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AI Can Make You Suck Faster Too

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Re: AI Can Make You Suck Faster Too

#171

Post by rcxdude »

Marazan wrote: post #14
blfr wrote: post #4

There are some good points, and I ask the question of where is the ground breaking stuff myself, but severely weakened by * stretching the timeline: the actual real programming ability appeared in LLMs in the last 6-8 months, not 3-4 years, * using the weakest possible tool: and I bought $10 worth of DeepSeek credits that is a far cry from Claude with Fable. Also, I know nothing about marathons but for most uses putt…

I remember being told in early 2025 that only now has "real programming ability" appeared in LLMs. And since then there's been 3 more "now real programming ability has been made available and previous stuff was just toy examples" cycles (summer 2025, winter 2025 and spring 2026) Looking forward to the next "everything before this was trivial and bad, here's the good stuff" moment

It's a bit Goomba Fallacy. For different people the threshold was crossed at different times. That you're getting told different things by different people doesn't make those statements self-contradictory.

Re: AI Can Make You Suck Faster Too

#172

Post by reconnecting »

Quothling wrote: post #166
reconnecting wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What you're telling me now is that in the short period of 4 months, an American corporation took an employee of a company the EU relies on for critical matters from "wouldn't touch it if you paid me" to outsourcing thinking. Well, I'm speechless.

Are you purposely twisting things to fit a certain narrative? If you really want to go into it, I've previously talked about how we used AI tools provided to us by one of our major investors who do so for all the companies they are invested into. These were also Anthropic and OpenAI models. The main difference is that Cowork has access to files on a users one drive (and that we get a lot more control over what goes i…

This is the funny part, because I have nothing to twist.

You work in the extreme opposite setup to mine. VC vs bootstrapped. LLMs vs hand-coded. High margins vs open-source. If you ever look at our codebase, you will see that there are very few code dependencies, and of course bringing in another as large as LLMs is not in scope.

If you wish, we can always continue our exchange by email (mine is in hn profile).

Re: AI Can Make You Suck Faster Too

#173

Post by Zakis1 »

solid_fuel wrote: post #144
Zakis1 wrote: post #3

> Uses only DeepSeek and comes to the conclusion that LLM's are bad at coding? Why not use actual frontier models, and you know do some real research, before writing a blog post?

> Why not use actual frontier models, and you know do some real research, before writing a blog post? Seems like they've already done more research than you. Their results not matching your expectations does not indicate a lack of research. If you feel they missed something, why don't you go spend your own money on whatever frontier model you want and go publish a post with your own conclusions.

What expectations do I have? They used one AI model and then wrote a blog post as if they have an informed opinion. It has no credibility whatsoever, why would I listen to anyone's opinion who hasn't done proper research.

It's like playing one video game and then claiming all video games are boring and have bad gameplay and stories.

Re: AI Can Make You Suck Faster Too

#174

Post by boredatoms »

bigstrat2003 wrote: post #148
cheeze wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I got here and... I agreed with everything up to this point. The author makes a good point. If you don't know what you're doing, AI accelerates that. No question. But they put a whopping... ten bucks into using DeepSeek and weren't impressed with the initial results. I know they try to cover this with "you just aren't prompting correctly!" but if, in 2026, you aren't able to have an LLM generate decent quality code..…

> in 2026, you aren't able to have an LLM generate decent quality code Nobody is. The only difference is that some of us are willing to say the emperor has no clothes.

The workflow isnt a single prompt then you have working code from the LLM, its 30 prompts of discussion and then reading each proposed edit and having tangent discussions until you're somewhat ok with it. Then reviewing the changeset as a whole and refactoring a few times

Re: AI Can Make You Suck Faster Too

#175

Post by LelouBil »

hypfer wrote: post #169
grebc wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you build a desktop/terminal app, web app/site, mobile app, or even a library without engaging AI is probably where I’d draw the line. Not everything you touch when you know how to code is doing the whole thing, but I’d expect you’d be able to piece it all together with some time and docs. Pick your own platform that suits too, I’m not saying iOS or Windows only. For context to my above comment re university cour…

> Can you build a desktop/terminal app, web app/site, mobile app, or even a library without engaging AI is probably where I’d draw the line. Wasn't the workflow there always to take the example code of whatever library or framework it was and then customize it? I could definitely never start a react or android or c# or whatever application from scratch with no resources. Nor would I want to because why. Works with C…

Yeah, not the one you are responding to, but I wouldn't define it as from scratch.

Personally, "know how to code" is basically having the logic an reasoning skills to read and understand and apply documentation for whatever subject you need for this job.

If you have never written a web app in your life, but you can follow next.js tutorials and customize them beyond the tutorials afterwards, then you're at the point where the only thing you need is more time or more docs based on what you need to do at work.

Re: AI Can Make You Suck Faster Too

#176

Post by freepiai »

imtringued wrote: post #84
rootnod3 wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right. Better throw money at 5 different ones and then people come and tell you that you just need MORE agents and throw MORE money at it or you're not doing it right.

The cheapest coding subscription is $20 and you can get a refund if you cancel within 7 days. Actually, I lied, Codex is free and I developed my first AI written application using it and the free tier limits were generous enough to work on it for several months.

Hey! I'm building www.freepi.ai which is free! So you can also try that!

Re: AI Can Make You Suck Faster Too

#178

Post by wseqyrku »

orwin wrote: post #48

I now started to us AI to help review my juniors PRs, because I couldn't keep up with the amount of code they ship. It started poorly, but now I have my method: I first read the code and flag the lines I'm not sure about, then ask any frontier model (I like Claude here for analysis, even if I don't use it for the rest) to explain the PR and to put effort on the parts I flagged (basically explain in detail the code, n…

Wow, that painful AI aided review process, it's like you are computering with eyes closed.

Re: AI Can Make You Suck Faster Too

#179

Post by grebc »

LelouBil wrote: post #175
hypfer wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Can you build a desktop/terminal app, web app/site, mobile app, or even a library without engaging AI is probably where I’d draw the line. Wasn't the workflow there always to take the example code of whatever library or framework it was and then customize it? I could definitely never start a react or android or c# or whatever application from scratch with no resources. Nor would I want to because why. Works with C…

Yeah, not the one you are responding to, but I wouldn't define it as from scratch. Personally, "know how to code" is basically having the logic an reasoning skills to read and understand and apply documentation for whatever subject you need for this job. If you have never written a web app in your life, but you can follow next.js tutorials and customize them beyond the tutorials afterwards, then you're at the point w…

You hit the nail on the head friend :)

Re: AI Can Make You Suck Faster Too

#180

Post by noonat »

Speaking anecdotally, at least: I don't think the lack of publicly available software is necessarily evidence that AI tools are ineffective.

From the limited perspective I have as a senior developer working in industry, I think that:

1. It has been a relatively short amount of time since the November 2025 quality increase in frontier LLMs. 2. It takes time for developers to learn how to use agents effectively, once they begin to trust them. 3. There is a significant difference in the output quality dependent on how you guide the agent. 4. Experienced developers are creating lots of quality software that is used internally (or only personally by them) but which they don't have the time or confidence to release for others to use.

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