Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

AI makes the easy part easier and the hard part harder

blundergoat.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

191–200 of 382 posts

Re: AI makes the easy part easier and the hard part harder

#191

Post by sothatsit »

afro88 wrote: post #186
kfarr wrote: post #18

I think it makes the annoying part less annoying? Also re: "I spent longer arguing with the agent and recovering the file than I would have spent writing the test myself." In my humble experience arguing with an LLM is a waste of time, and no-one should be spending time recovering files. Just do small changes one at a time, commit when you get something working, and discard your changes and try again if it doesn't. I…

Once you start arguing, it's time to start a new prompt with new instructions

I also like asking the agent how we can update the AGENTS.md to avoid similar mistakes going forward, before starting again.

Re: AI makes the easy part easier and the hard part harder

#192

Post by sothatsit »

crazygringo wrote: post #141

> Reading and understanding other people's code is much harder than writing code. I keep seeing this sentiment repeated in discussions around LLM coding, and I'm baffled by it. For the kind of function that takes me a morning to research and write, it takes me probably 10 or 15 minutes to read and review. It's obviously easier to verify something is correct than come up with the correct thing in the first place. And…

I think this originated from old arguments that say that the total _cumulative_ time spent reading code will be higher than the time spent writing it. But then people just warped it in their heads that it takes more time to read and understand code than it takes to write it in general, which is obviously false.

I think people want to believe this because it is a lot of effort to read and truly understand some pieces of code. They would just rather write the code themselves, so this is convenient to believe.

Re: AI makes the easy part easier and the hard part harder

#193

Post by Guvante »

degamad wrote: post #183
Guvante wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People rarely post proprietary code to GitHub. Most of it is open licenses that generally only require attribution. Some use a copy left license. Software patents are not copyright in anyway they are a completely different thing. So this isn't AI getting back at the big guys it is AI using open source code you could have used if you just followed the simple license. Copyright in regards to software is effectively "if…

> if you just followed the simple license But there's the rub. If you found the code on Github, you would have seen the "simple licence" which required you to either give an attribution, release your code under a specific licence, seek an alternative licence, or perform some other appropriate action. But if the LLM generates the code for you, you don't know the conditions of the "simple license" in order to follow th…

I was responding to "if software patents are bad why is AI stealing software also bad"

Re: AI makes the easy part easier and the hard part harder

#194

Post by EnPissant »

mattgreenrocks wrote: post #108
ekidd wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The wrinkle is that the AI doesn't have a truly global view, and so it slowly degrades even good structure, especially if run without human feedback and review. But you're right that good structure really helps.

Yet it still fumbles even when limiting context. Asked it to spot check a simple rate limiter I wrote in TS. Super basic algorithm: let one action through every 250ms at least, sleeping if necessary. It found bogus errors in my code 3 times because it failed to see that I was using a mutex to prevent reentrancy. This was about 12 lines of code in total. My rubber duck debugging session was insightful only because I h…

Try again with gpt-5.3-codex xhigh.

Re: AI makes the easy part easier and the hard part harder

#195

Post by AnthonyMouse »

ThunderSizzle wrote: post #116
AuthAuth wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Its license washing. The code is great because its already a problem solved by someone else. The AI can spit out the solution with no license and no attribution and somehow its legal. I hope American tech legislation holds that same energy once others start taking American IP and spitting it back out with no license or attribution.

I've seen many discussions stating patent hoarding has gone too far, and also that copyright for companies have gone way too far (even so much that Amazon can remove items from your purchase library if they lose their license to it). Then AI begins to offer a method around this over litigious system, and this becomes a core anti-AI argument. I do think it's silly to think public code (as in, code published to the pub…

> I've seen many discussions stating patent hoarding has gone too far, and also that copyright for companies have gone way too far (even so much that Amazon can remove items from your purchase library if they lose their license to it).

The main arguments against the current patent system are these:

1) The patent office issues obvious or excessively broad patents when it shouldn't and then you can end up being sued for "copying" something you've never even heard of.

2) Patents are allowed on interfaces between systems and then used to leverage a dominant market position in one market into control over another market, which ought to be an antitrust violation but isn't enforced as one.

The main arguments against the current copyright system are these:

1) The copyright terms are too long. In the Back To The Future movies they went 30 years forward from 1985 to 2015 and Hollywood was still making sequels to Jaws. "The future" is now more than 10 years in the past and not only are none of the Back To The Future movies in the public domain yet, neither is the first Jaws from 1970, nor even the movies that predate Jaws by 30 years. It's ridiculous.

2) Many of the copyright enforcement mechanisms are draconian or susceptible to abuse. DMCA 1201 is used to constrain the market for playback devices and is used by the likes of Google and Apple to suppress competition for mobile app distribution and by John Deere to lock farmers out of their tractors. DMCA 512 makes it easy and essentially consequence-free to issue fraudulent takedowns and gives platforms the incentive to execute them with little or no validation, leading to widespread abuse. The statutory damages amounts in the Copyright Act are unreasonably high, especially for non-commercial use, and can result in absurd damages calculations vastly exceeding any plausible estimate of actual damages.

LLMs don't solve any of that. Making it easier to copy recent works that would still be under copyright even with reasonable copyright terms is not something we needed help with. If you wanted to copy something still under copyright, that was never that hard, and doing that when you don't know about it or want it is actively unhelpful.

Re: AI makes the easy part easier and the hard part harder

#196

Post by raw_anon_1111 »

dijksterhuis wrote: post #159
raw_anon_1111 wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree completely. I just did my first “AI native coding project”. Both because for now I haven’t run into any quotas using Codex CLI with my $20/month ChatGPT subscription and the company just gave everyone an $800/month Claude allowance. Before I even started the implementation I: 1. Put the initial sales contract with the business requirements. 2. Notes I got from talking to sales 3. The transcript of the initial…

> Can you say that about any project that was done before GenAI? yes. the linux kernel and it's extensive mailing lists come to mind. in fact, any decent project which was/is built in a remote-only scenario tends to have extensive documentation along these lines, something like gitlab comes to mind there. personally i've included design documents with extensive notes, contracts, meeting summaries etc etc in our docs…

Well, I was developing as a hobby for 10 years starting with an Apple //e in 65C02 assembly language before graduating from college…if that gives you a clue to my age and I am old enough that I am eligible to put catch up contributions in my 401K…

If I had to scope this project before GenAI it would have taken two other developers to do the work I mentioned not to mention make changes to a web front end that another developer did for another client on a project I was leading - I haven’t touched front end code for over a decade

Re: AI makes the easy part easier and the hard part harder

#197

Post by threethirtytwo »

The truth is that it’s lowering the difficulty of work people used to consider hard. Which parts get easier depends on the role, but the change is already here.

A lot of people are lying to themselves. Programming is in the middle of a structural shift, and anyone whose job is to write software is exposed to it. If your self-worth is tied to being good at this, the instinct to minimize what’s happening is understandable. It’s still denial.

The systems improve month to month. That’s observable. Most of the skepticism I see comes from shallow exposure, old models, or secondhand opinions. If your mental model is based on where things were a year ago, you’re arguing with a version that no longer exists.

This isn’t a hype wave. I’m a software engineer. I care about rigor, about taste, about the things engineers like to believe distinguish serious work. I don’t gain from this shift. If anything, it erodes the value of skills I spent years building. That doesn’t change the outcome.

The evidence isn’t online chatter. It’s sitting down and doing the work. Entire applications can be produced this way now. The role changes whether people are ready to admit it or not. Debating the reality of it at this point mostly signals distance from the practice itself.

Re: AI makes the easy part easier and the hard part harder

#198

Post by threethirtytwo »

zjp wrote: post #24
le-mark wrote: post #9

I vibe coded a retro emulator and assembler with tests. Prompts were minimal and I got really great results (Gemini 3). I tried vibe coding the tricky proprietary part of an app I worked on a few years ago; highly technical domain (yes vague don’t care to dox myself). Lots of prompting and didn’t get close. There are literally thousands of retro emulators on github. What I was trying to do had zero examples on GitHub…

I call these "embarrassingly solved problems". There are plenty of examples of emulators on GitHub, therefore emulators exist in the latent spaces of LLMs. You can have them spit one out whenever you want. It's embarrassingly solved. There are no examples of what you tried to do.

Stop repeating this trope. It can spit out something you've never built before this is utterly clear and demonstrated and no longer really up for debate.

Claude code has never been built before claude code. Yet all of claude is being built by claude code.

Why are people clinging to these useless trivial examples and using it to degrade AI? Like literally in front of our very eyes it can build things that aren't just "embarrassingly solved"

I'm a SWE. I wish this stuff wasn't real. But it is. I'm not going off hype. I'm going what I do with AI day to day.

Re: AI makes the easy part easier and the hard part harder

#199

Post by AnthonyMouse »

satvikpendem wrote: post #185
ibeckermayer wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1. Equality under the law is important in its own right. Even if a law is wrong, it isn’t right to allow particular corporations to flaunt it in a way that individuals would go to prison for. 2. GPL does not allow you to take the code, compress it in your latent space, and then sell that to consumers without open sourcing your code.

> 2. GPL does not allow you to take the code, compress it in your latent space, and then sell that to consumers without open sourcing your code. If AI training is found to be fair use, then that fact supercedes any license language.

Whether AI training in general is fair use and whether an AI that spits out a verbatim copy of something from the training data has produced an infringing copy are two different questions.

If there is some copyrighted art in the background in a scene from a movie, maybe that's fair use. If you take a high resolution copy of the movie, extract only the art from the background and want to start distributing that on its own, what do you expect then?

Re: AI makes the easy part easier and the hard part harder

#200

Post by anupamchugh »

socketcluster wrote: post #27

I think AI is just a massive force multiplier. If your codebase has bad foundation and going in the wrong direction with lots of hacks, it will just write code which mirrors the existing style... And you get exactly was OP is suggesting. If however, your code foundations are good and highly consistent and never allow hacks, then the AI will maintain that clean style and it becomes shockingly good; in this case, the p…

[flagged]
Post reply on HN