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The hidden cost of AI coding

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Re: The hidden cost of AI coding

#191
post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What if I prefer to have a clone of me doing my coding, and then I throw my clone under the bus and start to (angrily) hyperfocus explore and change every piece to be beautiful? Does this mean I love coding or I hate coding? It's definitely a personality thing, but that's so much more productive for me, than convincing myself to do all the work from scratch after I had a design. I guess this means I hate coding, and…

If you create a sufficiently absurd hypothetical, anything is possible. Or are you calling an LLM a "clone" of you? In that case, it's more, "if you create a flawed enough starting premise, anything is possible".

> flawed enough starting premise

That's where we start to disagree what future looks like, then.

It's not there yet, in that the LLM-clone isn't good enough. But amusingly a not nearly good enough clone of me already made me more productive, in that I'm able to deliver more while maintaining the same level of personal satisfaction with my code.

Re: The hidden cost of AI coding

#192

This comment section really shows the stark divide between people who love coding and thus hate AI, and people who hate coding and thus love AI. Honestly, I suspect the people who would prefer to have someone or something else do their coding, are probably the devs who are already outputting the worst code right now.

I like solving problems but I hate coding. Wasting 20 minutes because you forgot a semicolon or something is not fun. AI let's me focus on the problem and not bother with the tedious coding bit.

Re: The hidden cost of AI coding

#194
I love that quote he led with.

In my case, I couldn't agree more, with the premise of the article, but my life today, is centered around writing software the very best that I can; regardless of value or price.

It's not very effective, if I were to be trying to make a profit.

It's really hard to argue for something, if the something doesn't result in value, as perceived by others.

For me, the value is the process. I often walk away from my work, once I have it up and shipping. I do like to take my work all the way through shipping, support, and maintenance, but find that my eye is always drawn towards new shores[0].

    “A ship in harbor is safe, but that is not what ships are built for.”
    –John A. Shedd
[0] https://littlegreenviper.com/miscellany/thats-not-what-ships...

Re: The hidden cost of AI coding

#195

Some people love programming, for the sake of programming itself. They love the CS theory, they love the tooling, they love most everything about it. Other people see all that as an means to an end - and find no joy from the technical aspect of creating something. They're more interested in the end result / product, rather than the process itself. I think that if you're in group A, it can be difficult to understand g…

i mean how far are you willing to take that argument? every decade has just been a new abstraction, imagine people flipping switches or in raw assembly talking about how they don't "understand" you now with your no effort. or even those who don't "understand" why you use your autocomplete and fancy IDE, preferring a simple text editor.

i say this as someone who cut my teeth on this stuff growing up and seeing the evolution, it's both. and at some point it's honestly elitism and gatekeeping. i sort of cringe when it's called a "craft" because it's not like woodworking or something. the process is both full of joy but so is the end result, and the nature of our industry is that the process is ALWAYS changing.

you accumulate a depth of knowledge and watch as it washes away in a few years. that kind of change, and the big kind of change that AI brings scares people so they start clinging to it like it's some kind of centuries old trade lol.

Re: The hidden cost of AI coding

#196

This comment section really shows the stark divide between people who love coding and thus hate AI, and people who hate coding and thus love AI. Honestly, I suspect the people who would prefer to have someone or something else do their coding, are probably the devs who are already outputting the worst code right now.

yeah i definitely enjoy the craft and love of writing boilerplate or manually correcting simple errors or looking up functions /s. i hate how it's even divided into "two camps", it's more like a big venn diagram.

Re: The hidden cost of AI coding

#197

The author is already an experienced programmer. Let me toss in an anecdote about the next generation of programmers. Vibe coding: also called playing pinball with the AI, hoping something useful comes out. I taught a lecture in my first-semester programming course yesterday. This is in a program for older students, mostly working while going back to school. Each time, a few students are selected to present their cod…

This is one of the biggest dangers imo. While I agree with the OP about the deflation of joy in experienced programmers, the related but more consequential effect seems to be dissuading people from learning. A generational threat to collective competence and a disservice to students and teachers everywhere

Re: The hidden cost of AI coding

#198

This comment section really shows the stark divide between people who love coding and thus hate AI, and people who hate coding and thus love AI. Honestly, I suspect the people who would prefer to have someone or something else do their coding, are probably the devs who are already outputting the worst code right now.

See my reply to another comment - I don't think the divide is as stark as you claim. (And I don't enjoy the value judgement)

I think that comment is conflating 2 different things: 1) people like you and I who use LLMs for exploring alternative methods to our own, and 2) people who treat LLMs like Stack Overflow answers they don't understand but trust because it's on SO.

Yes, there are tasks or parts of the code that I'm less interested in, and would happily either delegate or negotiate-off to someone else, but I wouldn't give those to a writer who happens to be able to write in a way that approximates program code, I'd give them to another dev on the team. A junior dev gets junior dev tasks, not tasks that they don't have the skills to actually perform, and LLMs aren't even at an actual junior dev level, imhe.

I noted in another comment that I've also used LLMs to get ideas for alternate ways to implement something, or to as you said "jump start" new files or programs. I'm usually not actually pasting that code into my IDE, though- I've tried that, and the work to make LLM-generated code fit into my programs is way more than just writing out the bits I need, where I need. That is clearly not the case for a lot of people using LLMs, though.

I've seen devs submitting PRs with giant blocks of clearly LLM-gen'd code, that they've tried to monkey-wrench into working with the rest of the program (often breaking conventions or secure coding standards). And these aren't junior devs, they're devs that have been working here for years and years.

When you force them to do a code review, they know it's not up to par, but there is a weird attitude that LLM-gen'd code is more acceptable to be submitted with issues than personally-written code. As though it's the LLM's fault or job to fix, even though they prompted and copied and badly-integrated and PR'd it.

And that's where I think there is a stark divide. I think you're on my side of the divide (at least, I didn't get the impression that you hate coding), it just sounds like you haven't really seen the other side.

My personal dime-store psych theory is that it's the same mental mechanism that non-technical computer users fall into of improperly trusting/ believing computers to produce correct information, but now happening to otherwise technical folks too because "AI" is still a black box technology to most of us, like computers in general are to non-techies.

LLMs are really really cool, and really really impressive to me, and I've had 'wow' moments where they did something that makes you forget what they are and how they work, but you can't let that emotional reaction towards it override the part that knows it's just a token chain. When you do, people end up (obviously on the very extreme end) 'dating' them, letting them make consequential "decisions", or just over-trusting their output/code.

Re: The hidden cost of AI coding

#199

One of the things people often overlook don't talk about in this arguments is the manager's point of view and how it's contributing to the shakeups in this industry. As a developer I'm bullish on coding agents and GenAI tools, because they can save you time and can augment your abilities. I've experienced it, and I've seen it enough already. I love them, and want to see them continue to be used. I'm bearish on the id…

I think you are right with the building analogy. Most stuff built in the last 25 years is crap quality! But importantly looks nice. Needs to look nice at first.

Re: The hidden cost of AI coding

#200
post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you create a sufficiently absurd hypothetical, anything is possible. Or are you calling an LLM a "clone" of you? In that case, it's more, "if you create a flawed enough starting premise, anything is possible".

> flawed enough starting premise That's where we start to disagree what future looks like, then. It's not there yet, in that the LLM-clone isn't good enough. But amusingly a not nearly good enough clone of me already made me more productive, in that I'm able to deliver more while maintaining the same level of personal satisfaction with my code.

The question of increasing productivity and what that means for us as laborers is another entire can of worms, but that aside, I have never yet found LLM-gen'd code that met my personal standards, and sped up my total code output.

If I want to spend my time refactoring and bugfixing and rewriting and integrating, rather than writing from scratch and bugfixing, I can definitely achieve that by using LLM code, but the overall time has never felt different to me, and in many cases I've thrown out the LLM code after several hours due to either sheer frustration with how it's written, or due to discovering that the structure it's using doesn't work with the rest of the program (see: anything related to threading).

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