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I am happier writing code by hand

abhinavomprakash.com

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Re: I am happier writing code by hand

#131

Post by sgarland »

echelon wrote: post #98
yoz-y wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t think that the real dichotomy here. You can either produce 2-5x good maintainable code, or 10-50x more dogshit code that works 80-90% of the time, and that will be a maintenance nightmare. The management has decided that the latter is preferable for short term gains.

It's not dogshit if you're steering. That's what so many of you are not getting. Look at the pretty pictures AI generates. That's where we are with code now. Except you have ComfyUI instead of ChatGPT. You can work with precision. I'm a 500k TC senior SWE. I write six nines, active-active, billion dollar a day systems. I'm no stranger to writing thirty page design documents. These systems can work in my domain just f…

Since we’re apparently measuring capability and knowledge via comp, I made 617k last year. With that silly anecdote out of the way, in my very recent experience (last week), SOTA AI is incapable of writing shell scripts that don’t have glaring errors, and also struggles mightily with RDBMS index design.

Can they produce working code? Of course. Will you need to review it with much more scrutiny to catch errors? Also yes, which makes me question the supposed productivity boost.

Re: I am happier writing code by hand

#132

Post by krupan »

chasd00 wrote: post #73
zozbot234 wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> you lost control of the code and are running more and more frictionless on hopes and dreams Your control over the code is your prompt. Write more detailed prompts and the control comes back. (The best part is that you can also work with the AI to come up with better prompts, but unlike with slop-written code, the result is bite-sized and easily surveyable.)

Also, you’re still in control of your code. It’s not an xor thing, the agent does its thing but the code is still there and yours. You can still adjust, fix, enhance etc. you’re still in control. The agent is there to help as much or as little as you want.

Control over code requires understanding it. That's what letting an LLM wrote everything takes away from you

Re: I am happier writing code by hand

#133

Post by sgarland »

zozbot234 wrote: post #78
sgarland wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is what I don’t understand: why highly-paid SWEs seem to think that their salaries will remain the same (if they even still have a job) if their role is now a glorified project manager.

Good project managers (with a technical focus) are not low-paid at all, even compared to SWE's.

Sure, but you need 1/10th the amount of PMs as you do SWEs.

Re: I am happier writing code by hand

#134

Post by jmull »

afavour wrote: post #86
woeirua wrote: post #5

This is no different then carpentry. Yes, all furniture can now be built by machines. Some people still choose to build it by hand. Does that make them less productive? Yes. Will they ever carve furniture by hand for a business? Probably not. Can they still enjoy the act of working with the wood? Yes. If you want to code by hand, then do it! No one's stopping you. But we shouldn't pretend that you will be able to do…

I think this comparison isn’t quite correct. The downside with carpentry is that you only ever produce one of the thing you’re making. Factory woodwork can churn out multiple copies of the same thing in a way hand carpentry never can. There is a hard limit on output and output has a direct relationship to how much you sell. Code isn’t really like that. Hand written code scales just like AI written code does. While so…

Exactly.

How much is coding actually the bottleneck to successful software development?

It varies from project to project. Probably in a green field it starts out pretty high but drops quite a bit for mature projects.

(BTW, "mature" == "successful", for the most part, since unsuccessful projects tend to get dropped.)

Not that I'm not AI-denier. These are great tools. But let's not just swallow the hype we're being fed.

Re: I am happier writing code by hand

#135

Post by ainiro »

woeirua wrote: post #5

This is no different then carpentry. Yes, all furniture can now be built by machines. Some people still choose to build it by hand. Does that make them less productive? Yes. Will they ever carve furniture by hand for a business? Probably not. Can they still enjoy the act of working with the wood? Yes. If you want to code by hand, then do it! No one's stopping you. But we shouldn't pretend that you will be able to do…

This is such a self-evident truth, the fact that somebody still believes AI generated code is "bad quality" is surprising ...

Psst ==> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k6eSKxc6oM8

MY project (MIT licensed) ...

Re: I am happier writing code by hand

#136

Post by rorylaitila »

I've developed at the speed of "vibecoding" long before LLMs by having highly thought-compressed tools, frameworks and snippets. Most of my applications use Model Driven Development where the data model automatically builds the application DAO/controllers/validations/migrations. The data model is the application. I find LLMs help me write procedures upon this data model even a little bit faster than I did before. But the data model is the design. Unless I turnover the entire design to the LLM, I am always the decider on the data model. I will always have more context about where I want to evolve the data model. I enjoy the data modelling aspect and want to remain in the driver seat, with LLMs as my implementer of procedures.

Re: I am happier writing code by hand

#137

Post by mlaretallack »

candiddevmike wrote: post #10
woeirua wrote: post #5

This is no different then carpentry. Yes, all furniture can now be built by machines. Some people still choose to build it by hand. Does that make them less productive? Yes. Will they ever carve furniture by hand for a business? Probably not. Can they still enjoy the act of working with the wood? Yes. If you want to code by hand, then do it! No one's stopping you. But we shouldn't pretend that you will be able to do…

> If you want to code by hand, then do it! No one's stopping you. But we shouldn't pretend that you will be able to do that professionally for much longer. If you can't code by hand professionally anymore, what are you being paid to do? Bring the specs to the LLMs? Deal with the customers so the LLMs don't have to?

I am currently doing 6 projects at the same time, where before I would only of doing one at a time. This includes the requirements, design, implementation and testing.

Re: I am happier writing code by hand

#138

Post by bayarearefugee »

interstice wrote: post #58
sgarland wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is what I don’t understand: why highly-paid SWEs seem to think that their salaries will remain the same (if they even still have a job) if their role is now a glorified project manager.

Doesn't this mean the ones that should be really worried are the project managers, since the SWE has better understanding over what's being done and can now orchestrate from a PM level?

Both should realize that if this all works out according to plan then there eventually reaches a point that there is no longer a need for their entire company, let alone any individual role in it.

Re: I am happier writing code by hand

#139

Post by JodieBenitez »

woeirua wrote: post #5

This is no different then carpentry. Yes, all furniture can now be built by machines. Some people still choose to build it by hand. Does that make them less productive? Yes. Will they ever carve furniture by hand for a business? Probably not. Can they still enjoy the act of working with the wood? Yes. If you want to code by hand, then do it! No one's stopping you. But we shouldn't pretend that you will be able to do…

I'm still not sure about the productivity. Last time I asked a LLM to generate a lib for me it did it in a few second but the result took me the day to review and correct. About the same time it would take me to write it from scratch.

Re: I am happier writing code by hand

#140

Post by boredemployee »

every day there's a thread about this topic and the discussions always circle around the same arguments.

I think we should be worrying about more urgent things, like a worker doing the job of three people with ai agents, the mental load that comes with that, how much of the disruption caused by ai will disproportionately benefit owners rather than employees, and so on.

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