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AI slows down open source developers. Peter Naur can teach us why

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Re: AI slows down open source developers. Peter Naur can teach us why

#181

Post by thinkingemote »

tjr wrote: post #148
thinkingemote wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly! Waze the navigation app tends to route users on longer routes but which feels more fast. When driving we perceive our journey as fast or slow not by the actual length but by our memories of what happened. Waze knows human drivers are happier with driving a route that may be longer in time and distance of they feel like they are making progress with the twists and turns. Ai tools makes programming feel easier…

That sounds like a navigation tool that I absolutely do not want! Occasionally I do enjoy meandering around, but usually fastest / shortest path would be preferred. And I'm not sure about the other either. In my 20+ year career in aerospace software, the most memorable times were solving interesting problems, not days with no struggle just churning out code.

Indeed it is removing the memorable events of achievement!

Generally memorable things are different than unmemorable things. Work is unmemorable. Driving is unmemorable except when something negative happens. Waze tries to give some positive feelings to the driving route. Waze knows that people want positive experiences sometimes more than efficiency.

Being stuck in a traffic jam is more memorable than not being so. Or we remember the negative feeling more than the fact that our drive actually wasn't inefficient.

AI tools makes us have a less negative day of work. so we feel like we have no traffic jams. "I got so much done" really means "I didn't get stuck". But it's also removing the positive feelings too!

It's an illusion of progress through our feelings and memories.

Or programming with AI brings different feedback mechanisms and systems and different emotional engagements and different memory behaviours. It's very interesting!

Re: AI slows down open source developers. Peter Naur can teach us why

#182

Post by kfajdsl »

pennomi wrote: post #81
antimora wrote: post #50

I'm one of the regular code reviewers for Burn (a deep learning framework in Rust). I recently had to close a PR because the submitter's bug fix was clearly written entirely by an AI agent. The "fix" simply muted an error instead of addressing the root cause. This is exactly what AI tends to do when it can't identify the actual problem. The code was unnecessarily verbose and even included tests for muting the error.…

This is the most frustrating thing LLMs do. They put wide try:catch structures around the code making it impossible to actually track down the source of a problem. I want my code to fail fast and HARD during development so I can solve every problem immediately.

This is my number one complaint with LLM produced code too. The worst thing is when it swallows an error to print its own error message with far less info and no traceback.

In my rules I tell it that try catches are completely banned unless I explicitly ask for one (an okay tradeoff, since usually my error boundaries are pretty wide and I know where I want them). I know the context length is getting too long when it starts ignore that.

Re: AI slows down open source developers. Peter Naur can teach us why

#183

Post by thinkingemote »

blake1 wrote: post #94

I think a reasonable summary of the study referenced is that: "AI creates the perception of productivity enhancements far beyond the reality." Even within the study, there were some participants who saw mild improvements to productivity, but most had a significant drop in productivity. This thread is now full of people telling their story about huge productivity gains they made with AI, but none of the comments conte…

It's like the difference between being fast and quick. AI tools make the developer feel quick but they may not be fast. It's less cognitive effort in some ways. It's an interesting illusion, one that is based on changing emotions from different feedback loops and the effects of how memory forms.

Re: AI slows down open source developers. Peter Naur can teach us why

#184

Post by asadotzler »

tjr wrote: post #169
PicassoCTs wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I also think that AI written code- is just not read. People hate code-reviews, and actively refuse to read code- because that is hard work, reading into other peoples thoughts and ideas. This is why pushing for new code, rewrites, new frameworks is so popular. https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/06/things-you-should-... So a ton of ai-generated code- is just that, never read. Its generated, tested against test-fun…

I have mostly worked in aerospace software, and find this rather horrifying. I suppose, if your tests are in fact good and comprehensive enough, there could be a logical argument for not needing to understand the code, but if we're talking people's safety in the hands of your software, I don't know if there is any number of tests I would accept in exchange for willingly giving up understanding of the code.

You're transferring the need to be really good at coding and understanding code to the need to be really good at testing and understanding tests, which 9/10 times requires being good at coding and understanding code. There are no free lunches.

Re: AI slows down open source developers. Peter Naur can teach us why

#185

Post by asadotzler »

thinkingemote wrote: post #183
blake1 wrote: post #94

I think a reasonable summary of the study referenced is that: "AI creates the perception of productivity enhancements far beyond the reality." Even within the study, there were some participants who saw mild improvements to productivity, but most had a significant drop in productivity. This thread is now full of people telling their story about huge productivity gains they made with AI, but none of the comments conte…

It's like the difference between being fast and quick. AI tools make the developer feel quick but they may not be fast. It's less cognitive effort in some ways. It's an interesting illusion, one that is based on changing emotions from different feedback loops and the effects of how memory forms.

Quickness is a burst; speed is a flow.

Or, "slow is smooth, and smooth is fast"

Re: AI slows down open source developers. Peter Naur can teach us why

#186

Post by asadotzler »

yomismoaqui wrote: post #175
jdiff wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

GP is pointing out the distinct lack of AI driven development in the wild. At this point, agents should be visibly maintaining at least a few popular codebases across this world wide web. The fact that there aren't raises some eyebrows for the claims that are regularly made by proponents. Not just the breathless proponents, either. Even taking claims very conservatively, FOSS maintainer burnout should be a thing of t…

It's disingenuous to expect that tools that are publicly available for less than a year have a massive adoption in the wild. Think that these were internal tools that provided value to engineers on Anthropic, OpenAI, Google & others and now are starting to be adopted by the general public. Some people are overhyped and some seem hurt because I don't know, maybe they define themselves by their ability to write code by…

>It's disingenuous to expect that tools that are publicly available for less than a year have a massive adoption in the wild.

Github got massive adoption in a year, probably 100K developers and tens of thousands of projects including big names like Ruby on Rails.

I'm sure if I spent more than 2 minutes on this I'd have even more examples but this one is enough to neuter your claims.

Re: AI slows down open source developers. Peter Naur can teach us why

#187

Post by 2muchcoffeeman »

narush wrote: post #86
antonvs wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Early-2025 AI slows down experienced open-source developers. Even that's too general, because it'll depend on what the task is. It's not as if open source developers in general never work on tasks where AI could save time.

We call this over-generalization out specifically in the "We do not provide evidence that:" table in the blog post and paper - I agree there are tasks these developers are likely sped up on with early-2025 tools.

I think this will be the key. Finding appropriate tasks. Even on code bases I know, I can find tedious things for the AI to do. Sometimes I can find tedious things for it to do that I would never have dreamt of doing in the past. Now, I think “will it do it?”.

Once I got a hang of identifying problems, or being more targeted, I was spending less time messing about and got things done quicker.

Re: AI slows down open source developers. Peter Naur can teach us why

#188

Post by rightbyte »

andix wrote: post #79

What I noticed: AI development constantly breaks my flow. It makes me more tired, and I work for shorter time periods on coding. It's a myth that you can code a whole day long. I usually do intervals of 1-3 hours for coding, with some breaks in between. Procrastination can even happen on work related things, like reading other project members code/changes for an hour. It has a benefit to some extent, but during this…

It would be interesting to record what one do in a day at the desk. Probably quite depressing to watch.

Like, I think 1h would be streaching it for mature codebases.

Re: AI slows down open source developers. Peter Naur can teach us why

#189

Post by asadotzler »

delusional wrote: post #170
la_fayette wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When you argued that it saved you time by a factor of 10, have you even measured that properly? I initially also had the feeling that LLMs save me time, but in the end it didn't. I roughly compared my performance to past performance by the amount of stories done and LLMs made me slower even if I thought I am saving time... From several month of deep work with LLMs I think they are amazing pattern matchers, but not pr…

There was a recent study that found that LLM users in general tend to feel like they were more productive with AI while actually being less productive.

presumably the study this very HN discussion responds to.
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