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AI makes programming differently difficult

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Re: AI makes programming differently difficult

#111

Post by skydhash »

kerblang wrote: post #108
austin-cheney wrote: post #49

I am looking at the subtitle: The future of software development will belong to those who can think clearly at scale, maintain durable mental models amid rapid change, and integrate machine-generated output into human-directed intent. Wasn't this always the case? Maybe I just take this for granted because I am dumb Army guy and this is the only lens through which we dumb Army people see the world. Whenever the subjec…

Ever since the first programming language the goal was to make the work easier, although there are different kinds of "easy", and sometimes you end up worse off because tools don't live up to promises. The human element is "What do I want?" You have ideas about how you need things to work. Some folks don't care much at all about how things work, just that they can shove a thing out the door and get paid with minimal…

> Some folks don't care much at all about how things work, just that they can shove a thing out the door and get paid with minimal effort. Sometimes their boss is completely in agreement

The issue is not the quality per se (I can write hacky things if that’s needed). The issue is when you become responsible for the shoddy things that were rushed and is now hacks on pile of hacks.

Re: AI makes programming differently difficult

#112

Post by LinuxAmbulance »

asdfman123 wrote: post #59
LinuxAmbulance wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> All the AI companies are retaining the messages we're sending to their agents to train the next models. I wouldn't be surprised if the agents will be able to do what I'm doing in a year or two. Some things are very easy to solve via code (see https://xkcd.com/1425/ ), and others are extremely difficult. For LLM based AI, it can be trained to write functionally correct code easily - there's tons of pre-existing code…

> Some things are very easy to solve via code (see https://xkcd.com/1425/ ), and others are extremely difficult. Note that comic is about a task that AI has already conclusively solved...

The irony is not lost on me!

Re: AI makes programming differently difficult

#114

Post by cratermoon »

order-matters wrote: post #107
gofreddygo wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"How can we dig a well here" and "should we dig a well here" are neither mutually exclusive nor sufficient in their own regard. Cant answer should we without having done a lot of it before. Cant learn unless you actually do it and see the consequences through.

and yet it's also incredibly effective to be able to recognize "oh this plot is incredibly similar to these 100 other plots and there appears to be a pretty consistent pattern to what is driving where the well is built, and they are all constructed in a very similar fashion, i am just going to copy what they did" AI is very useful when you dont need to invent anything new

Right up until you cut that fiber cable or gas line.

Re: AI makes programming differently difficult

#115

Post by austin-cheney »

kerblang wrote: post #108
austin-cheney wrote: post #49

I am looking at the subtitle: The future of software development will belong to those who can think clearly at scale, maintain durable mental models amid rapid change, and integrate machine-generated output into human-directed intent. Wasn't this always the case? Maybe I just take this for granted because I am dumb Army guy and this is the only lens through which we dumb Army people see the world. Whenever the subjec…

Ever since the first programming language the goal was to make the work easier, although there are different kinds of "easy", and sometimes you end up worse off because tools don't live up to promises. The human element is "What do I want?" You have ideas about how you need things to work. Some folks don't care much at all about how things work, just that they can shove a thing out the door and get paid with minimal…

> Ever since the first programming language the goal was to make the work easier

The historical evidence disagrees. The point of software is automation and the point of automation is elimination of labor by any means. Nowhere in that is easier.

Clearly developers have forgotten what automation is because the quest for easier satisfies the narcissism of people who lack the ability to see otherwise.

Re: AI makes programming differently difficult

#116

Post by guywithahat »

asveikau wrote: post #35
guywithahat wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder about this. One would think new programmers, like old, will learn through experience to care most about the things that matter, and ignore things that don’t. In 10 years my pre-AI experience may condition me to waste time thinking about struct packing, while younger developers simply won’t know or care

> thinking about struct packing, while younger developers simply won’t know or care That particular ship sailed more than 15 years ago. Back then if you asked people trained on high level GC-based languages about low level details or memory allocation, they wouldn't know.

I do a lot of embedded C++ work and byte stream work where packing matters, but I agree with you. For most development it’s irrelevant, and in the future I expect it to be even less relevant.

Re: AI makes programming differently difficult

#117

Post by sgarland »

kypro wrote: post #25

It's way easier. People don't need to read code anymore, nor will they have to care about building mental models about the system as this article suggests. The way to think about coding agents is that a good one should in theory literally replace the developer entirely. No, a whole organisation of developers. In theory a product owner should just be able to dictate how they want to product to function at a high level…

If my experience with RDBMS generalizes, I predict that this trend will result in companies hiring skilled developers to unfuck their codebases.

Furthermore, I predict they will identify massive structural issues, propose huge lifts to redo it correctly, and will instead be told to do patchwork fixes to stop the bleeding.

Now, I do think AI is (or will be) good enough to implement these patchwork fixes when given explicit instructions, but someone will need to figure it out for them.

The problem is if you don’t understand the root cause, you’ll at best feed the LLM a list of symptoms, and it will dutifully fix them. “Our p99 on this endpoint is breaching” becomes “I’ve added an index for this query,” or “I’ve added a caching layer,” when the actual problem may well be that you’re storing huge blobs that bloat your working set, cause buffer pool churn, and saturate your NIC. Is the symptom solved? Yes. Is it scalable? No, you’ll next need to vertically scale the instance, which is more expensive, and has an upper bound. Eventually you’ll decide to shard, which adds complexity, when the actual solution would’ve eliminated all of those issues at once.

Re: AI makes programming differently difficult

#118

Post by kimjune01 »

contextfree wrote: post #84
snerbles wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Human insight can emerge from attacking the semblance of sense in the LLM's output. Much of the cognitive work in writing emerges in the labor of writing prose and challenging assumptions against the model you build in your head as you go. I've found this process is inverted when working with an LLM: it in effect emits a provisional structure first, and I discover what I actually think by finding where its output is…

Yeah I've written some docs using the following process: 1. Throw some notes, PR links, etc. into copilot and ask for a first draft 2. Go back and forth for a while asking for revisions 3. Trash all of the AI-generated text and rewrite the whole thing myself from scratch, which I can do quickly in a typing frenzy because I now have a clear idea what I want, by way of seeing what I don't want.

I do this

Re: AI makes programming differently difficult

#119

Post by bluefirebrand »

m3kw9 wrote: post #97
overgard wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One thing that I find frustrating/disturbing about LLM generated code is that wrong stuff doesn't usually look wrong, so you almost have to review it even closer than what you'd review from a person. Like in the past when a developer was being sloppy, usually you could kind of tell superficially, but with LLM code it's usually well documented and superficially well structured, all while doing batshit insane things. L…

double edge sword of LLM code generation, you cannot catch 100%, nor do you want to always ready every single word. Gotta develop a feel.

Engineering by feels...

Is this what we've come to?

Re: AI makes programming differently difficult

#120

Post by bluefirebrand »

dsmurrell wrote: post #6

It's somehow more tiring, reading complex plans in response to your guidance, and then making decision after decision. Reminds me of this Alan Watts bit... A farmer who ordered a farmhand quickly discovered he was an extraordinarily efficient worker. The first day, he put him on sawing logs, and the farmhand sawed more logs than anybody else, ever. It was fantastic — but the wood-cutting work was all done in one day.…

For me, the stress about making decisions as an employee isn't about making a choice.

It's knowing that any moment a manager is going to wander along and change it from under me. So I might as well ask the manager first.

It showed up on my performance reviews that I'm bothering other people with questions and I should make my own choices, so I started doing that and documenting every time the choice I made got overturned by a manager. Next performance review when it came up I brought out my list. My performance reviewer was pissed at me for documenting this and I was let go four months later. :)

I would love a job where people let me make decisions after decision after decision

And yeah you could say that if my manager had to overturn my decisions that often it probably meant that I made bad decisions, and maybe that's true, but I don't think so. It was often things like "this is the best solution but it will take longer", "This low priority, do it the quick way instead". But priorities changed a lot.

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