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AI has a multiplying effect on existing technical skills

joshwcomeau.com

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Re: AI has a multiplying effect on existing technical skills

#161

Post by dataflow »

adjejmxbdjdn wrote: post #130
Waterluvian wrote: post #6

I had an Iron Man moment last week where I was “vibe coding” a UI design with component tests live on the other screen. Iterating by asking it to move things, reduce emphasis of an element, exploring layout options, etc. The loop was near realtime and felt amazing. The code it generated was awful. The kind of garbage that people who don’t know any better would ship: it looked right and it worked. But it was instantly…

Could it be that the fact that the thing you’re an expert at looked like garbage to you, but the things you’re not an expert at, looked just fine, is not a coincidence? You can talk to a bunch of designers who will say the opposite. Claude Design Studio generated this garbage UI, that I fixed manually, but it created great code j never could have that made it work.

I'm confused, this doesn't make sense. The target they're iterating on (UI) is the same one whose quality they're assessing, not a different one (source code).

You're suggesting that (a) their UI skills are lacking (based on what? isn't UI exactly what they were iterating on and trying to improve?), and (b) that a real UI expert would've somehow felt the UI they were working on was consistently garbage, despite how many times they iterate on it?

Which means you're saying you don't believe anyone can actually produce high quality (to an expert) output with AI on the same target they're working on, and if they think they are, that just means they don't have a good sense of quality?

Re: AI has a multiplying effect on existing technical skills

#162

Post by threethirtytwo »

Waterluvian wrote: post #6

I had an Iron Man moment last week where I was “vibe coding” a UI design with component tests live on the other screen. Iterating by asking it to move things, reduce emphasis of an element, exploring layout options, etc. The loop was near realtime and felt amazing. The code it generated was awful. The kind of garbage that people who don’t know any better would ship: it looked right and it worked. But it was instantly…

Well here's the million dollar question. It's a maintenance dead end for humans to read and edit. But for an LLM, is it a maintenance deadend? Could the LLM iterate on that same code base and be highly effective on it?

Re: AI has a multiplying effect on existing technical skills

#163

Post by jmcodes »

gbear0 wrote: post #107
user34283 wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't see the benefit of checking in either prompts or specs. I never tried spec driven development for myself, but if I review other's MRs I am typically exhausted after the first 10 lines. And there are hundreds of lines, nearly always with major inaccuracies. For myself I always found the plan mode to work well. Once the implementation is done, the code is the source of truth. If it works, it works. When I want…

Those checked-in specs become the requirements for the system. So the next time you ask the AI to make a fix, it can use those specs as part of the solution and not break another requirement. Basically the code underneath keeps getting rewritten over and over, but that doesn't matter as long as it hits the required specs.

Do you rewrite the specs with new requirement changes if they've already been implemented? How do you supercede a spec?

I've been using LLMs daily and I spun up a few spec driven flows once or twice but like the person above I think the code is the source of truth.

Also why wouldn't you use TDD to enforce the 'spec' then?

Re: AI has a multiplying effect on existing technical skills

#164

Post by hollowturtle »

akersten wrote: post #23
Waterluvian wrote: post #6

I had an Iron Man moment last week where I was “vibe coding” a UI design with component tests live on the other screen. Iterating by asking it to move things, reduce emphasis of an element, exploring layout options, etc. The loop was near realtime and felt amazing. The code it generated was awful. The kind of garbage that people who don’t know any better would ship: it looked right and it worked. But it was instantly…

> The code it generated was awful. The kind of garbage that people who don’t know any better would ship: it looked right and it worked. But it was instantly a maintenance dead end. In the Tailwind thread the other day I was explicitly told that the intended experience of many frameworks is "write-only code" so maybe this is just the way of the future that we have to learn to embrace. Don't worry how it's all hooked u…

I'm pretty you wouldn't want the same for code that runs healthcare, banks or transport. Only useless shitty web projects could embrace what's you're saying. And no there's no "Claude review the code and improve it" magical formula

Re: AI has a multiplying effect on existing technical skills

#165

Post by hollowturtle »

threethirtytwo wrote: post #162
Waterluvian wrote: post #6

I had an Iron Man moment last week where I was “vibe coding” a UI design with component tests live on the other screen. Iterating by asking it to move things, reduce emphasis of an element, exploring layout options, etc. The loop was near realtime and felt amazing. The code it generated was awful. The kind of garbage that people who don’t know any better would ship: it looked right and it worked. But it was instantly…

Well here's the million dollar question. It's a maintenance dead end for humans to read and edit. But for an LLM, is it a maintenance deadend? Could the LLM iterate on that same code base and be highly effective on it?

Yes it is a maintenance deadend for LLMs it's notorious codebases start accumulating enormous amount of tech debt and that it gets almost impossible to unravel it even with the best agent

Re: AI has a multiplying effect on existing technical skills

#166

Post by runarberg »

simonw wrote: post #148
runarberg wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> a Junior (in ANY subject) has the ability to LEARN so much faster with an AI research assistant This is a testable hypotheses with severe lack of citations. Intuition would argue the opposite. We learn by using our brains, if we offload the thinking to a machine and copy their output we don‘t learn. A child does not learn multiplication by using a calculator, and a language learner will not learn a new language by…

This seems to me like one of those things where people go into it with widely different initial assumptions. 1. AI is for cheating and doing the work for you. Obviously it won't help you learn faster because you won't have to do any thinking at all. 2. AI is an always-available question answering machine. It's like having a teaching assistant who you can ask about anything at any time . This means you can greatly acc…

This is also a testable hypothesis. I would like to see usage statistics before making assumptions here but my gut feeling is that an overwhelming AI usage (like > 90%) would fall into your category 1.

But even with category 2. I think that still does not absolve AI as a cheating machine. Doing research is a skill and if you ask AI to do the research for you that is a skill a junior developer simply never learns.

Re: AI has a multiplying effect on existing technical skills

#167

Post by sailfast »

I don’t know that people think their jobs will go away because AI will be better.

I think most understand that their jobs are going away because we will need fewer engineers to build the software their companies currently need.

Now - huge opportunity for new companies and markets, but not sure if they will be as profitable.

Re: AI has a multiplying effect on existing technical skills

#168

Post by ryandrake »

therouwboat wrote: post #135
giancarlostoro wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Easy, have Claude review the code, tell it to be critical and that it needs to be easier to understand, follow Clean Code, SOLID principles and best practices. Lie to it, say you got this from a Junior developer, or "review it as if you were a Staff Level Engineer reviewing Junior code" the models can write better code, just nobody tells them to.

Is this a joke? Smartest people on the planet never thought about telling AI to just write better code?

Kind of wild that you have to tell an LLM things like "do it right" and "make the code maintainable" and "don't make mistakes". Shouldn't that be the default? I wouldn't accept a calculator application that got math wrong unless you pressed a button labeled "actually solve the problem."

Re: AI has a multiplying effect on existing technical skills

#169

Post by AlecSchueler »

ar_lan wrote: post #137
giancarlostoro wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Easy, have Claude review the code, tell it to be critical and that it needs to be easier to understand, follow Clean Code, SOLID principles and best practices. Lie to it, say you got this from a Junior developer, or "review it as if you were a Staff Level Engineer reviewing Junior code" the models can write better code, just nobody tells them to.

Why wouldn't Claude just impose this same loop in the code it writes - or better, write better code before it needs such review?

Why would it? It doesn't do anything with intention without being prompted. When you ask it to do something it's going to give you what seems like the most likely result, it isn't striving to give you the most correct result, those things just have some overlap.
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