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The AI coding trap

chrisloy.dev

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Re: The AI coding trap

#171

Post by treyd »

chamomeal wrote: post #136
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?

Yeah but it’s the same issue. Open source licenses (just like other laws) weren’t designed for the age of LLMs. I’m sure most people don’t care, but I bet a lot of maintainers don’t want their code fed to LLMs!

Intellectual property as a concept wasn't designed for the age of LLM. You have to add a bunch of exceptions to copyright (fair use, first sale) to get it to not immediately lead to scenarios that don't make any intuitive sense. LLMs explode these issues because now you can mechanically manipulate ideas, and this forces to light new contradictions that intellectual property causes.

Re: The AI coding trap

#172

Post by wat10000 »

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 suspect the root of the disagreement is more about what kinds of work people do. There are many different kinds of programming and you can’t lump them all together. We shouldn’t expect an AI tool to be a good fit for all of them, any more than we should expect Ruby to be a good fit for embedded development or C to be a good fit for web apps.

My experience with low level systems programming is that it’s like working with a developer who is tremendously enthusiastic but has little skill and little understanding of what they do or don’t understand. Time I would have spent writing code is replaced by time spent picking through code that looks superficially good but is often missing key concepts. That may count as “thinking” but I wouldn’t categorize it as the good kind.

Where it excels for me is as a superpowered search (asking it to find places where we play a particular bit-packing game with a particular type of pointer works great and saves a lot of time) and for writing one-off helper scripts. I haven’t found it useful for writing code I’m going to ship, but for stuff that won’t ship it can be a big help.

It’s kind of like an excavator. If you need to move a bunch of dirt from A to B then it’s great. If you need to move a small amount of dirt around buried power lines and water mains, it’s going to cause more trouble than it’s worth.

Re: The AI coding trap

#173

Post by [deleted] »

dxxvi wrote: post #163

There is this statement in the article: LLMs are lightning fast junior engineers. I don't know if that is right or wrong. To me, good LLMs are a lightning fast better version of me. That means that I can write code like some LLMs but it'll take me days to do it (if I use a language that I'm not good at, for example Rust) but with carefully crafted prompts, LLMs take maybe half an hour or less.

[deleted]

Re: The AI coding trap

#174

Post by phyzome »

DrNosferatu wrote: post #152

I don't understand why some people are so upset with AI coding - no one forces them to use it. Now, if you say the problem is that you don't want to be inflicted with other people's AI code, just enforce more meaningful tests. There has always been bad code in the past, and there always will be. I, for one, am doing great with AI coding - and my feeling is that more emphasis on project structure is the way forward fo…

> I don't understand why some people are so upset with AI coding - no one forces them to use it.

You might be a little bit out of touch with the current zeitgeist -- and what's happening in a lot of corporations.

Re: The AI coding trap

#175

Post by agentcoops »

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…

Completely agreed. Whether it be AI or otherwise, I consider anything that gives me more time to focus on figuring out the right problem to solve or iterating on possible solutions to be good.

Yet every time that someone here earnestly testifies to whatever slight but real use they’ve found of AI, an army of commentators appears ready to gaslight them into doubting themselves, always citing that study meant to have proven that any apparent usefulness of AI is an illusion.

At this point, even just considering the domain of programming, there’s more than enough testimony to the contrary. This doesn’t say anything about whether there’s an AI bubble or overhype or anything about its social function or future. But, as you note, it means these cardboard cutout critiques of AI need to at least start from where we are.

Re: The AI coding trap

#176

Post by ZephyrBlu »

halfadot wrote: post #167
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…

> 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. No it isn't. There's literally nothing about the process that forces you to skip understanding. Any such skips are purely due to the lack of will on the developer's side. This lack of will to learn will not change the outcomes for you…

> No it isn't. There's literally nothing about the process that forces you to skip understanding. Any such skips are purely due to the lack of will on the developer's side

This is the whole point. The marginal dev will go to the path of least resistance, which is to skip the understanding and churn out a bunch of code. That is why it's a problem.

You are effectively saying "just be a good dev, there's literally nothing about AI which is stopping you from being a good dev" which is completely correct and also missing the point.

The marginal developer is not going to put in the effort to wield AI in a skillful way. They're going to slop their way through. It is a concern for widespread AI coding, even if it's not a concern for you or your skill peers in particular.

Re: The AI coding trap

#177

Post by prostheticrazor »

The article is pretty interesting, perhaps some marmite takes, but the bit that chimed with me is the vibe coding vs AI-driven engineering. Senior management at my work is obsessed with vibe-coding and are constantly pushing engineers to promote vibe code to PROD. It’s dispiriting to see parts of our code base begin to fill with manager+LLM slop …

Re: The AI coding trap

#178

Post by mrcrumb1 »

halfadot wrote: post #167
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…

> 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. No it isn't. There's literally nothing about the process that forces you to skip understanding. Any such skips are purely due to the lack of will on the developer's side. This lack of will to learn will not change the outcomes for you…

Let me ask you this: do you understand the code your colleagues produce as well as the code you write yourself?

Re: The AI coding trap

#179

Post by v3xro »

ZephyrBlu wrote: post #176
halfadot wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. No it isn't. There's literally nothing about the process that forces you to skip understanding. Any such skips are purely due to the lack of will on the developer's side. This lack of will to learn will not change the outcomes for you…

> No it isn't. There's literally nothing about the process that forces you to skip understanding. Any such skips are purely due to the lack of will on the developer's side This is the whole point. The marginal dev will go to the path of least resistance, which is to skip the understanding and churn out a bunch of code. That is why it's a problem. You are effectively saying "just be a good dev, there's literally nothi…

To add to the above - I see a parallel to the "if you are a good and diligent developer there is nothing to stop you from writing secure C code" argument. Which is to say - sure, if you also put in extra effort to avoid all the unsafe bits that lead to use-after-free or race conditions it's also possible to write perfect assembly, but in practice we have found that using memory safe languages leads to a huge reduction of safety bugs in production. I think we will find similarly that not using AI will lead to a huge reduction of bugs in production later on when we have enough data to compare to human-generated systems. If that's a pre-existing bias, then so be it.

Re: The AI coding trap

#180

Post by bloomca »

johnfn wrote: post #161
lelanthran wrote: post #80

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. This argument is wearing a little thin at this point. I see it multiples times a day, rephrased a little bit. The response, "How well do you think your thinking will go if you had not spent years doing the 'practice' part?" , is always followed by either silence or a non…

Do you think that all managers and tech leads atrophy because they don’t spend all day “doing”? I think a good number of them become more effective because they delegate the simple parts of their work that don’t require deep thought, leaving them to continue to think hard about the thorniest areas of what they’re working on. Or perhaps you’re asking how people will become good at delegation without doing? I don’t kno…

Managers 100% lose their abilities, their focus shifts to completely different concerns -- codebase health, enabling people, tracking velocity metrics, etc. They still understand high-level concerns, of course (if we are talking about strong technical background), but they'd struggle a lot if just dropped into the codebase.

Tech leads can exist in many variants, but usually they spend the majority of time in code, so they don't lose it. If they become too good at managing and change their priorities, they _will_ gradually drift away too.

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