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AI is making me dumb

jpain.io

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Re: AI is making me dumb

#221

Post by micromacrofoot »

DParida08 wrote: post #208

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.

You could say something similar about the internet really, and the worst we get is some AWS or Cloudflare outage, no? People joke about various services being down but it's nothing too ridiculous, and unlikely to impact every provider simultaneously.

Re: AI is making me dumb

#222

Post by redmaple892 »

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

I'm curious about how people link ideas and remember them. If you don't mind sharing, what was your process to save and remember this particular post from 2018?

Re: AI is making me dumb

#223

Post by fragmede »

suzzer99 wrote: post #159
joebates wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same. Luckily I enjoy the process of refactoring and deleting code is nearly arousing, so I get the initial dopamine rush of wow this works, followed by the dopamine rush of "wow now this is cleaner and works so much better". Keeps me in touch with the codebase too.

I question any dev who doesn't get aroused by deleting code. I just removed an entire graphql endpoint - 500 lines of front and back-end code. I may need to be hosed down.

Get a room!

Re: AI is making me dumb

#224

Post by fragmede »

ryandrake wrote: post #72
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…

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…

Try codex.

Re: AI is making me dumb

#225

Post by [deleted] »

panflute wrote: post #210
Trasmatta wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

[deleted]

Re: AI is making me dumb

#226

Post by torben-friis »

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…

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

Not while context windows cause decay and larger bills.

The AI's max cognitive load C is larger than a human's, but if codebase size grows unbounded the minimum context needed for a change will eventually surpass C.

It is also a bad idea to let your codebase become only readable by a machine when we are still in the dark about the role machines and people will take in the future. What if you have to go back to manual dev in a now gargantuan codebase?

Re: AI is making me dumb

#227

Post by devinprater »

suzzer99 wrote: post #159
joebates wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same. Luckily I enjoy the process of refactoring and deleting code is nearly arousing, so I get the initial dopamine rush of wow this works, followed by the dopamine rush of "wow now this is cleaner and works so much better". Keeps me in touch with the codebase too.

I question any dev who doesn't get aroused by deleting code. I just removed an entire graphql endpoint - 500 lines of front and back-end code. I may need to be hosed down.

Oh my. I may not want to know what selecting all and then pressing Delete would do to you.

Re: AI is making me dumb

#229

Post by 98codes »

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…

As someone now firmly in the "used to be a developer" part of my career, AI use seems like good old atrophying of the memory muscle of coding. Whether it's because you just don't code anymore at all, or offload that thinking to AI, the effect on you is the same. You start to forget.

Don't have AI do anything you want to stay sharp on.

Re: AI is making me dumb

#230

Post by thesimon »

cub-creature wrote: post #174
thisisthenewme wrote: post #126

As a developer, I kind of feel like this all smells like job security. After using LLMs for a while, I have to admit it's pretty nice, and I like using it. I've been vibecoding a few apps, and it's a good dopamine hit to immediately see your ideas come to life. However, based on my experience, it will bite you if you trust it blindly. Even in my vibecoded projects, it keeps adding "features" without me asking for the…

While I agree with the general sentiment that decentralized, bespoke solutions will explode, and require some maintenance (which may in-turn result in more hiring), I've seen plenty that still makes me hesitant to fully embrace this idea as likely. I know this is a wall of text, so forgive me while I doom-post my thoughts for a few minutes: For one thing, the efficiency gains are massive. Bigger than any other tool,…

> Yeah, there's the nice thoughts like "we wouldn't know how to maintain our app" -- but Claude would do a decent job in a single dev's hands, or "AI will potentially change the application unintentionally and introduce bugs" -- but proper observability, testing, and further prompting could fix those things in minutes to hours.

I was thinking about that the other day when I was automating a workflow: I hooked up Jira to Claude so that bug reports would automatically get a pull request. Opus 4.7 is pretty good at it. And compared to dev costs it's still quite cheap.

It's nice to not be distracted by simple bugs, but aren't I killing my own job?

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