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AI is making me dumb

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Re: AI is making me dumb

#201

Post by jasonjei »

switchbak wrote: post #195
jasonjei wrote: post #74

I’m not using AI to eliminate thinking but to free me from the rote mundane code writing. AI is perfectly competent at writing code once a prototype is implemented. I do write initial proof of concept crude prototypes (not commented, hardcoded variables, etc), and AI does the productionizing of them. It has really allowed me to command a team of agents instead of keeping track of a bunch of humans of varying work eth…

"AI is perfectly competent at writing code once a prototype is implemented" ... perfectly? I mean, it's certainly far from perfect - this is where I spend most of my day, in fixing the imperfections of the code generating robot. Granted I'm not polishing up a prototype, I'm maintaining, evolving and modernizing a non-trivial 8+ year old product.

It's not perfect, but to give you an example, I needed to create a proxy broker to manage proxies for scraping data. GPT built me a broker to manage my fleet/inventory of proxies and buy bandwidth or new proxies as needed as well as maintain the proxy ledger for proxy health, while I was able to work on the core product.

It helped me with developing a scoring system (for example, I gather slot data for restaurants to see how scarce they are) to rank restaurants (higher score being harder to book) to determine signals of busyness. It also helped me build a backlog system to make snapshots of every restaurant's slot availability on 3 different providers (OpenTable, Tock, Resy).

Maybe I misspoke, I’m not saying the code it wrote is perfect. But the code produced by GPT-5.5 frontier model is easily miles better than a junior developer. But it is very competent. Perfectly competent was maybe more hyperbole, but I still drive the point.

Re: AI is making me dumb

#202

Post by jasonjei »

hirvi74 wrote: post #185
jasonjei wrote: post #74

I’m not using AI to eliminate thinking but to free me from the rote mundane code writing. AI is perfectly competent at writing code once a prototype is implemented. I do write initial proof of concept crude prototypes (not commented, hardcoded variables, etc), and AI does the productionizing of them. It has really allowed me to command a team of agents instead of keeping track of a bunch of humans of varying work eth…

What even is rote, mundane code? How much of this rote, mundane code do you honestly have in any given project?

I don't care to build a ledger or build an ETL system. I don't care to spend my time debugging IaC terraform systems. GPT allowed me to focus on the core functionality of my code instead of investing hours of my time on ancillary support systems that are well understood. Terraform is notoriously difficult even for the most skilled among us. It helped me manage and tune my Cloud Tasks queue for processing from the microservice scraping data into the main app.

The cool thing is that I was able to let an agent manage this while I did the human task of steering it to work. Some of this work is novel, yet much of this work includes well-understood software patterns, such as scatter-gather and so on.

I absolutely do not enjoy using JavaScript or TypeScript at all. So it was a huge relief when I was able to get AI to help with UI work on Next.js and React Native/Expo.

I've gotten it to help with a cross-cloud cross-region setup on Terraform with shared secrets on AWS and GCP with GHA workflows for sandbox, staging, and prod promotion deployments. And I have no background as a DevOps guy.

Again, it didn't propose the exact shape of my system design. But chatting with it really allowed me to form the shape. It really is a bicycle for your brain. It helped me look at the tradeoffs of different products (PubSub vs Cloud Tasks, or AWS equivalents).

Re: AI is making me dumb

#203

Post by legulere »

embedding-shape wrote: post #106
wahnfrieden wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are tasks where it is appropriate to vibe code

Agreed, whenever you're 99% sure you'll throw away the code afterwards.

I let Claude translate a horribly written vb program writing some xml data into a pdf form. Most of the code I didn't even read until much later, I just checked the end result. The code won't be touched again, and if it will simply be replaced. Some code is foundational and you should put a lot of effort into it, a lot of code isn't though.

Other than that agentic coding has not really been working that well for me at our main codebase though.

Re: AI is making me dumb

#204

Post by Trasmatta »

notarobot123 wrote: post #171
ryandrake wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my experience, Claude only knows how to spew code. Every problem you want it to solve, it translates into "more code" rather than "less code". You have to very closely code review everything it does, otherwise your codebase is going to just grow and grow, and asymptotically approach 100% debt. I code review everything that Claude produces, and I'd estimate about 90-95% of the time, my reaction is WOW it works but…

At this point, it's worth asking whether lots of relatively straightforward verbose code is actually significantly worse than the least code necessary for the problem. Obviously, architecture matters. What might matter less is verbosity. The reason we aimed for minimal "accidental complexity" up to now was directly related to the cost/pain of changing and maintaining that code. Hasn't the economics of maintenance and…

> Hasn't the economics of maintenance and change shifted so much that accidental complexity isn't actually all that expensive/painful?

I sincerely believe that extensive accidental complexity will ALSO be bad for AI agents. Their quality will diminish as their context windows get filled up with endless amounts of spaghetti and accidental complexity. I feel like we won't fully start feeling those effects for another year or so.

Re: AI is making me dumb

#206

Post by wrout »

Xmd5a wrote: post #93
embedding-shape wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> after a few minutes of vibe coding Don't vibe-code, it's a joke someone coined in the moment, that somehow the industry decided shouldn't be a joke, and some people think it's a feasible way of developing stuff, it's not. Find a better way of working together with agent, where you get the review what's important to be reviewed by a human, and "outsource" the rest, and you'll end up with code and a design that works…

I've been thinking of using Kiczales's Systematic Program Design [0]. Write the skeleton. Let the IA fill in the blanks. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16563160

great point, i've found the htdp/recursion scheme approach works quite well, even when using some smaller local models... i loved taking prof. kiczales course, the materials are publicly available, still: - https://cs110.students.cs.ubc.ca - https://cs110.students.cs.ubc.ca/admin/links.html

Re: AI is making me dumb

#207

Post by clownpenis_fart »

stolen_biscuit wrote: post #54
Rooster61 wrote: post #11

I can't relate that much to this. Every time I use AI to write code, I'm constantly fighting a feeling on the back of my neck that I need to look over everything it has done and supplement/alter it with my own code. That ick feeling counteracts the dopamine hit of having a working app after a few minutes of vibe coding, and I don't think that's going anywhere anytime soon. That said, I have experience. I could absolu…

Fully agree. I supplement my game development with AI. Anything novel or interesting I want to do, I need to write the code for myself, otherwise I'm in for a world of hurt. But for the drudgery work that is necessary to invest a lot of time in but boring to actually write, I design a clear architecture and ask AI to do the implementation leg-work. And still you have to go back over and make sure it didn't decide to…

[dead]

Re: AI is making me dumb

#208

Post by DParida08 »

The day AI platforms suffer a massive and prolonged outage, it’ll trigger absolute panic and chaos. In many ways we are sacrificing a part of our creativity and independent thinking, but the reality is there’s hardly any alternative now. In a world moving this fast, choosing not to adapt often means getting left behind.

Re: AI is making me dumb

#209

Post by andrewstuart2 »

dogleash wrote: post #34
andrewstuart2 wrote: post #15

I was talking to some friends about this over drinks the other day. I feel it has the same effects as any drug (or behavior) that triggers dopamine. If I can get a dopamine hit for lower effort AI in 10 minutes, and maybe a tiny bit better of a hit doing it myself after a day, why would my brain go for anything but AI? Especially when my DIY muscles are a bit atrophied. And of course the hedonic treadmill (if that's…

I'm curious whenever I hear takes with your perspective. Entering the workforce happens at an age where people have built (some more rudimentary than others) a level of understanding and self control regarding delayed gratification and Type II fun. Did you have the kind of life where you were never really challenged to build that skillset, or is the mental stimulation so strong for you when you use AI that it overcom…

I have ADHD and have done quite a bit of reading and study on it, so I'm pretty familiar with how dopamine and dopamine disorders work. I've also been in the workforce as a software engineer long enough to have done some really hard things. So my life and career have both been plenty challenging lol.

And I'm not alone here. Like I said, I was discussing this with a bunch of friends who are also quite senior and accomplished in their engineering careers, and the sentiment was familiar for us all.

Re: AI is making me dumb

#210

Post by panflute »

Trasmatta wrote: post #204
notarobot123 wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At this point, it's worth asking whether lots of relatively straightforward verbose code is actually significantly worse than the least code necessary for the problem. Obviously, architecture matters. What might matter less is verbosity. The reason we aimed for minimal "accidental complexity" up to now was directly related to the cost/pain of changing and maintaining that code. Hasn't the economics of maintenance and…

> Hasn't the economics of maintenance and change shifted so much that accidental complexity isn't actually all that expensive/painful? I sincerely believe that extensive accidental complexity will ALSO be bad for AI agents. Their quality will diminish as their context windows get filled up with endless amounts of spaghetti and accidental complexity. I feel like we won't fully start feeling those effects for another y…

True, yet they have a Moore's Law like growth going for properties like their context windows.. I think the larger problem with letting them be verbose is Occam's razor. The more verbose they are the more variant behavior they will have where any variation that is not strictly necessary is likely to include incorrect behavior.
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