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The AI coding trap

chrisloy.dev

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Re: The AI coding trap

#141

Post by nimithryn »

reb wrote: post #7

I would love to see an anti-AI take that doesn't hinge on the idea that technology forces people to be lazy/careless/thoughtless. The plan-build-test-reflect loop is equally important when using an LLM to generate code, as anyone who's seriously used the tech knows: if you yolo your way through a build without thought, it will collapse in on itself quickly. But if you DO apply that loop, you get to spend much more ti…

I think that the problem is, at the end of the day, the engineer must specify exactly what they want the program to do.

You can do this in Python, or you can do this in English. But at the end of the day the engineer must input the same information to get the same behavior. Maybe LLMs make this a bit more efficient but even in English it is extremely hard to give exact specification without ambiguity (maybe even harder than Python in some cases).

Re: The AI coding trap

#142

Post by jowea »

nharada wrote: post #132
bootsmann wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Comparing LLMs to programming languages is a fake equivalence. I don’t have to write assembly because LLVM will do that for me correctly in 100% of the cases, while AI might or might not (especially the more I move away from template crud apps)

it might be functionally correct but if you wrote it yourself it could be orders of magnitude faster

We've been on the Electron era long enough to know that developer time is more expensive than CPU time.

Re: The AI coding trap

#143

Post by skydhash »

nativeit wrote: post #68
didibus wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If the thinking bit is your favorite part, AI allows you to spend nearly all of your time there if you wish, from concept through troubleshooting I think this depends. I prefer the thinking bit, but it's quite difficult to think without the act of coding. It's how white boarding or writing can help you think. Being in the code helps me think, allows me to experiment, uncover new learnings, and evolve my thinking in…

I’m struggling to understand how they are asserting one follows from the other. I’m not a SWE, but do a lot of adjacent types of work (infrastructure automation and scripting, but also electronics engineering, and I’m also a musician), and the “thinking” part where I get to deploy logic and reasoning to solve novel challenges is certainly a common feature among these activities I certainly enjoy, and I feel it’s a co…

I like to think of the essential/accidental complexity split. The true way to solve essential complexity in a business settings is to talk with stakeholders.

Tools, libraries and platforms are accidental complexities. If you have already learned how to use them, you can avoid the pitfalls and go straight to the solution, which is why the common advice is to use boring technologies, as the solutions are widely documented and there are a lot of case studies.

If it's something new, then you can learn as you go by starting small and refactor as you're gaining more confidence. Copy-pasta or code generation is usually bad in that case. You don't know enough to judge the long-term costs.

Code is tech debt. When people talk about software engineering, it's to make sure that this debt doesn't outweigh the benefits of using the software.

Re: The AI coding trap

#144

Post by Den_VR »

benoau wrote: post #124
strogonoff wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I never made a case against LLMs and similar ML applications in the sense that they negatively impact mental agility. The cases I made so far include, but are not limited to: — OSS exploded on the promise that software you voluntarily contributed to remains to benefit the public, and that a large corporation cannot tomorrow simply take your work and make it part of their product, never contributing anything back. Com…

> — The ends don’t justify the means. IP theft that lies in the beginning of this new wave of applied ML is essentially piracy Isn't "AI coding" trained almost entirely on open source code and published documentation?

Intellectual property theft? If gp’s referring to the Books3 shadow library not having been legally bought, it’s not realistically more than 197k books worth less than $10MM. And let’s not forget Intellectual property rights only exist “ To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts.”

Re: The AI coding trap

#145

Post by layer8 »

reb wrote: post #7

I would love to see an anti-AI take that doesn't hinge on the idea that technology forces people to be lazy/careless/thoughtless. The plan-build-test-reflect loop is equally important when using an LLM to generate code, as anyone who's seriously used the tech knows: if you yolo your way through a build without thought, it will collapse in on itself quickly. But if you DO apply that loop, you get to spend much more ti…

My experience is that you need the “physical” coding work to get a good intuition of the mechanics of software design, the trade-offs and pitfalls, the general design landscape, and so on. I disagree that you can cleanly separate the “mental” portion of the work. Iterating on code builds your mental models, in a way that merely reviewing code does not, or only to a much more superficial degree.

Re: The AI coding trap

#146

Post by moffkalast »

sciencejerk wrote: post #115
reb wrote: post #7

I would love to see an anti-AI take that doesn't hinge on the idea that technology forces people to be lazy/careless/thoughtless. The plan-build-test-reflect loop is equally important when using an LLM to generate code, as anyone who's seriously used the tech knows: if you yolo your way through a build without thought, it will collapse in on itself quickly. But if you DO apply that loop, you get to spend much more ti…

@shredprez the website in your bio appears to sell AI-driven products: "Design anything in Claude, Cursor, or VS Code Consider leaving a disclaimer next time. Seems like you have a vested interest in the current half-baked generation of AI products succeeding

Conflict of interest or not, he's not really wrong. Anyone shipping code in a professional setting doesn't just push to prod after 5 people say LGTM to their vibe coded PR, as much as we like to joke around with it. There are stages of tests and people are responsible for what they submit.

As someone writing lots of research code, I do get caught being careless on occasion since none of it needs to work beyond a proof of concept, but overall being able to just write out a spec and test an idea out in minutes instead of hours or days has probably made a lot of things exist that I'd otherwise never be arsed to bother with. LLMs have improved enough in the past year that I can easily 0-shot lots of ad-hoc visualization stuff or adapters or simple simulations, filters, etc. that work on the first try and with probably fewer bugs than I'd include in the first version myself. Saves me actual days and probably a carpal tunnel operation in the future.

Re: The AI coding trap

#147

Post by Den_VR »

zwnow wrote: post #127
benoau wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> — The ends don’t justify the means. IP theft that lies in the beginning of this new wave of applied ML is essentially piracy Isn't "AI coding" trained almost entirely on open source code and published documentation?

Yes. But here we are, people ignoring all the theft that has happened. People generating images on stolen art and call themselves artists. People using it to program and call themselves programmers. Also, it seems to me that so many people just absolutely ignore all the security related issues coming with coding agents. Its truly a dystopia. But we are on hackernews so obviously people will glaze about "AI" on here.

Maybe we should get upset about people using cameras to take pictures of art on the same principles. And what about that Andy Warhol guy, what a pretender!

… so I hope you can see why I don’t actually agree with your comment about who’s allowed to be a artist, and not just dismiss me as a glazer

Re: The AI coding trap

#148

Post by Vegenoid »

danpat wrote: post #65
PessimalDecimal wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I would love to see an anti-AI take that doesn't hinge on the idea that technology forces people to be lazy/careless/thoughtless. The article sort of goes sideways with this idea but pointing out that AI coding robs you a deep understanding of the code it produces is a valid and important criticism of AI coding. A software engineer's primary job isn't producing code, but producing a functional software system. Most…

> And you will never know code as well as a reader and you would have as the author for anything larger than a very small project. This feels very true - but also consider how much code exists for which many of the current maintainers were not involved in the original writing. There are many anecdotal rules out there about how much time is spent reading code vs writing. If you consider the industry as a whole, it see…

> What's the difference between a messy codebase created by a genAI, and a messy codebase where all the original authors of the code have moved on and aren't available to ask questions?

Messy codebases made by humans are known to be a bad thing that causes big problems for software that needs to be maintained and changed. Much effort goes into preventing them and cleaning them up.

Re: The AI coding trap

#149

Post by iammrpayments »

meindnoch wrote: post #62
mmaunder wrote: post #57

If you know, understand that you are in possession of a massive and temporary information asymmetry advantage, and you should run with it as hard and fast as you can to gain the biggest lead possible, before the author and the rest of the world gain that advantage too. Go, go now, go fast, do it in parallel, and don’t stop until you win. Opportunities like this are extremely rare not just in your life, but in the his…

What are you talking about?

Could be either to keep using AI or to give up AI all together, we will never know.

This man should probably be a poet.

Re: The AI coding trap

#150

Post by Marha01 »

overfeed wrote: post #131
reb wrote: post #7

I would love to see an anti-AI take that doesn't hinge on the idea that technology forces people to be lazy/careless/thoughtless. The plan-build-test-reflect loop is equally important when using an LLM to generate code, as anyone who's seriously used the tech knows: if you yolo your way through a build without thought, it will collapse in on itself quickly. But if you DO apply that loop, you get to spend much more ti…

> AI allows you to spend nearly all of your time there if you wish, from concept through troubleshooting It does not! If you're using interactive IDE AI, you spend your time keeping the AI on the rails, and reminding it what the original task is. If you're using agents, then you're delegating all the the mid-level/tactical thinking, and perhaps even the planning, and you're left with the task of writing requirements…

From my experience, current AI models stay on the rails pretty well. I don't need to remind them of the task at hand.
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