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AI coding made me faster, but I can't code to music anymore

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Re: AI coding made me faster, but I can't code to music anymore

#211

Post by loandbehold »

chongli wrote: post #171
loandbehold wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I read about AI assistants allegedly creating tech debt but my experience is opposite. Claude Code makes it easy to refactor helping to reduce tech debt. Tech debt usually happens because refactoring takes time but is hard to justify to upper management because upper management only sees new features but not quality of code. With Claude Code refactoring is much faster so it gets done.

Are you talking about refactoring code you’re already familiar with? Or a completely unknown codebase that no one else at the company knows anything about and you’ve been tasked with fixing?

Both. But I'm not talking about fixing. I'm talking about refactoring.

Re: AI coding made me faster, but I can't code to music anymore

#212

Post by dfxm12 »

latexr wrote: post #36
foo42 wrote: post #30

The tradeoff of higher velocity for less enjoyment may feel less welcome when it becomes the new baseline and the expectation of employers / customers. The excitement of getting a day's work done in an hour* (for example) is likely to fade once the expectation is to produce 8 of such old-days output per day. I suspect it doesn't matter how we feel about it mind you. If it's going to happen it will, whether we enjoy t…

> The excitement of getting a day's work done in an hour* (for example) is likely to fade once the expectation is to produce 8 of such old-days output per day. That dumb attitude (which I understand you’re criticising) of “more more more” always reminds me of Lenny from the Simpsons moving fast through the yellow light, with nowhere to go. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QR10t-B9nYY > I suspect it doesn't matter how…

moving fast through the yellow light, with nowhere to go.

My company has been preparing for this for a while now, I guess, as my backlog clearly has years' worth of work in it and positions of people who have left the org remain unfilled. My colleagues at other companies are in a similar situation. Considering round after round of layoffs, if I got ahead a little bit and found that I had nothing else to do, I'd be worried for my job.

Society becoming shittier isn’t inevitable

Yes, I agree, but the deck is usually stacked against the worker, especially in America. I doubt this will be the issue that promotes any sort of collectivism.

Re: AI coding made me faster, but I can't code to music anymore

#214

Post by throw10920 »

sarchertech wrote: post #164
popcorncowboy wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "If it's going to happen it will" - That is quite the defeatist attitude. Society becoming shittier isn’t inevitable You're right in general, but I don't think that'll save you/us from OP's statement. This is simple economic incentives at play. If AI-coding is even marginally more economically efficient (i.e. more for less) the "old way" will be swept aside at breathtaking pace (as we're seeing). The "from my cold…

> If AI-coding is even marginally more economically efficient (i.e. more for less) the "old way" will be swept aside at breathtaking pace (as we're seeing). On the scale I’ve been doing this (20 years), that hasn’t been the case. Rails was massively more efficient for what 90% of companies where building. But it never had anywhere near a 90% market share. It doesn’t take 1000 engineers to build CRUD apps, but compani…

I think that you're correct in that Rails and IDEs offer significant productivity benefits but aren't/weren't widely adopted.

But AI seems to be different in that it claims to replace programmers, instead of augment them. Yes, higher productivity means you don't have to hire as many people, but with AI tools there's specifically the promise that you can get rid of a bunch of your developers, and regardless of truth, clueless execs buy the marketing.

Stupid MBAs at big companies see this as a cost reduction - so regardless of the utility of AI code-generation tools (which may be high!), or of the fact that there are many other ways to get productivity benefits, they'll still try to deploy these systems everywhere.

That's my projection, at least. I'd love to be wrong.

Re: AI coding made me faster, but I can't code to music anymore

#215

Post by politician »

bluefirebrand wrote: post #110
furyofantares wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Society" is more than just software developers. We are very well paid for very cushy work. It's not good for anyone's work to get worse, but it's not a huge hit to society if a well-paid cushy job gets less cushy. And presumably people buy our work because it's valuable to them. Multiplying that by 8 would be a pretty big benefit to society. I don't want my job to get less fun, but I would press that button without…

My cushy software job has burned me out so badly that I am on medical leave with massive memory problems and a bit of concern about my heart So I mean... Yeah Is software more comfortable generally than many other lines of work? Yes probably Is it always soft and cushy? No, not at all. It is often high pressure and high stress

FWIW, I am not your doctor: Taking a daily antioxidant, glutathione, has helped me manage memory-related symptoms that appeared coincident with other burnout symptoms.

Disclaimer: talk to your doctor. I don’t know if your doctor can tell you whether this is a good idea, but it might help in some countries with good medical systems.

Re: AI coding made me faster, but I can't code to music anymore

#216

Post by ModernMech »

gyosko wrote: post #165

I really don't get it. While letting the AI write some code can be cool and fascinating, I really can't undersand how: - write the prompt(and you need do be precise and think and express carefully what you have in mind) - check/try the code - repeat is better than writing the code by myself. AI coding like this feels like a nightmare to me and it's 100x more exhausting.

It's not. And people are realizing that, which is causing them to bring back and reinvent aspects of software engineering to AI coding to make it more tolerable. People once questioned whether AI will replace all programming languages with natural language interfaces, it now looks like programming languages will be reinvented in the context of AI to make their natural language interface more tool-like.

Re: AI coding made me faster, but I can't code to music anymore

#217

Post by broast »

gyosko wrote: post #165

I really don't get it. While letting the AI write some code can be cool and fascinating, I really can't undersand how: - write the prompt(and you need do be precise and think and express carefully what you have in mind) - check/try the code - repeat is better than writing the code by myself. AI coding like this feels like a nightmare to me and it's 100x more exhausting.

So basically what an engineering manager or product manager enjoys doing

Re: AI coding made me faster, but I can't code to music anymore

#218

Post by cmiles74 »

foo42 wrote: post #30

The tradeoff of higher velocity for less enjoyment may feel less welcome when it becomes the new baseline and the expectation of employers / customers. The excitement of getting a day's work done in an hour* (for example) is likely to fade once the expectation is to produce 8 of such old-days output per day. I suspect it doesn't matter how we feel about it mind you. If it's going to happen it will, whether we enjoy t…

Even if the developer is keeping the quality of the LLM generated code high (by constant close reading of the output, rejecting low quality work and steering with prompts) does this mean the project as a whole is improving? I have my doubts! I'm also skeptical that this developer has increased their velocity as much as they believe, IMHO this has long been a difficult thing to measure.

Overall, is this even a good thing? With this increase in output, I suspect we'll need to apply more pressure to people requesting features to ensure those requests are high quality. When each feature takes half the time to implement, I bet it's easy to agree to more features without spending as much time evaluating their worth.

Re: AI coding made me faster, but I can't code to music anymore

#219

Post by ModernMech »

david-gpu wrote: post #168
gyosko wrote: post #165

I really don't get it. While letting the AI write some code can be cool and fascinating, I really can't undersand how: - write the prompt(and you need do be precise and think and express carefully what you have in mind) - check/try the code - repeat is better than writing the code by myself. AI coding like this feels like a nightmare to me and it's 100x more exhausting.

I bet some people felt the same way when we collectively moved from assembly to compilers.

To some degree you're correct -- LLMs can be viewed as the kind of "sufficiently advanced" compiler we've always dreamed of. Our dreams didn't include the compiler lying to us though, so we have not achieved utopia.

LLMs are more like DNA transcription, where some percentage of the time it just injects a random mutation into the transcript, either causing am evolutionary advantage, or a terminal disease.

This whole AI industry right now is trying to figure out how to always get the good mutation, and I don't think it's something that can be controlled that way. It will probably turn out that on a long enough timescale, left unattended, LLMs are guaranteed to give your codebase cancer.

Re: AI coding made me faster, but I can't code to music anymore

#220

Post by SketchySeaBeast »

zdragnar wrote: post #201
latexr wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The excitement of getting a day's work done in an hour* (for example) is likely to fade once the expectation is to produce 8 of such old-days output per day. That dumb attitude (which I understand you’re criticising) of “more more more” always reminds me of Lenny from the Simpsons moving fast through the yellow light, with nowhere to go. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QR10t-B9nYY > I suspect it doesn't matter how…

> “more more more” If you're a salaried or hourly employee, you aren't paid for your output, you are paid for your time, with minimum expectations of productivity. If you complete all your work in an hour... you still owe seven hours based on the expectations of your employment agreement, in order to earn your salary and benefits. If you'd rather work in an output based capacity, you'll want to move to running your o…

That's funny, because, at more than one place I've worked as a salaried employee, when I had to work OT, the narrative was "you're salary because you're paid to get the job done, doesn't matter how many hours it takes". Unfortunately, "the job" somehow never worked out to be less than 40 hours a week.
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