Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The hidden cost of AI coding

terriblesoftware.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

221–230 of 475 posts

Re: The hidden cost of AI coding

#221

Post by skydhash »

sayamqazi wrote: post #203
insin wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The documentation are for answering your questions, it’s not a puzzle to be solved. Using the reference docs assumes that you already have an understanding about the thing that is being documented and you’re looking for specificity or details. If not, the correct move is to go through a book, a tutorial, or the user guide. Aka the introductory materials.

Re: The hidden cost of AI coding

#222

Post by cushychicken »

melvinroest wrote: post #212
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.

I replaced "code" for "singing" to make a point. > This comment section really shows the stark divide between people who love singing and thus hate AI-assisted singing, and people who hate singing and thus love AI-assisted singing. > Honestly, I suspect the people who would prefer to have someone or something else do their singing, are probably the singers who are already outputting the worst singing right now. The p…

I love coding - but I am not very good at it. I can describe what I want in great detail, with great specificity. But I am not personally very good at turning that detailed specification into the proper syntax and incantations.

AI is like jet fuel for me. It’s the translation layer between specs and code I’ve always wanted. It’s a great advisor for implementation strategies. It’s a way to try new strategies in code quickly.

I don’t need to get anyone else to review my code. Most of this is for personal projects.

I don’t really write professionally, so I don’t have a ton of need for it to manage realities of software engineering (large codebases, peer reviews, black box internal systems, etc). That being said - I do a reasonable amount of embedded Linux work, and AI understands the Linux kernel and device drivers very well.

To extend your metaphor: AI is like a magic microphone that makes all of my singing sound like Tony Rice, my personal favorite singer. I’ve always wanted to sound like him - but I never will. I don’t have the range or the training. But AI allows my coding level to get to that corresponding level with writing software.

I absolutely love it.

Re: The hidden cost of AI coding

#223

Post by cushychicken »

RedNifre wrote: post #159
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.

Right, just how back in the day, people who loved writing assembly hated high level languages and people who found assembly too tedious loved compilers.

It’s almost like there’s a big range of different comprehension styles among human beings, and a varying set of preferences that go with those.

Re: The hidden cost of AI coding

#224

Post by skydhash »

ThrowawayTestr wrote: post #192
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.

I like solving problems but I hate coding. Wasting 20 minutes because you forgot a semicolon or something is not fun. AI let's me focus on the problem and not bother with the tedious coding bit.

That comment makes me deeply suspicious about your debugging skills. And the formatting of your code.

Re: The hidden cost of AI coding

#225

Post by nyarlathotep_ »

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.

seeing a lot of `const thing = doThing(); // add this line` showing up lately too.

Re: The hidden cost of AI coding

#226

Post by ang_cire »

melvinroest wrote: post #212
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.

I replaced "code" for "singing" to make a point. > This comment section really shows the stark divide between people who love singing and thus hate AI-assisted singing, and people who hate singing and thus love AI-assisted singing. > Honestly, I suspect the people who would prefer to have someone or something else do their singing, are probably the singers who are already outputting the worst singing right now. The p…

I think the analogy/ substitution falls apart in that singing is generally not very stable or lucrative (for 99.999% of singers), so it is pretty rare to find someone singing who hates it. Much less uncommon to find people working in IT who hate the specific work of their jobs.

And I think we do tend to (rightfully) look down on e.g. singers who lip-sync concerts or use autotune to sing at pitches they otherwise can't, nevermind how we'd react if one used AI singing instead of themselves.

Yes, loving something is no guarantee of skill at it, but hating something is very likely to correspond to not being good at it, since skills take time and dedication to hone. Being bad at something is the default state.

Re: The hidden cost of AI coding

#227

Post by skydhash »

iamleppert wrote: post #3

There's nothing stopping you from coding if you enjoy it. It's not like they have taken away your keyboard. I have found that AI frees me up to focus on the parts of coding I'm actually interested in, which is maybe 5-10% of the project. 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. I care about certain things…

> doesn't judge or sneer at you, or tell you to "RTFM". It's better than any human help, even if its not always right because its at least always more reliable and you don't have to bother some grey beard who probably hates you anyway.

That’s a lot of trauma you’re dealing with.

Re: The hidden cost of AI coding

#228

Post by bradley13 »

z_open wrote: post #220
bradley13 wrote: post #124

The author is already an experienced programmer. Let me toss in an anecdote about the next generation of programmers. Vibe coding: also called playing pinball with the AI, hoping something useful comes out. I taught a lecture in my first-semester programming course yesterday. This is in a program for older students, mostly working while going back to school. Each time, a few students are selected to present their cod…

Does your course not have exams or in-lab assignments? Should sort itself out. Honestly, I'm all for homework fading away as professors can't figure out how to prevent people from using AI. It used to be the case that certain kids could get away with not doing much because they were popular enough to get people to let them copy their assignments (at least for certain subjects). Eventually the system will realize they…

Sure, this guy is likely to fail the course. The point is: he is already working in the field. I don't know his exact job, but if it involves programming, or even scripting, he is faking his way with AI, not understanding what he's doing. That is frightening.

Re: The hidden cost of AI coding

#229

Post by sebstefan »

clbrmbr wrote: post #204

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…

Added joy for me as well mostly by giving me the relevant API calls I need straight away, from publically available documentation, instead of having to read docs myself. "How do I do X in Y"

And if something's not obvious I can always fetch the specifics of any particular calls. But at least I didn't have to find the name of that call in the first place.

Re: The hidden cost of AI coding

#230

Post by skydhash »

selfhoster11 wrote: post #166
dxroshan wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Do you mean the laconic and incomplete documentation? And the tutorials that range from "here's how you do a hello world" to "draw the rest of the fucking owl" [0], with nothing in between to actually show you how to organise a code base or file structure for a mid-level project? Hallucinations are a thing. With a competent human on the other end of the screen, they are not such an issue. And the benefits you can rea…

The kind of documentation you’re looking for is called a tutorial or a guide, and you can always buy a book for it.

Also something are meant to be approached with the correct foundational knowledge (you can’t do 3D without geometry, trigonometry, and matrixes. And a healthy dose of physics). Almost every time I see people strugling with documentation, it was because they lacked domain knowledge.

Post reply on HN