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The hidden cost of AI coding

terriblesoftware.org

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Re: The hidden cost of AI coding

#241

Post by otabdeveloper4 »

dxroshan wrote: post #139
apothegm wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So much this. The AI takes care of the tedious line by line what’s-the-name-of-that-stdlib-function parts (and most of the tedious test-writing parts) and lets me focus on the interesting bits like what it is I want to build and how the pieces should fit together. And debugging, which I find satisfying. Sadly, I find it sorely lacking at dealing with build systems and that particular type of boilerplate, mostly becau…

> The AI takes care of the tedious line by line what’s-the-name-of-that-stdlib-function parts (and most of the tedious test-writing parts) AI generated tests are a bad idea.

Well, maybe they just need X lines of so-called "tests" to satisfy some bullshit-job metrics.

Re: The hidden cost of AI coding

#243

Post by cainxinth »

TrackerFF wrote: post #185

Some people love programming, for the sake of programming itself. They love the CS theory, they love the tooling, they love most everything about it. Other people see all that as an means to an end - and find no joy from the technical aspect of creating something. They're more interested in the end result / product, rather than the process itself. I think that if you're in group A, it can be difficult to understand g…

Some writers like to write. Some like to have written.

Re: The hidden cost of AI coding

#244

Post by scarface_74 »

bgwalter wrote: post #167
RedNifre wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

First of all, Lisp, Fortran and COBOL had been around most of the time when assembly was popular. Assembly was used because of resource constraints. Secondly, you are not writing anything you get from an LLM. You prompt it and it spits out other people's code, stripped of attribution. This is what children do: Ask someone to fix something for you without understanding the result.

I very much understand the result of code that it writes. But I have never gotten paid to code. I get paid to use my knowledge of computers and the industry to save the company money or to make the company money.

Do you feel the same way when you delegate assignments to more junior developers and they come back with code?

Re: The hidden cost of AI coding

#245

Post by ramesh31 »

>"...the one thing that currently worries me most about using AI for software development: lack of joy."

I struggled with this at first too. But it just becomes another kind of joy. Think of it like jogging versus riding a motorcycle. Jogging is fun, people enjoy it, and they always will. But flying down a canyon road at 90MPH and racing through twists and turns is... way more fun. Once you've learned how to do it. But there's a gap there in which it stops being fun until you do.

Re: The hidden cost of AI coding

#246

Post by yapyap »

TrackerFF wrote: post #185

Some people love programming, for the sake of programming itself. They love the CS theory, they love the tooling, they love most everything about it. Other people see all that as an means to an end - and find no joy from the technical aspect of creating something. They're more interested in the end result / product, rather than the process itself. I think that if you're in group A, it can be difficult to understand g…

> On the other hand, I know people that want to jump straight to the end result. They have some melody or idea in their head, and they just want to generate some song that revolves around that idea. I don't really look down on those people, even though the snobs might argue that they're not "real musicians". I don't understand them, but that's not really something I have to understand either.

So if someone generates their music with AI to get their idea to music you don’t look down on it?

Personally I do, if you don’t have the means to get to the end you shouldn’t get to the end and that goes double in a professional setting. If you are just generating for your own enjoyment go off I guess but if you are publishing or working for someone that’ll publish (aka a professional setting) you should be the means to the end, not AI.

Re: The hidden cost of AI coding

#247

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

Re: The hidden cost of AI coding

#248

Post by skydhash »

ang_cire wrote: post #231
skydhash wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Who write boilerplate this day? I just lift the code from the examples in the docs (especially css frameworks). And I love looking at functions docs, because after doing it a few times, you develop an holistic understanding of the library and your speed increases. Kinda like learning a foreign language. You can use an app to translate everything, or asks for the correct word when the needs arises. The latter is a bit…

Seriously, I see this claim thrown around as though everyone writes the same starting template 50 times a week. Like, if you've got a piece of "boilerplate" code you're constantly rewriting... Save It! Put it in a repo or a snippet somewhere that you can just copy-paste when you need it. You don't need a multi-million dollar LLM to give you slightly different boilerplate snippets when you already have a text editor o…

Maybe all code is boilerplate for them? I use libraries and frameworks exactly for the truly boilerplate part. But I still try to understand those code I depends on, as some times I want to deviate from the defaults. Or the bug might be in there.

It’s when you try to use an exotic language, you realize the amount of work that has been done to minimize dev time in more mainstream languages.

Re: The hidden cost of AI coding

#249

Post by [deleted] »

jappgar wrote: post #201
pjmlp wrote: post #156

> After all, if we lose the joy in our craft, what exactly are we optimizing for? For being one of the few lucky ones that gets to stay around taking care of the software factory robots, or designing them, while everyone else that used to work at the factory is now queueing somewhere else.

To me THIS is the most stressful part of the whole thing. I like programming but I have other hobbies I find fulfilling, and nothing stops me from programming with a pen and paper. The bad vibes are not caused by lack of programming, they're caused by headsman sharpening his axe behind me. A few lucky programmers will be elevated to God status and we're all fighting for those spots now.

[deleted]

Re: The hidden cost of AI coding

#250

Post by melvinroest »

ang_cire wrote: post #226
melvinroest wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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'…

> 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.

I tried to cover this particular case with:

> And while it is easier to become good at coding than at singing - for professional purposes at least - I believe that the effect still holds.

---

> 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.

I tried to cover this particular case with:

> It is of course positively correlated with it.

---

> Being bad at something is the default state.

Well, skill-wise yes. But being talented at something can happen, even when you hate something.

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