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What AI coding costs you

tomwojcik.com

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Re: What AI coding costs you

#181

Post by throwdbaaway »

zzzeek wrote: post #121
xantronix wrote: post #60

Writing code by hand and managing the mental model of its execution and architecture is one of the few remaining joys of my day job, apart from delivering a good product people want and use and being helpful. Even the small things, the tedious chores of refactoring or scaffolding that initial bit of CRUD boilerplate are steps that matter to me. The callouses matter. The tedium matters. These moments of pain and drudg…

I continue to do all of those things but have Claude do the typing for me, if that makes any sense. I'm directing it on almost a line by line basis, I just am not that interested in doing syntax pushups anymore.

Can you describe a bit more how this works? I suppose the speed remains about the same, while the experience is more pleasant?

(Big fan of SQLAlchemy)

Re: What AI coding costs you

#182

Post by october8140 »

I think what’s interesting is technical debt is contained in a project, but cognitive debt is contained in a person. I think we will see good developers pile up so much cognitive debt they will nuke their own careers.

Re: What AI coding costs you

#183

Post by zezaeoh »

Should we seek the dopamine reward of creativity in writing code? Isn't delivering the value created through the developed results to users itself a creative act?

Will the ability to review code (which is important now) become important in the future? Is it necessary to have a pipeline to nurture seniors?

Wouldn't it be more important to define clear requirements, verify that the resulting code operates properly within various guardrails, and clearly communicate the designed value, than to be able to review code?

Re: What AI coding costs you

#184

Post by noduerme »

jnovek wrote: post #35
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.

Do you have management pressure to use these tools? I don’t have any data but me and virtually every software engineer I talk to regularly is feeling or has felt pressure to use these tools.

I personally do not. But I don't work in the software industry. I write custom software in an industry that's as far away from tech as you can imagine. My management tells me what features they want, and doesn't care how it gets done. They only care that it works, and the priority is never to get a feature out fast. The priority is to never break their logistics software that's used 24/7. The deployment cycle is still fast, but bugs can be catastrophic, and it's on me to fix any bugs that crop up whenever something goes into production. Usually, when a bug filters up to me, it's within a few hours, because edge cases arise quickly. I know almost immediately what lines of code in which files are the most likely culprits. Because I wrote them, and I tested them manually, and I thought long and hard before hitting the button. If someone else (or something else) wrote them, I'd have to go hunting at the exact moment when time is critical and there's an open bug in a live deployment, and my phone is ringing and people are yelling.

The term "vibe coding" is new, but I've described what I do as "jazz coding" for a couple decades.

Re: What AI coding costs you

#185

Post by lubujackson »

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…

My question is always: what are you building? You need to tell the AI what to build. What if it does it in a way that isn't what you want, or makes the buttom blue instead of red, or any number of other decisions?

AI can write the code, but not tell you what code you want it to write. In other words, how long are your specs? Either the LLM decides "whatever" or you have massive amounts of documentation to coordinate.

We still need to decide what to build, and some of the how. That is not automate-able, yet everyone seems to gloss over that bit.

Re: What AI coding costs you

#186

Post by falkensmaize »

apples_oranges wrote: post #33

It’s like walking vs taking bus or car. It’s nice to walk sometimes..

I’d argue it’s more like driving yourself vs passively being driven everywhere. Remember that scene at the end of E.T.? Where Elliott and his brother steal the van, but they don’t know how to get to their destination because “I don’t know streets mom always drives!”. LLMs are mom always driving - you might recognize some landmarks after a while, but you don’t know the names of the streets to get anywhere.

Re: What AI coding costs you

#187

Post by lgas »

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 seems to do this kind of stuff more when you're not looking too. Like I'll be approving edits all day without any problem then the second I set it to auto it gets a lint error about dead code and adds a pragma to allow the dead code instead of removing it, etc.

Re: What AI coding costs you

#188

Post by fud101 »

Until a majority of software engineers become unemployed, we won't collectively wake up and act which is what we should to this existential crisis unfolding. Action more than yet another plausible sounding article.

Re: What AI coding costs you

#189

Post by whatever1 »

xantronix wrote: post #60

Writing code by hand and managing the mental model of its execution and architecture is one of the few remaining joys of my day job, apart from delivering a good product people want and use and being helpful. Even the small things, the tedious chores of refactoring or scaffolding that initial bit of CRUD boilerplate are steps that matter to me. The callouses matter. The tedium matters. These moments of pain and drudg…

I mean at least now I have the option to spend time on code problems I enjoy.

Did I ever feel joy from trying to figure out the api of an obscure plotting library? No. And thankfully I never have to do it again.

Re: What AI coding costs you

#190

Post by slopinthebag »

9dev wrote: post #149
slopinthebag wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So you struggled to improve velocity without AI tools, are you worried that using the AI tools as a crutch will just lead to a death spiral of bad code being shipped increasingly faster? I've only ever seen the AI adoption approach work on fully functional teams. The concern as well is that by forcing the AI onto developers, they eventually throw their hands up and say "well they dont care about code quality anymore,…

> I've only ever seen the AI adoption approach work on fully functional teams. It's not that the team isn't functioning, it's that it's a pretty diverse team in terms of experience, which means things just used to take a while to finish. > The concern as well is that by forcing the AI onto developers, they eventually throw their hands up and say "well they dont care about code quality anymore, neither should I" and s…

In my experience the bottleneck was never with writing code. If this is the case how can a developer be expected to increase their output while still being responsible in the same way? Seems like a recipe for burnout.
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