I'm more and more confident I must be doing something wrong. I (re)tried using Claude about a month ago and I simply stopped using it after about two weeks because on one hand productivity did not increase(perhaps even decreased), but on the other hand it made me angry because of the time wasted on its mistakes. I was also mostly using it on Rust code, so I'm even more surprised about the article. What am I doing wrong? I've been mostly using the chat functionality and auto-complete, is there some kind of secret feature I'm missing?
The Bitter Prediction
21–30 of 189 posts
Re: The Bitter Prediction
#22A relative known youtuber called the primeagen has recently done a challenge sponsored by Cursor themselves where he and some friends would "vibe code" a game in a week. The results were pretty underwhelming. They would have been much faster not using generative Ai. Compared what you see from game jams where sometimes solo devs create whole games in just a few days it was pretty trash. It also tracks with my own expe…
[flagged]
Re: The Bitter Prediction
#23Earlier quoted context omitted.
You still don’t need AI to write software, but investing in it will make you more productive. More money enables you to buy better tools, that was always true for any trade. My friend is a woodworker and his tools are 5-10x more expensive than what I have in my shack, but are also more precise, more reliable and easier to use. AI is the same, I would even argue it gives you a bigger productivity boost with less money…
Incredible take considering using AI robs new learners of off real learning. There is a reason lots of experienced devs are dropping it from their editors. Using AI will not make you a better dev, it simply accelerates you building a failing product faster, because ultimately you wont understand your own product. Most devs that use AI blindly trust it instead of questioning what it produces.
> Most devs that use AI blindly trust it instead of questioning what it produces.
Without the punctuation, I first read it tautologically as "Most devs that use AI blindly, trust it instead of questioning what it produces". But even assuming you meant "Most devs that use AI, blindly trust it instead of questioning what it produces", there's still a negative feedback loop. We're still at the early experimentation phase, but if/when AI capabilities eventually settle down, people will adapt, learning when and when not they can trust the AI coder and when to take the reins - that would be the skill that people are hired for.
Alternatively, we could be headed towards an intelligence explosion, with AI growing in capabilities until it surpasses human coders at almost all types of coding work, except perhaps for particular tasks which the AI dev could then delegate to a human.
Re: The Bitter Prediction
#24I think this particular anxiety was explored rather well in the anonymous short story 'The End of Creative Scarcity': https://www.fictionpress.com/s/3353977/1/The-End-of-Creative... Some existential objections occur; how sure are we that there isn't an infinite regress of ever deeper games to explore? Can we claim that every game has an enjoyment-nullifying hack yet to discover with no exceptions? If pampered pet ani…
Loved it, thank you for sharing
Re: The Bitter Prediction
#25The author is essentially arguing that fewer people will be able to build software in the future.
That's the opposite of what's happened over the past year or two. Now many more non-technical people can (and are) building software.
Re: The Bitter Prediction
#26> Not only that, the generated code was high-quality, efficient, and conformed to my coding guidelines. It routinely "checked its work" by running unit tests to eliminate hallucinations and bugs.
This seems completely out of whack with my experience of AI coding. I'm definitely in the "it's extremely useful" camp but there's no way I would describe its code as high quality and efficient. It can do simple tasks but it often gets things just completely wrong, or takes a noob-level approach (e.g. O(N) instead of O(1)).
Is there some trick to this that I don't know? Because personally I would love it if AI could do some of the grunt work for me. I do enjoy programming but not all programming.
Re: The Bitter Prediction
#27AI has made me love programming again. I can finally focus on the creative parts only.
I'm possibly doing it wrong, but that hasn't quite been my experience. While with vibe coding I do still get to express my creativity, my biggest role in this creative partnership still seems to be copy and pasting console error messages and screenshots back to the LLM.
Re: The Bitter Prediction
#28AI will be cheap to run.
The hardware for AI is getting cheaper and more efficient, and the models are getting less wasteful too.
Just a few years ago GPT-3.5 used to be a secret sauce running on the most expensive GPU racks, and now models beating it are available with open weights and run on high end consumer hardware. Few iterations down the line good-enough models will run on average hardware.
When that Xcom game came out, filmmaking, 3D graphics, and machine learning required super expensive hardware out of reach of most people. Now you can find objectively better hardware literally in the trash.
Re: The Bitter Prediction
#29The author is essentially arguing that fewer people will be able to build software in the future. That's the opposite of what's happened over the past year or two. Now many more non-technical people can (and are) building software.
No, he never states this and is not true.
The author tell his experience regarding his joy programming things and figuring stuff out. In the end he says that AI made him lose this joy, and he compares it to cheating in a game. He does not say one word about societal impact and or the amount of engineers in the future, it's what you interpreted yourself.
Re: The Bitter Prediction
#30To me it’s the exact opposite. I was writing code for the past 20+ years and I recently realized it’s not the act of writing code I love, but the act of creating something from nothing. Over the past few months I wrote two non-trivial utility apps that otherwise I would most probably not write because I didn’t have enough time to do that, but Cursor + Claude gave me the 5x productivity boost that enabled me to do so,…
For me it's a bit of both. I'm working on exciting energy software with people who have deep knowledge of the sector but only semi-decent software knowledge. Nearly every day I'm reviewing some shitty PR comprised of awful, ugly code that somehow mostly works.
The product itself is exciting and solves a very real problem, and we have many customers who want to use it and pay for it. But damn, it hurts my soul knowing what goes on under the hood.