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Cognitive Debt: When Velocity Exceeds Comprehension

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Re: Cognitive Debt: When Velocity Exceeds Comprehension

#201

Post by AyanamiKaine »

jamamp wrote: post #125
hintymad wrote: post #114

Richard Gabriel wrote a famous essay Worse Is Better ( https://www.dreamsongs.com/WorseIsBetter.html ). The MIT approach vs the New Jersey approach does not necessarily apply to the discussion of the merits of coding agent, but the essay's philosophy seems relevant. AI coding sometimes sacrifices correctness or cleanness for simplicity, but it will win and win big as long as the produced code works per its users' sta…

I hope people can ask themselves why the goal is "winning" and "winning big", and not making a product that you are proud of. It shouldn't be about VC funding and making money, shouldn't we all be making software to make the world a little bit better? I realize we live in an unfortunate reality surrounded by capitalism, but giving in to that seems shortsighted and dismissive of actual problems.

That is true, but society as a whole does not reward "making software to make the world a little bit better". No one will come and say wow, only you self in the mirror.

I have the same feeling when creating my art-works I suffer through the process of creation and learning. While someone makes money with an ai generated art work.

Sometimes I wonder if it matters at all.

Re: Cognitive Debt: When Velocity Exceeds Comprehension

#202

Post by softboyled »

vjvjvjvjghv wrote: post #200
layer8 wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That means your personal growth has plateaued. ;)

My coding style definitely has plateaued. It probably even has regressed to preferring simpler code.

But that's not a regression...

Re: Cognitive Debt: When Velocity Exceeds Comprehension

#205

Post by keeda »

> The organizational assumption that reviewed code is understood code no longer holds.

This never held.

As somebody who has inherited codebases thrown over the wall through acquisitions and re-orgs, there is absolutely nothing in this article related to "code generated by AI" that cannot be attributed to "code generated by humans who are no longer at the company." Heck, these have happened when revisiting code I myself wrote years ago.

In a previous life 10 years ago, there was one large Python codebase I inherited from an acquisition, where a bug occurred due a method argument sometimes being passed in as a string or a number. Despite spending hours reproducing it multiple times to debug it, I could never figure out the code path that caused the bug. I suspect it was due to some dynamic magic where a function name was generated via concatenating disparate strings each of which were propagated via multiple asynchronous message queues (making the debugger useless), and then "eval"d. After multiple hours of trial and error and grepping, I could never find the offending callsite and the original authors had long moved on. My fix was just to put in a "x = int(x)" in the function and move on.

I would bet this was due to a shortcut somebody took under time pressure, something you can totally avoid simply by having the AI refactor everything instead.

We know what the solutions for that are, and they're the same -- in fact, they should be the default mode -- for AI-generated code. They are basically everything that we consider "best practices": avoiding magic, better types, comprehensive tests, documentation, modularity, and so on.

Re: Cognitive Debt: When Velocity Exceeds Comprehension

#206

Post by bluefirebrand »

jamamp wrote: post #125
hintymad wrote: post #114

Richard Gabriel wrote a famous essay Worse Is Better ( https://www.dreamsongs.com/WorseIsBetter.html ). The MIT approach vs the New Jersey approach does not necessarily apply to the discussion of the merits of coding agent, but the essay's philosophy seems relevant. AI coding sometimes sacrifices correctness or cleanness for simplicity, but it will win and win big as long as the produced code works per its users' sta…

I hope people can ask themselves why the goal is "winning" and "winning big", and not making a product that you are proud of. It shouldn't be about VC funding and making money, shouldn't we all be making software to make the world a little bit better? I realize we live in an unfortunate reality surrounded by capitalism, but giving in to that seems shortsighted and dismissive of actual problems.

> It shouldn't be about VC funding and making money, shouldn't we all be making software to make the world a little bit better

I agree with you, but I think you and I are on the wrong website for this mentality.

Re: Cognitive Debt: When Velocity Exceeds Comprehension

#207

Post by tomhow »

rvba wrote: post #203

Dang why was this article flagged?

Users flagged it and there were several reports that it seems likely to be LLM-generated.

Please email us (hn@ycombinator.com) to communicate with the mods. We don't get alerted to mentions of usernames and we don't get even close to seeing every comment, especially after a thread has gone from the front page.

Re: Cognitive Debt: When Velocity Exceeds Comprehension

#208

Post by Jensson »

layer8 wrote: post #189
vjvjvjvjghv wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I definitely understand my own code better than what other people wrote, even from 10 years ago. I often see code and think "this makes sense to do it this way". Turns out I wrote it years ago.

That means your personal growth has plateaued. ;)

And always thinking your code from a year ago is shit means the code you write right now is also shit, so you never get good.

Re: Cognitive Debt: When Velocity Exceeds Comprehension

#209

Post by rvba »

tomhow wrote: post #207
rvba wrote: post #203

Dang why was this article flagged?

Users flagged it and there were several reports that it seems likely to be LLM-generated. Please email us (hn@ycombinator.com) to communicate with the mods. We don't get alerted to mentions of usernames and we don't get even close to seeing every comment, especially after a thread has gone from the front page.

It feels like this article was flagged by users who sell AI stuff, because they dont like its content - so they tried to censorship it with some excuse.

This article shows flaws with AI driven development.

Re: Cognitive Debt: When Velocity Exceeds Comprehension

#210

Post by tomhow »

rvba wrote: post #209
tomhow wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Users flagged it and there were several reports that it seems likely to be LLM-generated. Please email us (hn@ycombinator.com) to communicate with the mods. We don't get alerted to mentions of usernames and we don't get even close to seeing every comment, especially after a thread has gone from the front page.

It feels like this article was flagged by users who sell AI stuff, because they dont like its content - so they tried to censorship it with some excuse. This article shows flaws with AI driven development.

Do you think it is LLM-generated or not? And how are you making that assessment?
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