Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

AI coding is addictive. Engineers are paying the price

leaddev.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

11–20 of 42 posts

Re: AI coding is addictive. Engineers are paying the price

#11

Post by yungtunafish »

dominotw wrote: post #8
yungtunafish wrote: post #7

Just started at a company and the amount of irresponsible AI use is appalling. I asked an employee whose job involves AI adoption/training how large their diffs are for pull requests. They told me that their diffs are "As much as the model can produce given its reasoning level". In the end, this is going to create unmaintainable code that no one understands. It also discourages reviewing the code because no dev can m…

why do you care how large the diffs are. isnt there any other way to measure if ai is producing value?

Its about the team being able to review the code to tell if its slop or not. It's hard to meaningfully review huge changes to a codebase for one PR. Just imagine if there are 5 PRs a day with 1000+ insertions. It leads to the production codebase being somewhat of a black box imo

Re: AI coding is addictive. Engineers are paying the price

#12

Post by chopete3 »

The problem with articles like this one is, they give ways to become efficient at handling more addiction, at the individual level. Nothing for others part of this, companies developing the software and organizations employing these tools.

Summary of the addiction management tips from the article.

1. Time-box your AI coding sessions with a clear goal and a hard end time.

2. Separate exploration (testing ideas) from execution (shipping code) to avoid losing focus.

3. Prioritize sleep, hard stops, and actual recovery as essential maintenance, not just wellness.

4. Invest in structured training to move from basic usage to advanced multi-agent workflows.

5. Personalize your AI workflow to fit your needs while actively avoiding common anti-patterns.

-

When a developer stops writing code and starts using Claude to handle multiple projects at once, they are essentially managing the outcomes.

They have become 10x engineering managers. The context strain and emotional strain is overwhelming.

Re: AI coding is addictive. Engineers are paying the price

#13

Post by hoppp »

yungtunafish wrote: post #7

Just started at a company and the amount of irresponsible AI use is appalling. I asked an employee whose job involves AI adoption/training how large their diffs are for pull requests. They told me that their diffs are "As much as the model can produce given its reasoning level". In the end, this is going to create unmaintainable code that no one understands. It also discourages reviewing the code because no dev can m…

Yeah, I dread going back to work as my position has transformed from full stack dev to Ai code unfucker...

Re: AI coding is addictive. Engineers are paying the price

#14

Post by hoppp »

eithed wrote: post #6
vijayst wrote: post #2

I can't agree more. I spent 4 hours debugging an issue with Claude from 10PM to 2AM which I will never do - before Claude.

Same; the most infuriating parts - Claude caused the issue and Claude misdiagnosed the issue, making me spend more time than if I was debugging it myself.

I basically generate and then remove 80% manually. Way overbuilt and doesn't follow my thinking that well.

Re: AI coding is addictive. Engineers are paying the price

#15

Post by bigstrat2003 »

eithed wrote: post #6
vijayst wrote: post #2

I can't agree more. I spent 4 hours debugging an issue with Claude from 10PM to 2AM which I will never do - before Claude.

Same; the most infuriating parts - Claude caused the issue and Claude misdiagnosed the issue, making me spend more time than if I was debugging it myself.

That's been my experience. LLMs cost me time, they don't save it.

Re: AI coding is addictive. Engineers are paying the price

#16

Post by bigstrat2003 »

hirvi74 wrote: post #5

What type of AI coding? I do not have the attention span to sit there and let these LLMs just churn away. I have to be the one doing the typing or nothing will be accomplished. I tried playing Claude Code and Codex a bit. While impressive in their outputs (at times), I just find the workflow to be so dissatisfying. One other aspect of LLMs that I do not enjoy when it comes to development is the fact that LLMs minimiz…

Yeah I feel much the same way, though I think LLMs suck ass at troubleshooting. They are almost always going down wrong paths and making bad guesses that I waste time disproving, or suggesting solutions that don't wind up lining up with the symptoms I'm having.

Where I do get value out of LLMs is in two main areas. One is generating short bits of code that I can more or less instantly recognize as correct. Bash scripts are a good example - I can read bash well enough but I'm not great at writing it, so Claude can generate a 20-line script very quickly and I can equally quickly understand the generated code. Writing such scripts would probably take me 15-20 minutes, so I'm not saving huge time, but it's there. The other use case I have is asking the LLM for code review on my personal projects. I don't let it write code (that would destroy the whole fun of the personal project, for one thing), but sometimes I have some code I'm pretty sure sucks and I'll ask ChatGPT to suggest better ways to accomplish the same thing. I learn a lot reviewing its suggestions.

Re: AI coding is addictive. Engineers are paying the price

#17

Post by weezing »

bigstrat2003 wrote: post #15
eithed wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same; the most infuriating parts - Claude caused the issue and Claude misdiagnosed the issue, making me spend more time than if I was debugging it myself.

That's been my experience. LLMs cost me time , they don't save it.

Glad to hear that. Gives some hope for the future.

Re: AI coding is addictive. Engineers are paying the price

#18

Post by otekengineering »

agentic coding is a soft drug, so taking 'the only way out is through' approach is pretty viable. once you figure out how to swim and have claude running for an hour+ at a time and only bugging you with either high-level taste decisions or 'done, how's it look?' it's pretty low stress

if you're overloaded with PRs, build LLM-based systems to take the load off. don't be a senior engineer, be an engineering manager.

Re: AI coding is addictive. Engineers are paying the price

#20

Post by sph »

bigstrat2003 wrote: post #15
eithed wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same; the most infuriating parts - Claude caused the issue and Claude misdiagnosed the issue, making me spend more time than if I was debugging it myself.

That's been my experience. LLMs cost me time , they don't save it.

Then why tf are you using it? I mean, seriously. Truly sounds like addiction.
Post reply on HN