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My article on why AI is great (or terrible) or how to use it

matthewrocklin.com

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Re: My article on why AI is great (or terrible) or how to use it

#21

Post by Yoric »

kleinsch wrote: post #16
deergomoo wrote: post #2

I will never as long as I live understand the argument that AI development is more fun. If you want to argue that you’re more capable or whatever, fine. I disagree but I don’t have any data to disprove you. But saying that AI development is more fun because you don’t have to “wrestle the computer” is, to me, the same as saying you’re really into painting but you’re not really into the brush aspect so you pay someone…

AI lets you pick the parts you want to focus on and streamline the parts you don't. I get zero joy out of wrestling build tools or figuring out deploy scripts to get what I've built out onto a server. In the past side projects would stall out because the few hours per week I had would get consumed by all of the side stuff. Now I take care of that using AI and focus on the parts I want to write.

Yeah, that is one of my main uses for AI: getting the build stuff and scripts out of the way so that I can focus on the application code. That and brainstorming.

In both cases, it works because I can mostly detect when the output is bullshit. I'm just a little bit scared, though, that it will stop working if I rely too much on it, because I might lose the brain muscles I need to detect said bullshit.

Re: My article on why AI is great (or terrible) or how to use it

#22

Post by gamerdonkey »

harles wrote: post #13
deergomoo wrote: post #2

I will never as long as I live understand the argument that AI development is more fun. If you want to argue that you’re more capable or whatever, fine. I disagree but I don’t have any data to disprove you. But saying that AI development is more fun because you don’t have to “wrestle the computer” is, to me, the same as saying you’re really into painting but you’re not really into the brush aspect so you pay someone…

~20 years working in tech for me, mostly big companies, and I’ve never been more miserable. I also can’t stop myself from using Claude Code and the like. I think it’s a bit like a gambling addiction. I’m riding high the few times it pays off, but most of the time it feels like it’s just on the edge of paying off (working) and surely the next prompt will push it over the edge.

The gambling analogy has been brought up before.

https://pivot-to-ai.com/2025/06/05/generative-ai-runs-on-gam...

Re: My article on why AI is great (or terrible) or how to use it

#23

Post by NoraCodes »

I don't care that AI development is more fun for the author. I wouldn't care if all the evidence pointed toward AI development being easier, faster, and less perilous. The externalities, at present, are unacceptable. We are restructuring our society in a way that makes individuals even less free and a few large companies even more powerful and wealthy, just to save time writing code, and I don't understand why people think that's okay.

Re: My article on why AI is great (or terrible) or how to use it

#24

Post by emseetech »

tsukikage wrote: post #11
deergomoo wrote: post #2

I will never as long as I live understand the argument that AI development is more fun. If you want to argue that you’re more capable or whatever, fine. I disagree but I don’t have any data to disprove you. But saying that AI development is more fun because you don’t have to “wrestle the computer” is, to me, the same as saying you’re really into painting but you’re not really into the brush aspect so you pay someone…

> is more fun because you don’t have to “wrestle the computer” Indeed, of all the possible things to say! AI "development" /is/ wrestling the computer. It is the opposite of the old-fashioned kind of development where the computer does exactly what you told it to. To get an AI to actually do what I want and nothing else is an incredibly painful, repetitive, confrontational process.

Understanding memory and using a debugger is hard but I'll take that over telling an AI my grandma will die if it does something wrong.

Re: My article on why AI is great (or terrible) or how to use it

#25

Post by libraryofbabel »

deergomoo wrote: post #2

I will never as long as I live understand the argument that AI development is more fun. If you want to argue that you’re more capable or whatever, fine. I disagree but I don’t have any data to disprove you. But saying that AI development is more fun because you don’t have to “wrestle the computer” is, to me, the same as saying you’re really into painting but you’re not really into the brush aspect so you pay someone…

But it’s not really an argument, it’s a statement about feelings. Some people really do prefer coding with AI. Is that so strange? Often we’ve spent 1 or 2 decades writing code and in our day jobs we don’t see a lot of novel problems come our way at the level of the code anymore (architecture, sure, still often novel). We’ve seen N number of variations on the same thing; we are good at doing them but get little joy in doing them for the N + 1th time. We find typing out api serializers and for loops and function definitions and yaml boilerplate just a little boring, if we already have a picture in our head of what we want to do. And we like being able to build faster and ship to our users without spending hours and extra brain cycles dealing with low-level complexity that could be avoided.

I am happy to accept that some people still prefer to write out their code by hand… that’s ok? Keep doing it if you want! But I would gently suggest you ask yourself why you are so offended by people that would prefer to automate much of that, because you seem to be offended. Or am I misreading?

And hey, I still enjoy solving interesting problems with code. I did advent of code this year with no LLM assistance and it was great fun. But most professional software development doesn’t have that novelty value where you get to think about algorithms and combinatorical puzzles and graphs and so on.

Before anyone says it, sure, there is a discussion to be had about AI code quality and the negative effects of all this. A bad engineer can use it to ship slop to production. Nobody is denying that. But I think that’s a separate set of questions.

Finally, I’m not sure painting is the best analogy. Most of us are not creating works of high art here. It’s a job, to make things for people to use, more akin to building houses than painting the Sistine Chapel. Please don’t sneer at use if we enjoy finding ways to put up our drywall quicker.

Re: My article on why AI is great (or terrible) or how to use it

#26

Post by somebehemoth »

deergomoo wrote: post #14
quotemstr wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> not really into the brush aspect so you pay someone to paint what you describe. That’s not doing, it’s commissioning. What if I have a block of marble and a vision for the statue struggling from inside it and I use an industrial CNC lathe to do my marble carving for me. Have I sculpted something? Am I an artist? What if I'm an architect? Brunelleschi didn't personally lay all the bricks for his famous dome in Flore…

I would call the designing of the building art, yes. But I wouldn’t call it construction. I would also call designing a system to be fed into an LLM designing. But I wouldn’t call it programming. If people are more into the design and system architecture side of development, I of course have no problem with that. What I do find baffling , as per my original comment, is all the people saying basically “programming is…

I do think a huge number of people are infatuated with the idea of programming but hate the act itself. I have tried to teach a lot of people to code and it is rare to find the person who is both enthusiastic and able to maintain motivation once they realize every single character matters and yes, that bracket does have to be closed.

Of course not everyone who programs AI style hate programming, but I do think your take explains a large chunk of zealotry: It has become Us v. Them for both sides and each is staking out their territory. Telling the vibe coder they are not programming hurts their feelings much like telling a senior developer all their accumulated experience and knowledge is useless if not today, for sure some day soon!

Re: My article on why AI is great (or terrible) or how to use it

#28

Post by dolebirchwood »

deergomoo wrote: post #2

I will never as long as I live understand the argument that AI development is more fun. If you want to argue that you’re more capable or whatever, fine. I disagree but I don’t have any data to disprove you. But saying that AI development is more fun because you don’t have to “wrestle the computer” is, to me, the same as saying you’re really into painting but you’re not really into the brush aspect so you pay someone…

I don't care about technology for what it is. I care about it for what it can do. If I can achieve what I want by just using plain English, I'm going to achieve what I want faster and more thoroughly enjoy the process. Just my two cents.

Re: My article on why AI is great (or terrible) or how to use it

#29

Post by falloutx »

AI development for me is not fun. It may be faster and more productive, jury still out on that. But typing code and understanding each line has its advantages. AI also takes out a lot of creativity out of programming and climbing the abstractions isnt for everyone.

Do we want everyone to operate at PM level? The space for that is limited. Its easy to say you enjoy vibe coding when you are high up the chain but for most devs we are not as experienced or lucky to be able to feel stable when workflows change every day.

But I dont feel I have enough data to believe whether vibe coding or hand coding is better, I am personally doing tedious task with AI, and still writing code by hand all the time.

Also the author presents rewriting Numpy in rust as some achievement but the AIs most probably trained on Numpy and RustyNum, AI are best at copying the code so its not really a big thing.

Re: My article on why AI is great (or terrible) or how to use it

#30

Post by awfulneutral »

harles wrote: post #13
deergomoo wrote: post #2

I will never as long as I live understand the argument that AI development is more fun. If you want to argue that you’re more capable or whatever, fine. I disagree but I don’t have any data to disprove you. But saying that AI development is more fun because you don’t have to “wrestle the computer” is, to me, the same as saying you’re really into painting but you’re not really into the brush aspect so you pay someone…

~20 years working in tech for me, mostly big companies, and I’ve never been more miserable. I also can’t stop myself from using Claude Code and the like. I think it’s a bit like a gambling addiction. I’m riding high the few times it pays off, but most of the time it feels like it’s just on the edge of paying off (working) and surely the next prompt will push it over the edge.

It feels like this to me too, whenever I give it a try. It's like a button you can push to spend 20 minutes and have a 50/50 chance of either solving the problem with effortless magic, or painfully wasting your time and learning nothing. But it feels like we all need to try and use it anyway just in case we're going to be obsolete without it somehow.
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