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We're all CTO now

jamie.ideasasylum.com

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Re: We're all CTO now

#101

Post by bluefirebrand »

CuriouslyC wrote: post #95
bluefirebrand wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Give an AI to a product manager and their code will be shit. Give it to a good programmer, and they're likely to ask the right questions and verify the code a little bit more so they get better results. I'm finding the inverse correlation: programmers who are bullish on AI are actually just bad programmers. AI use is revealing their own lack of skill and taste.

You can literally stub out exactly the structure you want, describe exactly the algorithms you want, the coding style you want, etc, and get exactly what you asked for with modern frontier models like o3/gemini/claude4 (at least for well represented languages/libraries/algorithms). The fact that you haven't observed this is an indicator of the shallowness of your experience.

> modern frontier models like o3/gemini/claude4 (at least for well represented languages/libraries/algorithms). The fact that you haven't observed this is an indicator of the shallowness of your experience.

I'm not chasing the AI train to be on the bleeding edge because I have better things to do with my time

Also I'm trying to build novel things, not replicate well represented libraries and algorithms

So... Maybe I'm just holding it wrong, or maybe it's not good at doing things that you can't copy and paste from github or stackoverflow

Re: We're all CTO now

#102

Post by DANmode »

StopVibeCoding wrote: post #10
sokoloff wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To me, the more interesting question is whether you without AI can outperform you using AI, not whether you can outperform someone else who is using AI. I think AI has already gotten to a point to where it can help skilled devs be more productive.

I have tested this. I have been coding for close to 20 years, in anything from web to embedded. I got tired of hearing about vibe coding day in and day out, so I gave in, and I tried everything under the sun. For the first few days, I started to see the hype. I was much faster at coding, I thought, I can just type this small prompt to the LLM and it will do what I wanted, much faster than I could have. It worked! I d…

Useless review without discussing the context, and carefully considered, well-scoped prompt you gave(?) it.

Re: We're all CTO now

#103

Post by DANmode »

StopVibeCoding wrote: post #77
nico wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I became unable to understand what I was doing, and as I read through the code very little of it made any sense to me, sure the individual lines were readable, functions made some semblance of sense, but there was no logic Yes, this happens, and it’s similar to when you first start working on a codebase you didn’t write However, if instead of giving up, you keep going, eventually you do start understanding what the…

No. It is different, when working with a codebase written by humans there is always sanity. Even when looking at terrible codebases, there is some realm of reason, that once you understand can make navigating the code easy. I believe you missed the part of my comment saying that I have been coding professionally for 20 years. I have seen horrible codebases, and I'm telling you I'd rather see the switch statement with…

Have you requested code written in the most human-readable fashion, with human-readable commenting,

for you to choose to be minified later?

Re: We're all CTO now

#104

Post by DANmode »

mrbluecoat wrote: post #25
StopVibeCoding wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have tested this. I have been coding for close to 20 years, in anything from web to embedded. I got tired of hearing about vibe coding day in and day out, so I gave in, and I tried everything under the sun. For the first few days, I started to see the hype. I was much faster at coding, I thought, I can just type this small prompt to the LLM and it will do what I wanted, much faster than I could have. It worked! I d…

Clearly this affected you deeply enough to create a new HN crusade account. Genuinely curious questions: Did you share this experience with management and your peers? What was their response? What steps could realistically reverse the momentum of vibe coding?

Sentiment on AI-generated code being so bad that human code is strongly preferred, and marketed.

Re: We're all CTO now

#105

Post by skydhash »

cpursley wrote: post #61
djha-skin wrote: post #42

I'm a DevOps engineer. I'm training someone new to the field. Often I'll ask the AI to do something and it goes sideways. Sometimes it really saves me time, but many times not. I'll break down and actually type out commands or even Google what to do instead of using the AI because it's still faster. It's true that my trainee uses the AI more because there's fewer commands in his muscle memory. But, it's still not gre…

Are you talking about CLI commands? I’ve been at programming for over a decade and don’t have the type of memory that allows me to remember all the obscure non-intuitive commands - AI has been a lifesaver, I could care a-less about nerd points.

No one does! That’s why everyone uses man and write scripts. And also bookmark the wiki pages.

Re: We're all CTO now

#106

Post by djha-skin »

cpursley wrote: post #61
djha-skin wrote: post #42

I'm a DevOps engineer. I'm training someone new to the field. Often I'll ask the AI to do something and it goes sideways. Sometimes it really saves me time, but many times not. I'll break down and actually type out commands or even Google what to do instead of using the AI because it's still faster. It's true that my trainee uses the AI more because there's fewer commands in his muscle memory. But, it's still not gre…

Are you talking about CLI commands? I’ve been at programming for over a decade and don’t have the type of memory that allows me to remember all the obscure non-intuitive commands - AI has been a lifesaver, I could care a-less about nerd points.

Devops is much more terminal heavy. I live in the terminal. It's not nerd points at that point it's just life.

Re: We're all CTO now

#107

Post by linsomniac »

StopVibeCoding wrote: post #90
cyberpunk wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It sounds like parent commentator is giving it tasks and trying to make it come up with logic. It’s bad at this. Use it as a translator, i knock out the interface or write some logic in pseudocode and then get it to translate it to code, review it, generate tests and bam half an hour or more of coding has been done in a few minutes. all the logic is mine, but i don’t have to remember if that function takes &foo or fo…

this is a good approach that I have admittedly not thought of. At that point however, is it really saving you that much time over good snippets and quick macros in your editor? For me writing the code is the easiest part of my job, I can write fast, and I have my vim configured in such a way where it makes writing code even faster.

>is it really saving you that much time over good snippets and quick macros in your editor?

I had someone say that to me ~a month ago. I had mentioned online that one of the things I had the AI tooling do that morning was to convert a bunch of "print" statements to logging statements. He said that was something he'd just have his editor find/replace do. I asked him what sort of find/replace he'd do that based on the content of the log message appropriately selected between "logging.debug", "info", "warning", and "error", because the LLM did a good job of that. It also didn't fall into the issues of "pprint()" turning into "plogging.debug()" and the like.

Re: We're all CTO now

#108

Post by taskforcegemini »

djha-skin wrote: post #42

I'm a DevOps engineer. I'm training someone new to the field. Often I'll ask the AI to do something and it goes sideways. Sometimes it really saves me time, but many times not. I'll break down and actually type out commands or even Google what to do instead of using the AI because it's still faster. It's true that my trainee uses the AI more because there's fewer commands in his muscle memory. But, it's still not gre…

beautiful analogy
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