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What AI coding costs you

tomwojcik.com

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Re: What AI coding costs you

#171

Post by timrogers »

> Reviewing AI output all day without the dopamine of creation is not a sustainable job description.

I agree that reducing engineers’ careers to code review will lead to burnout (amongst other problems).

But I think the reason we’re headed in this direction is precisely because creating with AI /can/ deliver “the dopamine of creation”.

It doesn’t deliver that hit for everyone - but it does for the half of engineers who are more excited about building new things than the act of coding.

Teams build more and ship faster because it’s so much easier to do that with AI - and it’s fun - and that leads to increased review load.

Re: What AI coding costs you

#172

Post by ksenzee »

9dev wrote: post #143
throwaway346434 wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So, you have a duty of care to make a safe workplace, at least in most countries. Consider what a job with no joy means for the ongoing mental health of your staff, where the main interaction they have all day is with an AI model that the person has to boss around; with little training on norms. Depression, frustration, nonchalance, isolation, and corner cutting are going to be the likely responses. So at the same ti…

I'm applying gentle pressure, not forcing everyone to use it. If necessary, I will fight for my team as much as I can, but that's not where we're headed and I would think about switching jobs if it ever is. Having said that: The dichotomy expressed in the threads here is a bit too extreme for my taste. It's not like working with AI is pure Yes-clicking review dread; there is joy to be found in materialising your idea…

> It's not like working with AI is pure Yes-clicking review dread; there is joy to be found in materialising your ideas out of thin air

I think that's true for some developers, and not for others. My guess is that one subset of developers has more ideas than they have time/resources to implement, and they enjoy programming because they love seeing the finished product emerge. I think this subset is more likely to go into management, because it's a force multiplier for them. They're the ones getting joy out of seeing AI make their ideas into reality.

But there's another subset who enjoys programming not because they love to see a product emerge, but because they enjoy the process itself: the head-scratching, the getting past "why won't this work" to the moment when the build starts working again or the site comes back up or the UI snaps into place. It's the magic of finding, among all the possible wrong answers, the exact right combination of bits that solve the problem. This subset is not getting any joy from AI: they're seeing AI take away that whole process and turn it into the kind of work their managers and their project owners do. It's made even worse because their managers don't even understand why they're so unhappy. I think managers would do well to consider how they're going to keep these folks happy and engaged and productive, because they're the ones who are going to be fixing the production bugs introduced by their teammates' AI commits. If they've all gone off to retrain as electricians, we're going to have a problem as an industry.

Re: What AI coding costs you

#173

Post by agentultra »

I often come back to a quote from Tony Hoare (paraphrased):

There are two ways to write software: either it obviously has no errors or there are no obvious errors in it.

LLMs tend to generate the latter. Because that’s what’s in the training data: all the code that was rushed to production with a promise it would be fixed later. And humans are notoriously bad at catching these kinds of errors.

It feels bad using tools like this because it turns you into a reverse centaur. You’re there because the tool cannot be held accountable. You’re the last mile delivery driver shipping the code. You didn’t participate in its construction and you take all the responsibility for it.

Only there are studies which demonstrate how small of an impact code review has on code quality. And that after reading a few hundred lines of code in an hour the effect disappears. Current AI processes aren’t equipped to handle this.

Whatever we’re doing it’s heading in the opposite direction of engineering.

Re: What AI coding costs you

#174

Post by amdivia »

eterps wrote: post #162
amdivia wrote: post #159

I think for AI to become useful while minimizing it's harm, the interface as a whole needs to be reworked. Instead of having a loop of code generation followed by review. The initiative should be taken by the developer, AI should be a background thing, not one that's surfacing itself to the developer. For instance I was thinking of AI coding where the developer is writing the application interface, files, design, and…

You could give https://github.com/jurriaan/aico a try.

Seems very interesting thanks for sharing! (even tho it still has a review process, but I feel it's heading in the right direction)

Re: What AI coding costs you

#175

Post by wrs »

9dev wrote: post #146
wrs wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a starker tradeoff, but still the same logic that engineering leaders have used for years to eliminate time for exploration, learning, mentoring, role-switching, and every other activity that makes a better engineer but doesn’t move tickets off the queue. These developers are all going to work somewhere else in a few years, so why should we invest in growing their skills? This isn’t a charity, after all. I’m…

I absolutely see your point there, but I don't have a better answer. It feels like the table stakes for feature development speed have risen all of a sudden, whether we like it or not.

Well, only if the increased speed doesn't result in a quality or staffing time bomb. Which none of us really knows at this point. You could always write code faster if you don't care if it works or is maintainable (and indeed many companies work that way for a while), and you could always put your developers in a pressure cooker until they leave from burnout.

Re: What AI coding costs you

#176

Post by bdbdbdb »

noduerme wrote: post #21

The hell with with whatever speed boost I might get. I still write all my code by hand every day, and own what it does. I know it. And I don't have to worry about atrophy. Could've outsourced a long time ago to humans, if I wanted to deal with reading code most of the time instead of writing it.

Am I alone in thinking atrophy might not happen? I use a keyboard all day but it doesn't mean I can't write by hand anymore. Predictive text didn't make me forget how to spell. If i buy coffee it doesn't mean I forget how to make it

Re: What AI coding costs you

#177

Post by wrs »

googamooga wrote: post #166
wrs wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When you let the LLM do the programming, you’re a product manager, not a programmer.

When you let compiler generate code for you, you're not a real programmer... That's what opcode coders was ranting in early 60s about FORTRAN programmers. Product managers can't produce viable programs ready to be deployed in production (yet). But maybe the will able to do it in the future. We don't know how far or close this future is. But I don't think it's not a bad idea in general.

The assumption behind the discussion is that they will be able to produce viable programs. And if you’re letting the LLM own the code, that’s what your job function will be: product manager.

Re: What AI coding costs you

#178

Post by FridgeSeal »

MattRix wrote: post #49
tomwojcik wrote: post #2

Hi HN, I've been using Claude Code heavily for the last year. Recently I've noticed a shift in sentiment among peers, here on HN, and over on /r/ExperiencedDevs. I wrote down some thoughts on the hidden costs of using AI too much that are not obvious, yet there's no concrete data yet. I tried to pull together data from a few different places to articulate something I think a lot of us are experiencing right now. I'd…

I’d encourage you to read this post: https://factory.strongdm.ai It hit the front page here a few weeks ago, but I don’t think most people took it seriously and got hung up on the $1000/day in tokens part. I am convinced that approach is the future of nearly all software development. It’s basically about how if you’re willing to spend enough tokens, these current models can already complete any software task. With th…

I have this conversation (or a variation threof) with some friends: I suspect that the vast majority of “mainstream commercial software development” is flat out just cooked. We won’t be writing code, nor debugging it. It’ll will just be people throwing more LLM compute at everything.

Open source, hobbyist and personal projects will probably remain the last bastions of “human in the loop” and human-written code, and I suspect these circles will retract into smaller, tighter circles.

Re: What AI coding costs you

#179

Post by stavros »

noduerme wrote: post #21

The hell with with whatever speed boost I might get. I still write all my code by hand every day, and own what it does. I know it. And I don't have to worry about atrophy. Could've outsourced a long time ago to humans, if I wanted to deal with reading code most of the time instead of writing it.

Nobody has to worry about atrophy. That's the good thing about it: Things only atrophy when you don't need them any more.

Re: What AI coding costs you

#180

Post by apitman »

dawnerd wrote: post #8
ryanmcl wrote: post #5

[dead]

The biggest problem is it’ll teach you bad habits. For example, Claude and gpt love to use fallbacks. They generate code that’ll get a positive result at any cost, even if it’s horrible in efficient. If you don’t have past knowledge you might just think that’s how it is. Now before someone says that junior devs make the same mistakes, yes, to some extent.

> it’ll teach you bad habits

So will most programmers

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