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I Will Never Use AI to Code

antman-does-software.com

11–20 of 94 posts

Re: I Will Never Use AI to Code

#11
post #6

I love using AI to code, as it saves me a lot of boring and repetitive typing. I only commit code that is roughly the same as I would have written anyway. It feels as good for developer ergonomics as the move away from CRT monitors.

I think I’m lucky that I never enjoyed programming, I enjoyed thinking about problems. That makes AI coding great, because I’m good enough at programming that I can describe what I want easily to an LLM, and I can judge the results very well for myself. I read and understand each line so I know I’m not committing crap.

Re: I Will Never Use AI to Code

#12

This writing is terrible and immediately put me off. The ‘superfluous’ swearing that the author seems to be proud about is instead going to put off a lot of his potential audience. Anyways, the ideas are nothing new that people haven’t read before as far as arguments against AI and the AI industry.

Not exactly anonymous, but even so:

https://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2004/03/19/green-blackboa...

Re: I Will Never Use AI to Code

#13

This writing is terrible and immediately put me off. The ‘superfluous’ swearing that the author seems to be proud about is instead going to put off a lot of his potential audience. Anyways, the ideas are nothing new that people haven’t read before as far as arguments against AI and the AI industry.

I prefer this writing style 100x over the bland AI assisted garbage that I have to read every day.

Give me something with an opinion, personality and evidence of battle scars any day. There’s actually extra signal here that helps me process what I’m reading. When I understand where the author is coming from I can extrapolate, attenuate and compare/contrast the content with my existing mental model far better.

Re: I Will Never Use AI to Code

#15
I was a hand tool woodworker, but the first time I had to rip 56 6 foot boards into 7 strips I immediately purchased a table saw. Now I use hand tools rarely because I find the speed and quality of my cuts are better. I still use hand tools for things that require certain standards, but electric tools almost always produce better quality results.

It’s about the same for AI coding, I just get better results.

Re: I Will Never Use AI to Code

#18
I share the author's love of coding and thus don't use AI for my own personal for-fun projects.

When it comes to employment and other people paying you to code, though, not using AI is increasingly a non-starter for most of us.

Re: I Will Never Use AI to Code

#19
post #6

I love using AI to code, as it saves me a lot of boring and repetitive typing. I only commit code that is roughly the same as I would have written anyway. It feels as good for developer ergonomics as the move away from CRT monitors.

> It feels as good for developer ergonomics as the move away from CRT monitors.

I kind of think CRT monitors were much better for developer ergonomics than LCD because of the tendency to set modern monitors much deeper into the desk and have to lean forward to see them. CRTs forced you to sit with better posture

Re: I Will Never Use AI to Code

#20
What's bad about AI:

- Vendors get to know everything about you

- Chips are becoming more politicized; I fear artificial scarcity as with housing will be put on chips, driving up prices.

- It causes a lot of centralisation. No, I cannot run deepseek at home. I don´t have 100.000+ USD laying around. 1TB of VRAM is not chump change.

- It can be a threat to the flourishing of open source. There is no longer a reason for me to work with other devs to build something in public together. I just have the LLM write what I need. It isolates.

These are the only drawbacks. Eveything else is clearly the artisans' ego getting in the way. That being said, if a piece of code is critical infra onto which many other things hinge, I will still hand code it.

EDIT: I think software will centralize heavily eventually; all the individual software devs we have now, and all the little custom shops, will all coalesce into a few megacorps per state. Clothing used to be made by famillies (micro scale), for the village, not produced centrally. It's not unthinkable the same will happen with software. The vendors have unprecedented access to all software being made; not just the code, but all the reasoning and iteration behind it. Plus, they can use their own model for development, allowing them to undercut any software house they want. The software world will be completelty unrecognizable in about two decades, I estimate.

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