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AI coding

geohot.github.io

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Re: AI coding

#131

Post by brabel »

Yoric wrote: post #79
onion2k wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I love AI for speed running through all the boring stuff and getting to the good parts. In some cases, especially with the more senior devs in my org, fear of the good parts is why they're against AI. Devs often want the inherent safety of the boring, easy stuff for a while. AI changes the job to be a constant struggle with hard problems. That isn't necessarily a good thing. If you're actually senior by virtue of tim…

Interesting point. There's also the fact that, while you're coding the easy stuff, your mind is thinking about the hard stuff, looking things up, seeing how they articulate. If you're spending 100% of your time on hard stuff, you might be hurting these preliminaries.

This makes no sense. Yes, having time to think about the hard part is good, but just because you’re not doing the boilerplate anymore doesn’t mean you can’t do the thinking part anymore! See how absurd it sounds when you actually describe it this way?

Re: AI coding

#132

Post by timeinput »

bdcravens wrote: post #25

I'm almost 50, and have been writing code professionally since the late 90s. I can pretty much see projects in my head, and know exactly what to build. I also get paid pretty well for what I do. You'd think I'd be the prototype for anti-AI. I'm not. I can build anything, but often struggle with getting bogged down with all the basic work. I love AI for speed running through all the boring stuff and getting to the goo…

I have a couple of niche areas of non-coding interest where I'm using AI to code. It is so amazing to write rust and just add `todo!(...)` through out the boiler plate. The AI is miserable at implementing domain knowledge in those niche areas, but now I can focus on describing the domain knowledge (in real rust code because I can't describe it precisely enough in English + pseudo code), and then say "fill in the todos, write some tests make sure it compiles, and passes linting", verify the tests check things properly and I'm done.

I've struggled heavily trying to figure out how to get it to write the exactly correct 10 lines of code that I need for a particularly niche problem, and so I've kind of given up on that, but getting it to write the 100 lines of code around those magic 10 lines saves me so much trouble, and opens me up to so many more projects.

Re: AI coding

#133

Post by Sammi »

mihaic wrote: post #124
matt3D wrote: post #70

This is a more extreme example of the general hacker news group think about AI. Geohot is easily a 99.999 percentile developer, and yet he can’t seem to reconcile that the other 99.999 percent are doing something much more basic than he can ever comprehend. It’s some kind of expert paradox, if everyone was as smart and capable as the experts, then they wouldn’t be experts. I have come across many developers that beha…

[flagged]

You've seen plenty of people who hacked the ps3 and iphone as teenagers and created a low level system analysis tool for doing such system hacks? You've seen plenty of people writing self driving car software a decade ago? Why did you write this when you know nothing?

Re: AI coding

#134

Post by dm3 »

krystofee wrote: post #104
demirbey05 wrote: post #18

I started fully coding with Claude Code. It's not just vibe coding, but rather AI-assisted coding. I've noticed there's a considerable decrease in my understanding of the whole codebase, even though I'm the only one who has been coding this codebase for 2 years. I'm struggling to answer my colleagues' questions. I am not defending we should drop AI, but we should really measure its effects and take actions accordingl…

I’m experiencing something similar. We have a codebase of about 150k lines of backend code. On one hand, I feel significantly more productive - perhaps 400% more efficient when it comes to actually writing code. I can iterate on the same feature multiple times, refining it until it’s perfect. However, the challenge has shifted to code review. I now spend the vast majority of my time reading code rather than writing i…

I'm very surprised you find this workflow more efficient than just writing the code. I find constructing the mental model of the solution and how it fits into existing system and codebase to be 90% of effort, then actually writing the code is 10%. Admittedly, I don't have to write any boilerplate due to the problem domain and tech choices. Coding agents definitely help with the last 10% and also all the adjacent work - one-off scripts where I don't care about code quality.

Re: AI coding

#135

Post by mritchie712 »

mihaic wrote: post #124
matt3D wrote: post #70

This is a more extreme example of the general hacker news group think about AI. Geohot is easily a 99.999 percentile developer, and yet he can’t seem to reconcile that the other 99.999 percent are doing something much more basic than he can ever comprehend. It’s some kind of expert paradox, if everyone was as smart and capable as the experts, then they wouldn’t be experts. I have come across many developers that beha…

[flagged]

For the comment above, the more relevant denominator is all humans vs. all developers. If you use all humans as the denominator, he's easily in the top 1% or 0.001% (I haven't followed his work closely, but you'd only have to be a good dev to be in top 1% of the global population).

Re: AI coding

#136

Post by skydhash »

ur-whale wrote: post #20

I do agree with many points in the article, but not about the last part, namely that coding with AI assist makes you slower. Personal experience (data points count = 1), as a somewhat seasoned dev (>30yrs of coding), it makes me WAY faster. I confess to not read the code produced at each iteration other than skimming through it for obvious architectural code smell, but I do read the final version line by line and mak…

> Personal experience (data points count = 1), as a somewhat seasoned dev (>30yrs of coding), it makes me WAY faster.

> Long story short: things that would take me a week to put together now take a couple of hours. The vast bulk of the time saved is not having to identify the libraries I need, and not to have to rummage through API documentation.

One of these is not true.

With libraries, it's either you HAVE to use it, so you spend time being acquainted with it (usually a couple hours to make sense of its design, the rest will come on a needed basis) or you are evaluating multiple ones (and that task is much quicker).

Re: AI coding

#137

Post by faangguyindia »

roxolotl wrote: post #94
faangguyindia wrote: post #56

AI coding is working really good for us. My teammate shared 3 phase workflow we are using on our team to deliver project at rapid phase. It's shared on ClaudeCode subreddit https://www.reddit.com/r/ClaudeCode/s/iy058fH4sZ I've been using it for months with great success

These workflows always surprise me. Isn’t this what you’ve been doing with humans all along? Write up a basic project plan likely following some structure the product team likes. Share it with the eng team. One to a few members of the eng team writes up a more specific plan. Everyone gets together again and goes through the specific plan to iron out the kinks. You the implement the plan. I’ve seen at my workplace peo…

I can implement 20 such features on my own each day with no input from others though. That's why i am using this method in the first place.

Re: AI coding

#138

Post by skydhash »

Havoc wrote: post #78

>It’s not precise in specifying things. That's the point - it's a higher level of abstraction. >highly non-deterministic ...not unlike say a boss telling a junior to change something? The bet here isn't that AI can be as precise as something hand coded but rather that you can move up a step in the abstraction layer. To use his compiler example...I don't care what the resulting assembly instructions look like, just wh…

> That's the point - it's a higher level of abstraction.

That's not what abstraction is. When I type `echo Hello, World`, I don't have to deal with graphic drivers and test rendering to have the text on the screen. And I don't have to worry that "Goodbye" will appear instead.

> Not unlike say a boss telling a junior to change something?

Junior don't stay junior for long. And bosses usually give juniors less time to grow than people are allocating AI tools to actually prove themselves. Github copilot was more than 3 years ago. Today a new hire is expected to be productive on day one.

Re: AI coding

#139

Post by hereme888 »

Sammi wrote: post #126
hereme888 wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's the intent behind your question?

The Internet is awash with people making the same claims you are, but where are the actual results that we can see and use? Where are all these supposed new programs that were only possible to make because of generative ai? The number of new apps in the app store is flat. Still getting the same amount in 2025 as in 2022.

App-store listing is a whole other animal. I don't care to go through all that just to share my app. I also don't care to resolve every technical issue others experience. Every time I've thought about generating revenue by selling my apps, two thoughts come to mind: my code is not professional-grade, and the field is so competitive than within months a professional will likely create a better app so why pollute the web with something subpar.

The hacker on the street corner isn't distributing his "secret sauce" because it wouldn't meet standards, but it works well for him, and it was cheap/free.

Re: AI coding

#140

Post by skydhash »

giveita wrote: post #117
skydhash wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But what about the tests usefulness? Tests enforce contracts, contracts are about the domain, not the implementation. The number of tests don't actually matter as much as what is being actually verified. If you look at the code to know what to tests, you are doing it wrong.

The usefulness is in saving time boilerplating, plus figuring out tests I may not have thought of. But I do closely review the code! It turns the usual drudge of writing tests into more of a code review. Last time I did it it had some mistakes I needed to fix for sure.

There shouldn't be boilerplate in test code. It should be refactored into harnesses, utils, and fixtures instead.
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