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AI coding made me faster, but I can't code to music anymore

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Re: AI coding made me faster, but I can't code to music anymore

#181

Post by creesch »

jckahn wrote: post #175
creesch wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> That dumb attitude (which I understand you’re criticising) of “more more more” always reminds me of Lenny from the Simpsons moving fast through the yellow light, with nowhere to go. Realizing that attitude in myself at times has given me so much more peace of mind. Just in general, not everything needs to be as fast and efficient as possible. Not to mention the times where in the end I spend a lot of time and energ…

> Just in general, not everything needs to be as fast and efficient as possible. It does when you are competing for getting and keeping employment opportunities.

Even then it is not always needed, but I also more directly address this already in the comment you are replying to.

Re: AI coding made me faster, but I can't code to music anymore

#182

Post by advael »

furyofantares wrote: post #101
Steven420 wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is everyone working shitty jobs not "society becoming shittier"? Seems pretty awful

"Society" is more than just software developers. We are very well paid for very cushy work. It's not good for anyone's work to get worse, but it's not a huge hit to society if a well-paid cushy job gets less cushy. And presumably people buy our work because it's valuable to them. Multiplying that by 8 would be a pretty big benefit to society. I don't want my job to get less fun, but I would press that button without…

This places a lot of faith in the following assumptions:

1. Efficiency measures as written to benchmark this coupling with economic productivity overall

2. Monetary assessments of value in the context of businesses spending money corresponding with social value

3. The gains of economic productivity being distributed across society to any degree, or the effect of this disparity itself being negligible

4. The negative externalities of these processes scaling less quickly than whatever we're measuring in our productivity metric

5. Aforementioned externalities being able to scale to even a lesser degree in lockstep with productivity without crashing all of the above, if not causing even more catastrophic outcomes

I have very little faith in any of these assumptions

Re: AI coding made me faster, but I can't code to music anymore

#183

Post by Rinum »

gyosko wrote: post #165

I really don't get it. While letting the AI write some code can be cool and fascinating, I really can't undersand how: - write the prompt(and you need do be precise and think and express carefully what you have in mind) - check/try the code - repeat is better than writing the code by myself. AI coding like this feels like a nightmare to me and it's 100x more exhausting.

It's a change in mindset. AI is like having your own junior developer. If you've never had direct reports before where you have to give them detailed instruction and validate their code then you're right, it might end up more exhausting than just doing the work yourself.

Re: AI coding made me faster, but I can't code to music anymore

#184

Post by foolserrandboy »

gyosko wrote: post #170
david-gpu wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I bet some people felt the same way when we collectively moved from assembly to compilers.

Yeah, if not only for the small fact that you are leaving a well defined set of rules for pure chaos and randomness this time around.

Yeah, I don't understand this comparison. I've programmed for years in higher level languages professionally and never learned assembly and never got stuck because the higher level language was limited or doing something wrong.

Whenever I use an LLM I always need to review its output because usually there is something not quite right. For context I'm using VS copilot, mostly ask and agent mode, in a large brownfield project.

Re: AI coding made me faster, but I can't code to music anymore

#185

Post by nbaugh1 »

gyosko wrote: post #165

I really don't get it. While letting the AI write some code can be cool and fascinating, I really can't undersand how: - write the prompt(and you need do be precise and think and express carefully what you have in mind) - check/try the code - repeat is better than writing the code by myself. AI coding like this feels like a nightmare to me and it's 100x more exhausting.

For me, on small personal projects, I can get a project to a point in about 4 hours where previous to new AI tools it would’ve taken about 40. At work, there is a huge difference due to the complexity of the code base and services. Using agents to code for me in these cases as 100% been the loop of iterating on something so often, I would’ve been better off with a more hands on approach, essentially just reviewing PRs written by AI.

Re: AI coding made me faster, but I can't code to music anymore

#186

Post by sarchertech »

hudon wrote: post #176
sarchertech wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nearly all clothing is still produced in an extremely manual process. What was automated was the production of raw cloth.

This is a distinction without a difference. Even if you take a rudimentary raw cloth comparison like cotton vs heavy wool (the latter being fire resistant and used historically used by firemen, ie. “Safety critical”), the machines’ output quality was significantly lower than manual output for the latter. This phenomenon is a general one… chainsaws vs hand saws, bread slicers vs hand slicing, mechanical harvesters vs…

That’s just not the general case at all. Automated or “powered” processes generally lead to a more consistent final product. In many cases the quality is just better than what can be done by hand.

Re: AI coding made me faster, but I can't code to music anymore

#187

Post by imiric »

ai_assisted_dev wrote: post #179
imiric wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not the same flow state experienced by programmers. While programming, it's possible to get into a trance-like state where the program's logic is fully loaded and visible in your mind, and your fingers become an extension of your mind that wire you directly to the machine. This allows you to modify the program essentially at the speed of thought, with practically zero chance of producing buggy code. The progra…

Nice way of gatekeeping "flow state of programmers", considering I have been a software engineer for the past 2 decades. So I have experienced quite some flow states in my life, and this is no different.

Not gatekeeping, just pointing out that they're different activities with very different experiences. What you're talking about and what the article is talking about are different things.

When using ML tools you have no deep understanding of the behavior of the program, since you don't understand the generated code. If you bother to review the code, that is a huge context switch from anything you were doing previously. This doesn't happen during deeply focused programming sessions.

You may have been a software engineer for decades without ever experiencing the programming flow state. I'm not passing judgement.

Re: AI coding made me faster, but I can't code to music anymore

#188

Post by nbaugh1 »

october8140 wrote: post #8

What kind of projects are people doing that are feeling the increased velocity?

Greenfield development of small web apps. I’m familiar enough with everything that I can get something up and running on my own, but I don’t do it regularly so I need to read a lot of docs to be up to date. I can describe the basic design and requirements of an app and have something like Claude Code spit out a prototype in a couple of hours

Re: AI coding made me faster, but I can't code to music anymore

#189

Post by daemin »

tamimio wrote: post #45

That's an argument I had with a friend last year. I told him generative AI will make writing code easier, but the life of whoever is writing it far worse. Because writing code without using AI is done with some sort of due diligence: you memorize some stuff, look up other stuff in the docs or online, and you take some time actually solving the problem you have. If you succeed, you would've spent the needed time at YO…

Kind of sounds like using LLMs to generate code is like eating USA junk/fast food. It is quick and tasty, and you get a dopamine rush from that sugar and fat in your body, but it leaves you feeling unsatisfied and unsatiated.

Re: AI coding made me faster, but I can't code to music anymore

#190

Post by sarchertech »

hudon wrote: post #172
sarchertech wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s a misconception. The machines we’re talking about made raw cloth not clothing and it was actually higher quality in many respects because of accuracy and repeatability. Almost all clothing is still made by hand one piece at a time with sewing machines still very manually operated.

“ …by the mid‑19th century machine‑woven cloth still could not equal the quality of hand‑woven Indian cloth. However, the high productivity of British textile manufacturing allowed coarser grades of British cloth to undersell hand‑spun and woven fabric in low‑wage India” [0] “…the output of power looms was certainly greater than that of the handlooms, but the handloom weavers produced higher quality cloths with great…

The problem with those quotes is the lack of definition of “quality”. Machine woven cloth in many ways is better because of consistency and uniformity.

If your goal is to make 1000 of the exact same dress, having a completely consistent raw material is synonymous with high quality.

It’s not fair to say that machines produced some kind of inferior imitation of the handmade product, that only won through sheer speed and cost to manufacture.

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