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AI coding

geohot.github.io

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Re: AI coding

#201

Post by tom_m »

bdcravens wrote: post #25

I'm almost 50, and have been writing code professionally since the late 90s. I can pretty much see projects in my head, and know exactly what to build. I also get paid pretty well for what I do. You'd think I'd be the prototype for anti-AI. I'm not. I can build anything, but often struggle with getting bogged down with all the basic work. I love AI for speed running through all the boring stuff and getting to the goo…

Exactly. If you know how the whole thing works end to end, AI makes you incredibly dangerous. Anyone who specializes or never really learned how everything works is at a huge disadvantage.

However. There's also good news. AI is also an amazing tool for learning.

So what I see AI doing is simply separating people who want to put effort forth and those who don't.

Re: AI coding

#202

Post by saulpw »

simianwords wrote: post #123
onion2k wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I love AI for speed running through all the boring stuff and getting to the good parts. In some cases, especially with the more senior devs in my org, fear of the good parts is why they're against AI. Devs often want the inherent safety of the boring, easy stuff for a while. AI changes the job to be a constant struggle with hard problems. That isn't necessarily a good thing. If you're actually senior by virtue of tim…

This is exactly why people hate AI. It disrupts the comfort of easy coding.

The main challenge with any creative effort, including and especially programming, is motivation. "Easy coding" gives you small mental wins that build your dopamine circuits and give you something to chase. When people say that "AI takes the fun out of coding" they mean that they're not getting those rewards anymore. It might make coding easier (though I'm not sure it actually does, ultimately), but in the process it takes away the motivation.

The ones who are excited about this are the ones who are motivated by the product. When AI can whip up some half-baked solution it sure looks like you can focus on the product and "get someone to code it up for you". But unless it's a well-understood and previously executed solution, you're going to run into actual technical problems and have to fix them. But your motivation to deal with the irritating pedantrics of the modern computing stack (which are the same as all technology ever, with orders of magnitude more parts) hasn't been built up. There's no beneficial flywheel, just a fleet of the Sorceror's Apprentice mindless brooms that you hope you can get work enough to ship.

Re: AI coding

#203

Post by bdcravens »

tom_m wrote: post #201
bdcravens wrote: post #25

I'm almost 50, and have been writing code professionally since the late 90s. I can pretty much see projects in my head, and know exactly what to build. I also get paid pretty well for what I do. You'd think I'd be the prototype for anti-AI. I'm not. I can build anything, but often struggle with getting bogged down with all the basic work. I love AI for speed running through all the boring stuff and getting to the goo…

Exactly. If you know how the whole thing works end to end, AI makes you incredibly dangerous. Anyone who specializes or never really learned how everything works is at a huge disadvantage. However. There's also good news. AI is also an amazing tool for learning. So what I see AI doing is simply separating people who want to put effort forth and those who don't.

> However. There's also good news. AI is also an amazing tool for learning.

Absolutely. For example, I've been learning Autodesk Fusion, and after establishing a small foundation through traditional learning techniques, I've been able to turbocharge my learning by asking precise questions to AI.

I image this really sucks for those whose business model relied on gatekeeping knowledge. (like training companies)

Re: AI coding

#204

Post by bdcravens »

ttiurani wrote: post #156
bdcravens wrote: post #25

I'm almost 50, and have been writing code professionally since the late 90s. I can pretty much see projects in my head, and know exactly what to build. I also get paid pretty well for what I do. You'd think I'd be the prototype for anti-AI. I'm not. I can build anything, but often struggle with getting bogged down with all the basic work. I love AI for speed running through all the boring stuff and getting to the goo…

> I can build anything, but often struggle with getting bogged down with all the basic work. I love AI for speed running through all the boring stuff and getting to the good parts. I'm in the same boat (granted, 10 years less) but can't really relate with this. By the time any part becomes boring, I start to automate/generalize it, which is very challenging to do well. That leaves me so little boring work that I spee…

> By the time any part becomes boring, I start to automate/generalize it, which is very challenging to do well. That leaves me so little boring work that I speed run through it faster by typing it myself than I could prompt it.

The two aren't mutually exclusive. You can use AI to build your tooling. (Unless it's of sufficient complexity or value that you need to do the work yourself)

Re: AI coding

#205

Post by jcmfernandes »

bdcravens wrote: post #25

I'm almost 50, and have been writing code professionally since the late 90s. I can pretty much see projects in my head, and know exactly what to build. I also get paid pretty well for what I do. You'd think I'd be the prototype for anti-AI. I'm not. I can build anything, but often struggle with getting bogged down with all the basic work. I love AI for speed running through all the boring stuff and getting to the goo…

+1. I agree with George when he says that AI is many times being used as a replacement for poor tooling, but you know what? So be it.

Re: AI coding

#206

Post by somewhereoutth »

AlecSchueler wrote: post #149
somewhereoutth wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> developer somewhere between junior and mid-level Why the insistence on anthropomorphizing what is just a tool? It has no agency, does not 'think' in any meaningful manner, it is just pattern matching on a vast corpus of training data. That's not to say it can't be very useful - as you seem to have found - but it is still just a tool.

It's not anthropomorphising though, is it? It's just a comparison of the tool's ability. Like talking about the horsepower of an engine.

But we didn't do this with spreadsheets or word processors - and those tools really did replace small armies of clerical and secretarial workers.

Re: AI coding

#207

Post by asjir »

skydhash wrote: post #140
giveita wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The usefulness is in saving time boilerplating, plus figuring out tests I may not have thought of. But I do closely review the code! It turns the usual drudge of writing tests into more of a code review. Last time I did it it had some mistakes I needed to fix for sure.

There shouldn't be boilerplate in test code. It should be refactored into harnesses, utils, and fixtures instead.

I'm not disagreeing per se, but in my experience my tests are so disposable they're never worth investing that much engineering effort in past getting them to pass

Re: AI coding

#208

Post by enraged_camel »

matt3D wrote: post #70

This is a more extreme example of the general hacker news group think about AI. Geohot is easily a 99.999 percentile developer, and yet he can’t seem to reconcile that the other 99.999 percent are doing something much more basic than he can ever comprehend. It’s some kind of expert paradox, if everyone was as smart and capable as the experts, then they wouldn’t be experts. I have come across many developers that beha…

>> Geohot is easily a 99.999 percentile developer

Really?

"The best model of a programming AI is a compiler... You give it a prompt, which is “the code”, and it outputs a compiled version of that code. Sometimes you’ll use it interactively, giving updates to the prompt after it has returned code, but you find that, like most IDEs, this doesn’t work all that well and you are often better off adjusting the original prompt and “recompiling”."

Really?

Re: AI coding

#210

Post by FergusArgyll »

luckylion wrote: post #7
ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #2

> AI makes you feel 20% more productive but in reality makes you 19% slower. How many more billions are we going to waste on this? Adderall is similar. It makes people feel a lot more productive, but research on its effectiveness[0] seems to show that, at best, we get only a mild improvement in productivity, and marked deterioration of cognitive abilities. [0] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6165228/

Research on _13_ people, that's a very important caveat when evaluating something like adderal.

Ironically the METR study n=20
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