241–250 of 635 posts
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> Why would any self respecting software developer use this tripe? Because I can ship 2x to 5x more code with nearly the same quality. My employer isn't paying me to be a craftsman. They're paying me to ship things that make them money.
Good employee, you get cookie and 1h extra pto
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You're not supposed to trust the tool, you're supposed to review and rework the code before submitting for external review. I use AI for rather complex tasks. It's impressive. It can make a bunch of non-trivial changes to several files, and have the code compile without warnings. But I need to iterate a few times so that the code looks like what I want. That being said, I also lose time pretty regularly. There's a le…
1) Once you get it to output something you like, do you check all the lines it changed? Is there a threshold after which you just... hope? 2) No matter what the learning curve, you're using a statistical tool that outputs in probabilities. If that's fine for your workflow/company, go for it. It's just not what a lot of developers are okay with. Of course it's a spectrum with the AI deniers in one corner and the vibe…
2) I find the tool analogy helpful but it has limits. Yes, it’s a stochastic tool, but in that sense it’s more like another mind, not a tool. And this mind is neither junior nor senior, but rather a savant.
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I use it all the time, and it has accelerated my output massively. Now, I don't trust the output - I review everything, and it often goes wrong. You have to know how to use it. But I would never go back. Often it comes up with more elegant solutions than I would have. And when you're working with a new platform, or some unfamiliar library that it already knows, it's an absolute godsend. I'm also damn proud of my own…
I have a hard time being sold on “yea it’s wrong a lot, also you have to spend more time than you already do on code review.” Getting to sit down and write the code is the most enjoyable part of the job, why would I deprive myself of that? By the time the problem has been defined well enough to explain it to an LLM sitting down and writing the code is typically very simple.
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> You're not supposed to trust the tool This is just an incredible statement. I can't think of another development tool we'd say this about. I'm not saying you're wrong, or that it's wrong to have tools we can't just, just... wow... what a sea change.
Imagine if your compiler just randomly and non-deterministically compiled valid code to incorrect binaries, and the tool's developer couldn't really tell you why it happens, how often it was expected to happen, how severe the problem was expected to be, and told you to just not trust your compiler to create correct machine code. Imagine if your calculator app randomly and non-deterministically performed arithmetic in…
They keep telling you that any employee who highlights problems with the tools are just trying to save their job.
Your investors tell you that the toolmakers are already saving money for your competitors.
Now, do you want that second house and white lotus vacation or not?
Making good tools is difficult. Bending perception (“is reality”) is easier and enterprise sales, just like good propaganda, work. The gold rush will leave a lot of bodies behind but the shovelmakers will make a killing.
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"Do you trust other developers to write good code without mistakes without getting it reviewed by others." Literally yes. Test coverage and QA to catch bugs sure but needing everything manually reviewed by someone else sounds like working in a sweatshop full of intern-level code bootcamp graduates, or if you prefer an absolute dumpster fire of incompetence.
I would accept mistakes and inconsistency from a human, especially one not very experienced or skilled. But I expect perfection and consistency from a machine. When I command my computer to do something, I expect it to do it correctly, the same way every time, to convert a particular input to an exact particular output, every time. I don't expect it to guess, or randomly insert garbage, or behave non-deterministicall…
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I naively bought into the idea of a future where the computers do the stuff we’re bad at and we get to focus on the cool human stuff we enjoy. If these LLMs were truly incredible at doing my job I’d pack it up and find something else to do, but for now I’m wholly unimpressed, despite what management seems to see in it.
Well, I've spent my entire career writing software, starting in C in the 1990s, and what I'm seeing on my dev laptop is basically science fiction as far as I'm concerned.
There is a certain amount of irony that people try really hard to say that hallucinations are not a big problem anymore and then a company that would benefit from that narrative gets directly hurt by it. Which of course they are going to try to brush it all away. Better than admitting that this problem very much still exists and isn’t going away anytime soon.
I think that’s why Apple is very slow at rolling out AI if it ever actually will. Downside is way too big than the upside.
Yes they didn't push it as hard as, say, copilot. I still think they got in way too deep way too fast.
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I think that’s why Apple is very slow at rolling out AI if it ever actually will. Downside is way too big than the upside.
They already rolled out an "AI" product. Got humiliated pretty bad, and rolled it back. [0] [0] https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cq5ggew08eyo
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Well, I've spent my entire career writing software, starting in C in the 1990s, and what I'm seeing on my dev laptop is basically science fiction as far as I'm concerned.
Hey both things can be true. It’s a long ways from the AI renaissances of the past. There’s areas LLMs make a lot of sense. I just don’t find them to be great pair programming partners yet.
Don't get me started on testcase generation.
Are there real challenges with forking VS Code? Yep. Are there glitches with LLMs? Sure. Are there other AI-powered coding alternatives that can do some of the same things? You betcha.
But net-net, Cursor's an amazing power tool that strongly extends what we can accomplish in any hour, day, or week.