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

What AI coding costs you

tomwojcik.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

121–130 of 206 posts

Re: What AI coding costs you

#121

Post by zzzeek »

xantronix wrote: post #60

Writing code by hand and managing the mental model of its execution and architecture is one of the few remaining joys of my day job, apart from delivering a good product people want and use and being helpful. Even the small things, the tedious chores of refactoring or scaffolding that initial bit of CRUD boilerplate are steps that matter to me. The callouses matter. The tedium matters. These moments of pain and drudg…

I continue to do all of those things but have Claude do the typing for me, if that makes any sense. I'm directing it on almost a line by line basis, I just am not that interested in doing syntax pushups anymore.

Re: What AI coding costs you

#122

Post by lenkite »

encomiast wrote: post #10
heartbreak wrote: post #6

It remains unclear to me why my ability to read and review code (the majority of my job for years now) will atrophy if I continue doing it while writing even less code than I was before. If my ability to write code somehow atrophies because I stop doing it, does that matter if I continue with the architecture and strategy around coding? The act of writing code by hand seems to be on a trajectory of irrelevance, so as…

"so as long as I maintain my ability to reason about code…what’s the issue?" It seems like that is the open question. The article suggests that people don't maintain this ability: "The AI group scored 17% lower on conceptual understanding, debugging, and code reading. The largest gap was in debugging, the exact skill you need to catch what AI gets wrong. One hour of passive AI-assisted work produced measurable skill…

What happens when more and more people cannot explain their PRs ? I mean they already use AI to create the "explanation" as well and ping you. Ask them questions and they will delegate again to AI and copy-paste what the AI answers.

Re: What AI coding costs you

#123

Post by wreath »

layer8 wrote: post #104
teeray wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s why I laugh when people are like “oh, AI writes all the tests, it’s so much easier.” If your code is hard to test, you need to change the abstraction or the interface. Tests are the first reuse of your code, so if it’s a pain to use in tests, it’s going to be terrible to use in general.

Not to mention that tests are at least as critical to get right as the code that is being tested.

And not to mention that most tests available to AI training is trash, so no wonder AI-generated tests are not only worthless but costly in terms of false sense of reliability.

Re: What AI coding costs you

#124

Post by mentos »

>> That deep, focused, creative problem-solving where hours disappear and you emerge with something you built and understand.

Yea but for how long? Go back and read any code you wrote a year ago and realize it could have been AI that wrote it.

Re: What AI coding costs you

#125

Post by phendrenad2 »

It's currently unclear what the long-term effects of offloading coding to AI will be for developers, and posts like this are not meaningful, as they have zero data to work with. I suppose they feel good to write if you're the type who thinks that a theory with zero data is as good as one with data.

Re: What AI coding costs you

#127

Post by JTbane »

xantronix wrote: post #60

Writing code by hand and managing the mental model of its execution and architecture is one of the few remaining joys of my day job, apart from delivering a good product people want and use and being helpful. Even the small things, the tedious chores of refactoring or scaffolding that initial bit of CRUD boilerplate are steps that matter to me. The callouses matter. The tedium matters. These moments of pain and drudg…

Wanted to chime in that, at my job, hand-writing code has been massively helpful when debugging it. My mental model of what can go wrong is much easier to form if I wrote the code. A LLM will not always be able to solve these incidents, no matter how many logs you throw at it.

Re: What AI coding costs you

#129

Post by ako »

lstodd wrote: post #116
ako wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A wreck of a product is still better than being out of business by not being able to release fast enough. Unfortunately, the market in general does not reward slow high quality.

and_then("complain about enshittification") ookay..

Yes, market dynamics are a bit of a catch 22: customers looking for the best deal, companies looking to reduce costs to still make profit. Customers always looking for the newest features, companies releasing faster before the product is done.

Re: What AI coding costs you

#130

Post by gengstrand »

tomwojcik wrote: post #2

Hi HN, I've been using Claude Code heavily for the last year. Recently I've noticed a shift in sentiment among peers, here on HN, and over on /r/ExperiencedDevs. I wrote down some thoughts on the hidden costs of using AI too much that are not obvious, yet there's no concrete data yet. I tried to pull together data from a few different places to articulate something I think a lot of us are experiencing right now. I'd…

Thanks for writing this blog. Others are also starting to notice these impacts and writing about them. I believe that it is important for more voices to be heard.

What resonated most for me was the "Finding Your Threshold" section. Your "Developers need the dopamine hit of creation." is memorable. I have also blogged about this phenomenon at https://www.exploravention.com/blogs/soft_arch_agentic_ai/ but I frame it more as how leaders can help the organization arrive at a healthy and sustainable balance between writing and reviewing code.

Post reply on HN