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My article on why AI is great (or terrible) or how to use it

matthewrocklin.com

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Re: My article on why AI is great (or terrible) or how to use it

#171

Post by danielbln »

falloutx wrote: post #73
alfalfasprout wrote: post #6

For a senior engineer, some very odd takes here: "Our ability to zoom in and implement code is now obsolete Even with SOTA LLMs like Opus 4.5 this is downright untrue. Many, many logical, strategic, architectural, and low level code mistakes are still happening. And given context window limitations of LLMs (even with hacks like subagents to work around this) big picture long-term thinking about code design, structure…

Its sad we have gone from making the software as good and efficient as possible to "good enough, ship it". This is the main reason AI agents are successful.

Let's not rewrite history. Somehow the counter point to these AI discussions seems to be some revisionist fantasy past where humans would only write perfect code at the height of the craft. That's just not true, there was plenty of shit code around before and business interests never cared one iota about "clean" code.

So no, we haven't gone from "making software as good and efficient as possible", that was always a niche.

Re: My article on why AI is great (or terrible) or how to use it

#172

Post by oneeyedpigeon »

wiseowise wrote: post #165
emseetech wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My question is why use AI to output javascript or python? Why not output everything in C and ASM for 500x performance? Why use high level languages meant to be easier for humans? Why not go right to the metal? If anyone's ever tried this, it's clear why: AI is terrible at C and ASM. But that cuts into what AI is at its core: It's not actual programming, it's mechanical reproduction. Which means its incapabilities in…

Because you want to modify those later instead of having read only blob?

Wouldn't the AI that wrote the original code be in a better position to modify it too?

Re: My article on why AI is great (or terrible) or how to use it

#173

Post by lazide »

CharlesW wrote: post #5

I get vibe-coders not having a good experience once the honeymoon is over. But I'm fascinated that a professional software developer could have such a different experience than I do. • LLMs generate junk • LLMs generate a lot of junk

For some people, code == junk?

Re: My article on why AI is great (or terrible) or how to use it

#174

Post by wiseowise »

oneeyedpigeon wrote: post #172
wiseowise wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because you want to modify those later instead of having read only blob?

Wouldn't the AI that wrote the original code be in a better position to modify it too?

Lets start a space station to squeeze a glass of juice.

Re: My article on why AI is great (or terrible) or how to use it

#175

Post by llmslave3 »

emseetech wrote: post #20
alfalfasprout wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah... don't get me wrong I find a lot of value in these tools. They do help with a lot of the tedium, can be helpful as debugging assistants, and in the right hands (with the right oversight) can indeed generate solid code. But we are, even as of Opus 4.5, so wildly far away from what the author is suggesting. FWIW my experience is working in the AI/ML space at a major tech company and as a maintainer + contributor…

I use AI as a rubber duck to research my options, sanity-check my code before a PR, and give me a heads up on potential pain points going forward. But I still write my own code. If I'm going to be responsible for it, I'm going to be the one who writes it. It's my belief that velocity up front always comes at a cost down the line. That's been true for abstractions, for frameworks, for all kinds of time-saving tools. S…

Yeah my guess is that it takes roughly the same amount of time regardless if it's AI agents or hand coding, the time just gets spent in different ways (writing vs reading for example).

Re: My article on why AI is great (or terrible) or how to use it

#177

Post by mcintyre1994 »

I disagree with them on the large PR section. I agree that we sometimes don’t review these in detail, but the thing that enables that for me is a trusted contributor explaining deterministically what they did. I renamed whatever variable, or I changed whatever script in all these places, I updated whatever lint rule and fixed all the errors, I moved whatever to a separate package.

All of these can create a diff across lots of files, but can be easily explained to a reviewer.

The problem is that I can’t trust an LLM to act deterministically the way I trust some people to. So I can’t just take that higher level view of “yep cool that sounds like a good idea” and skim the changes.

Re: My article on why AI is great (or terrible) or how to use it

#178

Post by hmry »

AdieuToLogic wrote: post #145

The author presents a false dichotomy when discussing "Why Not AI". ... there are some serious costs and reasonable reservations to AI development. Let's start by listing those concerns These are super-valid concerns. They're also concerns that I suspect came around when we developed compilers and people stopped writing assembly by hand, instead trusting programs like gcc ... Compilers are deterministic , making thei…

If LLMs were like compilers, you could put src/ into .gitignore and only upload the prompt.

Even the earliest compilers didn't work by the programmer writing code, copying the assembly output into their source tree, and throwing away the code.

This is not a value judgement, they simply aren't the same thing at all.

Re: My article on why AI is great (or terrible) or how to use it

#179

Post by mannanj »

Weird question. If a system you are using is intended to extract from you, and unwillfully and nonconsensually stealing your intellectual property because the unaccountable big companies do shady stuff (the "AI" companies) is it justified to use it for the productivity gains because it will 'eventually' get there anyway?

Does the potential gain as an early adopter make it morally ok.

Because thats what these tiered uses of these AI and how it's been getting better works imo. It got lots of training data from juniors and seniors using it the last 2 years, it got better. It gets more appealing and leverages human psychology and marketing to get higher level engineers to train it as it and the companies extract more data. It needs and gets more data from the people willfully complying and using it. Wondering if theres a game theory design for this conundrum - what typically happens in nature in these scenarios?

Re: My article on why AI is great (or terrible) or how to use it

#180

Post by [deleted] »

nl wrote: post #152
AdieuToLogic wrote: post #145

The author presents a false dichotomy when discussing "Why Not AI". ... there are some serious costs and reasonable reservations to AI development. Let's start by listing those concerns These are super-valid concerns. They're also concerns that I suspect came around when we developed compilers and people stopped writing assembly by hand, instead trusting programs like gcc ... Compilers are deterministic , making thei…

> Compilers are deterministic, making their generated assembly code verifiable People keep saying this like it is an absolute fact, whereas in reality it is a scale. Compilers are more deterministic than LLMs in general, but no they are not completely deterministic. That's why making reproducible builds is hard! https://stackoverflow.com/questions/52974259/what-are-some-e... and https://github.com/mgrang/non-determin…

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