Live data from Hacker News

The copilot delusion

deplet.ing

171–180 of 214 posts

Re: The copilot delusion

#171

I want everyone to join the programming club who wants to.

Wants is the operative word. If you show up to a racetrack with zero experience and a Ferrari, you’re not going to be accepted if you try to pretend that you know how to drive. You’ll probably also hit the wall, which hopefully would provide an opportunity for introspection.

If you have an AI generate all your code for you, and then say that you made an app, you should expect people to push back.

I want to be around people who like learning and knowing things for the sake of learning. AI is a tool, but if you rely on it too heavily (or really at all when starting out), you’re stifling your ability to truly learn.

Re: The copilot delusion

#172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> A reasonably smart CEO can pretty much understand, in depth, every aspect of their business. But when it comes to tech, which is often the most essential part, they are left grasping, and must rely on the expertise of other people I honestly really don't understand why this would be the case. Software isn't more complicated than any of the other aspects of the business. I think a "reasonably smart" CEO could just .…

If you run a trucking company, or a retail business, or a food company, etc. I believe you can understand to a fairly detailed level the logistics and “secret sauce” involved that makes the business tick, even if you are not the core employees operating with the skills and expertise. But if you are a non-technical CEO and your core business is, say, enterprise SaaS software, you don’t fundamentally understand what th…

The part of this argument that doesn’t make sense to me is that you’d think any CEO would have a reasonably decent bullshit detector, but maybe since they have to shovel it out so much, they forget how to detect it in others.

Re: The copilot delusion

#173

As a preface, I think lots of people will not like this take. A lot of people are going to have to come to the realization that has already been mentioned before but many find it hard to grasp. Your boss, stakeholders, and especially non-technical people literally give 0 fucks about "quality code" as long as it does what they want it to do. They do not care about tests insofar as if it works it works. Many have no cl…

A sane person writes clean code because they are going to have to maintain it themselves one day a few years into the future when the baby kept them up all night for three nights in a row and coffee isn't working for them anymore and they can't remember anything about it and it's falling over so it's really urgent and f**** those guys they swore they'd get someone to take this on with a proper handover and surely the…

>The level of irresponsibility that "vibe coding" is introducing to the world is actually worse than the one that had people pouring their savings into a shitcoin. But it's the same arseholes talking it up.

It's a broader ethos of irresponsibility and disposability that's infected so much of modern tech. Why polish up a game when you can ship it now and fix it later? Why delay an iPhone release that's "Built for Apple Intelligence (TM)" when you can sell the hype today and maybe deliver next quarter?

Everyone wants the reward but none of the work and accountability. You're not even doing the minimum level of work; you're just putting up the appearance of effort. Who cares if what you built is just a brittle husk? Vibe coding is just the natural progression of that cynical philosophy.

Re: The copilot delusion

#174
post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think we should just agree to disagree. All of those opened up new paradigms for programming, and so will AI even if we aren’t quite sure what that new paradigm is yet. There will always be people claiming the old-fashioned way is better, like Dijkstra’s famous complaint about kids not using punch cards anymore and how that meant they weren’t learning how to be good programmers.

We're actually quite certain what this new paradigm is, because some poor souls are already practicing it: slop coding. You prompt-whisper poorly-defined changes to make, and if the machine chokes on its own vomit along the way, you delete everything and try again. It feels reasonable, consistent to see it as another "old man yells at the skies" scenario, but I do think it's unprecedented for a machine to automate th…

I don’t think we’ve really figured out how to use AI in coding yet, vibe coding doesn’t really feel like it’s it. Vibe coding and just generating code like how some people claim intellisense is just to save on typing, when it’s actually a great in-situ browse what members can be selected on a value of a certain type.

There is definitely a way to abuse AI in programming, but it doesn’t seem to be very compelling and I don’t think it will get people who do that very far (eg relying on intel sense to save on typing rather than just learning how to type).

ChatGPT is a great writing tool if you already know how to write. You can curate and modify on top of it, allowing you to write your paper faster with the same amount of quality. But again people just using it to write essays or paper without knowing how to write themselves aren’t going to get good results.

Re: The copilot delusion

#175
post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Management has an AI shaped hammer and they're hitting everything to see if it's a nail. I really think we need to figure out how to cut back on management so we can get back to the business of actually doing work

Coordinating teams, talking to stakeholders/customers (including spending a lot of time with them), having someone manage individual contributors at some level, etc. is work that can't just be ignored at a company of any size. The only way to avoid (a lot of) it is to be very small and that has its own set of issues.

Sure, but do we really need four layers of people to do all of that?

It's really common to see just layers and layers of management at companies that get big enough

Re: The copilot delusion

#176

> if you want to sculpt the kind of software that gets embedded in pacemakers and missile guidance systems and M1 tanks—you better throw that bot out the airlock and learn. But the bulk of us aren't doing that... We're making CRUD apps for endless incoming streams of near identical user needs, just with slightly different integrations, schemas, and lipstick. Let's be honest. For most software there is nothing new und…

from TFA:

> Maybe you’ll never write the code that keeps a plane in the sky. Maybe you’ll never push bits that hold a human life in the balance. Fine. Most don’t. But even if you're just slapping together another CRUD app for some bloated enterprise, you still owe your users respect. You owe them dignity.

Re: The copilot delusion

#177
post #176

> if you want to sculpt the kind of software that gets embedded in pacemakers and missile guidance systems and M1 tanks—you better throw that bot out the airlock and learn. But the bulk of us aren't doing that... We're making CRUD apps for endless incoming streams of near identical user needs, just with slightly different integrations, schemas, and lipstick. Let's be honest. For most software there is nothing new und…

from TFA: > Maybe you’ll never write the code that keeps a plane in the sky. Maybe you’ll never push bits that hold a human life in the balance. Fine. Most don’t. But even if you're just slapping together another CRUD app for some bloated enterprise, you still owe your users respect. You owe them dignity.

> you still owe your users respect. You owe them dignity.

what does that even mean?

Users don't care if code is written by a human or AI; they care that the code gives them what they need, hopefully in a fairly pleasant manner.

Re: The copilot delusion

#178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well how hard would it be to replace management with AI? Perhaps a developer could use AI to recreate the other tasks of the company without all of the overhead of actual people.

Yeah i can't wait to discuss product with a sycophantic chatbot instead of the people who actually have a stake in the product. Management can and usually does suck but i can reason with a person, for now. And sadly only the product people actually know what they want, usually right when you've built it the way they used to want it lol.

Sounds almost has hard as writing code

Re: The copilot delusion

#179
post #176

> if you want to sculpt the kind of software that gets embedded in pacemakers and missile guidance systems and M1 tanks—you better throw that bot out the airlock and learn. But the bulk of us aren't doing that... We're making CRUD apps for endless incoming streams of near identical user needs, just with slightly different integrations, schemas, and lipstick. Let's be honest. For most software there is nothing new und…

from TFA: > Maybe you’ll never write the code that keeps a plane in the sky. Maybe you’ll never push bits that hold a human life in the balance. Fine. Most don’t. But even if you're just slapping together another CRUD app for some bloated enterprise, you still owe your users respect. You owe them dignity.

> you still owe your users respect. You owe them dignity.

This is moral grandstanding. You owe your customers a good product at a low cost. If you don't use a tool that can lower costs, you are wronging your users and will go out of business.

Handcrafted CRUD will go the same way as handcrafted anything; an expensive niche hobby.

Re: The copilot delusion

#180
post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We're actually quite certain what this new paradigm is, because some poor souls are already practicing it: slop coding. You prompt-whisper poorly-defined changes to make, and if the machine chokes on its own vomit along the way, you delete everything and try again. It feels reasonable, consistent to see it as another "old man yells at the skies" scenario, but I do think it's unprecedented for a machine to automate th…

I don’t think we’ve really figured out how to use AI in coding yet, vibe coding doesn’t really feel like it’s it. Vibe coding and just generating code like how some people claim intellisense is just to save on typing, when it’s actually a great in-situ browse what members can be selected on a value of a certain type. There is definitely a way to abuse AI in programming, but it doesn’t seem to be very compelling and I…

I understand what you mean, but let's be honest: this is a rare kind of tool that's more useful to feign competence, deceive yourself and others, and produce industrial volumes of slop than it is to do better work. IntelliSense is just dynamic documentation, which has existed since at least Emacs — it doesn't do the thinking for you.

Professional tools, from music notation and art to typesetting and programming, are about translating an image inside your mind into something physical. When you know what you're doing, the lack of an interpretable mapping between prompt and generation means you spend more time trying to describe what you want to write instead of just writing it. I'd be much happier with code generation if it could take a formal specification and either return an error or something that provably implements it. Maybe interpretability research will one day change that, but as they are now, they're simply not tunable or reliable enough to be used as tools. And yes, prompting doesn't count when they increasingly disregard your instructions.

There are many valid uses: I have a tiny WolframAlpha-like script that lets me type some basic computations and the LLM translates that to Python. I sometimes use LLM completions to get some inspiration when writing prose — while I usually discard them, they still help me think. They can often act as better grammar checkers than LanguageTool, and they make a nice companion to smaller translation models, both having their own quirks.

But most of this doesn't need these larger and larger models; I haven't yet tried, but I think fine-tuning some mid-size open-weights LLMs will yield similar or better results. The industry sold the public AGI, not better auto-complete, a fuzzy parser, or a smarter translator, and now they're burning growing piles of money on a saturated research direction to maintain the delusion singularity is 5 months away.

Post reply on HN