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The hidden cost of AI coding

terriblesoftware.org

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Re: The hidden cost of AI coding

#201

Post by jappgar »

pjmlp wrote: post #156

> After all, if we lose the joy in our craft, what exactly are we optimizing for? For being one of the few lucky ones that gets to stay around taking care of the software factory robots, or designing them, while everyone else that used to work at the factory is now queueing somewhere else.

To me THIS is the most stressful part of the whole thing.

I like programming but I have other hobbies I find fulfilling, and nothing stops me from programming with a pen and paper.

The bad vibes are not caused by lack of programming, they're caused by headsman sharpening his axe behind me.

A few lucky programmers will be elevated to God status and we're all fighting for those spots now.

Re: The hidden cost of AI coding

#202

Post by jappgar »

elicksaur wrote: post #142
pdimitar wrote: post #17

I don't know man, maybe prompt most of your work, eyeball it and verify it rigorously (which if you cannot do, you should absolutely never touch an LLM!), run a script to commit and push after 3 hours and then... work on whatever code makes you happy without using an LLM? Let's stop pretending or denying it: most of us would delegate our work code to somebody else or something else if we could. Still, prompting LLMs…

>most of us would delegate our work code to somebody else or something else if we could. Laughably narrow-minded projection of your own perspective on others.

We all delegate. Did you knit your own clothes or is that too boring for you?

Enjoying to code/knit is fine but we can no longer expect to get paid well to do it.

Re: The hidden cost of AI coding

#203

Post by sayamqazi »

insin wrote: post #158
ang_cire wrote: post #133

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.

Every PR I have to review with an obviously LLM-generated title stuffed with adjectives, and a useless description containing an inaccurate summary of the code changes pushes me a little bit more into trying to make my side projects profitable in the hope that one takes off. It usually only gets worse from there. Documentation needs to be by humans for humans, it's not a box that's there to be filled with slop.

> The actual documentation needs to be by humans for humans.

This is true for producing the documentation but if there is an LLM that can take said documentation and answer questions about it is a great tool. I think I get the answer far quicker with LLM than sifting through documentation when looking for existence of a function in a library or a property on an object.

Re: The hidden cost of AI coding

#204

Post by clbrmbr »

I have actually had some really great flow evenings lately, the likes of which I have not enjoyed in many years, precisely because of AI-assisted coding. The trick is to break the task down in to components that are of moderate complexity so that the AI can handle them (Gemini 2.5 Pro one-shots), and keep your mind on the high-level design which today's AI cannot coordinate.

What helps me is to think of it like I'm a kid again, learning to code full of ideas but without any pre-conceived notions. Rather than the Microsoft QuickBasic manual in my hands, I've got Gemini & Claude Code. I would be gleefully coding up a storm of games, websites, dubious webcrawlers, robots, and lord knows what else. Plenty of flow to be had.

Re: The hidden cost of AI coding

#205

Post by pjmlp »

tptacek wrote: post #63
codr7 wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not even close, those were all deterministic, this is probabilistic.

The output of the LLM is probabilistic. The code you actually commit or merge is not.

The code that the compiler generates, especially in the C realm, or with dynamic compilers is also not regular, hence the tooling constraints in high integrity computing environments.

Re: The hidden cost of AI coding

#206

Post by pjmlp »

jappgar wrote: post #201
pjmlp wrote: post #156

> After all, if we lose the joy in our craft, what exactly are we optimizing for? For being one of the few lucky ones that gets to stay around taking care of the software factory robots, or designing them, while everyone else that used to work at the factory is now queueing somewhere else.

To me THIS is the most stressful part of the whole thing. I like programming but I have other hobbies I find fulfilling, and nothing stops me from programming with a pen and paper. The bad vibes are not caused by lack of programming, they're caused by headsman sharpening his axe behind me. A few lucky programmers will be elevated to God status and we're all fighting for those spots now.

For me the most surprising part is the phase of wonder, from those that apparently never read anything in the history of industrial revolution, and think everyone will still have a place when we achieve Star Trek replicator level.

Not everyone gets a seat at the starship.

Re: The hidden cost of AI coding

#207

Post by jay_kyburz »

handzhiev wrote: post #168
voidUpdate wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The rest is boiler plate, cargo-culted, Dockerfile, build system and bash environment variable passing I keep seeing people saying to use an LLM to write boilerplate, but like... do you not just copy that from another project where you already wrote it?

No, because it's usually a few years old and already obsolete - the frameworks and the language have gone through a gazillion changes and what you did in 2021 suddenly no longer works at all.

lol, I've been cutting and pasting from the same projects I started in 2010. When you work in vanilla js it doesn't change.

Re: The hidden cost of AI coding

#208

Post by mopenstein »

Verdex wrote: post #65
tptacek wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those of us who write software professionally are literally in a field premised on automating other people's jobs away. There is no profession with less claim to the moral high ground of worker rights than ours.

Speak for yourself. I've worked in a medical space writing software so that people can automate away the job that their bodies used to do before they broke.

You're automating the 1's and 0's. There could be millions of people in an assembly like line of buttons, being paid minimum wage to press either the 1 or 0 button to eventually trigger the next operation.

Now all those jobs are gone because of you.

Re: The hidden cost of AI coding

#209

Post by melvinroest »

dxroshan wrote: post #117
melvinroest wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The rest is boiler plate, cargo-culted, Dockerfile, build system and bash environment variable passing circle of hell that I really could care less about. Even more so, I remember making a Chrome extension and feeling intimidated. I knew that I'd be comfortable with most of it given that JS is used but I just didn't know how to start. With an LLM it is way faster to spin up some default config and get going versus…

> What I've noticed in that respect is that I just read what it does and then immediately reason why it's there .... How if it hallucinate and gives you wrong code and explanation? It is better to read documentations and tutorials first.

Fair question. So far I've seen two things:

1. Code doesn't compile. This case is obvious on what to do.

2. Code does compile.

I don't work in Cursor, I read the code quick, to see the intent. And when done with that decide to copy/paste it and test the output.

You can learn a lot by simply reading the code. For example, when I see in polars a `group_by` function call but I didn't know polars could do that, now I know because I know SQL. Then I need to check the output, if the output corresponds to what I expect a group by function to do, then I'll move on.

There comes a point in time where I need more granularity and more precision. That's the moment where I ditch the AI and start to use things such as documentation and my own mind. This happens one to two hours after bootstrapping a project with AI in a language/library/framework I initially knew nothing about. But now I do, I know a few hours worth of it. That's enough to roughly know where everything is and not be in setup hell and similar things. Moreover, by just reading the code, I get a rough idea on how beginner to intermediate programmers think about the problem space the code is written in as there's always a certain style of writing certain code. This points me into the direction on how to think about it. I see it as a hint, not as the definitive answer. I suspect that experts think differently about it, but given that I'm just a "few hours old" in the particular language/lib/framework, I think knowing all of this is already really amazing.

AI helps with quicker bootstrapping by virtue of reading code. And when it gets actually complicated and/or interesting, then I ditch it :)

Re: The hidden cost of AI coding

#210

Post by ang_cire »

finalhacker wrote: post #190

When I coding, most of time was used to search docs over internet. My first language is not english, search over hundrud of pages is quiet slow. AI help me a lot, you don't need search, just ask AI, and it provide the answer directly. After using AI, I have more time used on coding, more fun.

I am mostly pretty underwhelmed with LLMs' code, but this is a use-case that makes perfect sense to me, and seems like a net-positive: using them as a reference manual/ translator/ training aid.

I just wish I saw more people doing this, rather than asking them to 'draw 80% of the owl'.

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