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Generative AI coding tools and agents do not work for me

blog.miguelgrinberg.com

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Re: Generative AI coding tools and agents do not work for me

#251

Post by freehorse »

mitthrowaway2 wrote: post #105
waprin wrote: post #19

To some degree, traditional coding and AI coding are not the same thing, so it's not surprising that some people are better at one than the other. The author is basically saying that he's much better at coding than AI coding. But it's important to realize that AI coding is itself a skill that you can develop. It's not just , pick the best tool and let it go. Managing prompts and managing context has a much higher ski…

The skill ceiling might be "high" but it's not like investing years of practice to become a great pianist. The most experienced AI coder in the world has about three years of practice working this way, much of which is obsoleted because the models have changed to the point where some lessons learned on GPT 3.5 don't transfer. There aren't teachers with decades of experience to learn from, either.

Moreover, the "ceiling" may still be below the "code works" level, and you have no idea when you start if it is or not.

Re: Generative AI coding tools and agents do not work for me

#252

Post by greybox »

tptacek wrote: post #106

I'm fine with anybody saying AI agents don't work for their work-style and am not looking to rebut this piece, but I'm going to take this opportunity to call something out. The author writes "reviewing code is actually harder than most people think. It takes me at least the same amount of time to review code not written by me than it would take me to write the code myself". That sounds within an SD of true for me, to…

For simple tedious or rote tasks, I have templates bound to hotkeys in my IDE. They even come with configurable variable sections that you can fill in afterwards, or base on some highlighted code before hitting the hot key. Also, its free

Re: Generative AI coding tools and agents do not work for me

#253

Post by hatefulmoron »

vidarh wrote: post #218
hatefulmoron wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It depends on what you're doing. If it's a simple task, or you're making something that won't grow into something larger, eyeballing the code and testing it is usually perfect. These types of tasks feel great with Claude Code. If you're trying to build something larger, it's not good enough. Even with careful planning and spec building, Claude Code will still paint you into a corner when it comes to architecture. In…

If you let it paint you into a corner, why are you doing so? I don't know what you mean by "a lot of guidance". Maybe I just naturally do that, but to me there's not been much change in the level of guidance I need to give Claude Code or my own agent vs. what I'd give developers working for me. Another issue is that as long as you ensure it builds good enough tests, the cost of telling it to just throw out the code i…

> If you let it paint you into a corner, why are you doing so?

What do you mean? If it were as simple as not letting it do so, I would do as you suggest. I may as well stop letting it be incorrect in general. Lots of guidance helps avoid it.

> Maybe I just naturally do that, but to me there's not been much change in the level of guidance I need to give Claude Code or my own agent vs. what I'd give developers working for me.

Well yeah. You need to give it lots of guidance, like someone who works for you.

> the cost of telling it to just throw out the code it builds later and redo it with additional architectural guidance keeps dropping.

It's a moving target for sure. My confidence with this in more complex scenarios is much smaller.

Re: Generative AI coding tools and agents do not work for me

#254

Post by [deleted] »

b112 wrote: post #238
socalgal2 wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> ChatGPT and Gemini literally only know the answer because they read StackOverflow. Stack Overflow only exists because they have visitors. I know this isn't true because I work on an API that has no answers on stackoverflow (too new), nor does it have answers anywhere else. Yet, the AI seems to able to accurately answer many questions about it. To be honest I've been somewhat shocked at this.

It is absolutely true, and AI cannot think, reason, comprehend anything it has not seen before. If you're getting answers, it has seen it elsewhere, or it is literally dumb, statistical luck. That doesn't mean it knows the answer . That means it guessed or hallucinated correctly. Guessing isn't knowing. edit: people seem to be missing my point, so let me rephrase. Of course AIs don't think, but that wasn't what I was…

[deleted]

Re: Generative AI coding tools and agents do not work for me

#255

Post by vidarh »

hatefulmoron wrote: post #253
vidarh wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you let it paint you into a corner, why are you doing so? I don't know what you mean by "a lot of guidance". Maybe I just naturally do that, but to me there's not been much change in the level of guidance I need to give Claude Code or my own agent vs. what I'd give developers working for me. Another issue is that as long as you ensure it builds good enough tests, the cost of telling it to just throw out the code i…

> If you let it paint you into a corner, why are you doing so? What do you mean? If it were as simple as not letting it do so, I would do as you suggest. I may as well stop letting it be incorrect in general. Lots of guidance helps avoid it. > Maybe I just naturally do that, but to me there's not been much change in the level of guidance I need to give Claude Code or my own agent vs. what I'd give developers working…

> What do you mean? If it were as simple as not letting it do so, I would do as you suggest.

I'm arguing it is as simple as that. Don't accept changes that muddle up the architecture. Take attempts to do so as evidence that you need to add direction. Same as you presumably would - at least I would - with a developer.

Re: Generative AI coding tools and agents do not work for me

#256

Post by sensanaty »

ed_mercer wrote: post #23

> It takes me at least the same amount of time to review code not written by me than it would take me to write the code myself, if not more. Hard disagree. It's still way faster to review code than to manually write it. Also the speed at which agents can find files and the right places to add/edit stuff alone is a game changer.

I'm fast at reviewing PRs because I know the person on the other end and can trust that they got things correctly. I'll focus on the meaty, tricky parts of their PR, but I can rest assured that they matched the design, for example, and not have to verify every line of CSS they wrote.

This is a recipe for disaster with AI agents. You have to read every single line carefully, and this is much more difficult for the large majority of people out there than if you had written it yourself. It's like reviewing a Junior's work, except I don't mind reviewing my Junior colleague's work because I know they'll at least learn from the mistakes and they're not a black box that just spews bullshit.

Re: Generative AI coding tools and agents do not work for me

#257

Post by BlackFly »

socalgal2 wrote: post #180

> Another common argument I've heard is that Generative AI is helpful when you need to write code in a language or technology you are not familiar with. To me this also makes little sense. I'm not sure I get this one. When I'm learning new tech I almost always have questions. I used to google them. If I couldn't find an answer I might try posting on stack overflow. Sometimes as I'm typing the question their search wo…

One of the many ways that search got worse over time was the promotion of blog spam over actual documentation. Generally, I would rather have good API documentation or a user guide that leads me through the problem so that next time I know how to help myself. Reading through good API documentation often also educates you about the overall design and associated functionality that you may need to use later. Reading the manual for technology that you will be regularly using is generally quite profitable.

Sometimes, a function doesn't work as advertised or you need to do something tricky, you get a weird error message, etc. For those things, stackoverflow could be great if you could find someone who had a similar problem. But the tutorial level examples on most blogs might solve the immediate problem without actually improving your education.

It would be similar to someone solving your homework problems for you. Sure you finished your homework, but that wasn't really learning. From this perspective, ChatGPT isn't helping you learn.

Re: Generative AI coding tools and agents do not work for me

#258

Post by purerandomness »

andrewstuart wrote: post #127

He’s saying it’s not faster because he needs to impose his human analysis on it which is slow. That’s fine, but it’s an arbitrary constraint he chooses, and it’s wrong to say AI is not faster. It is. He just won’t let it be faster. Some won’t like to hear this, but no-one reviews the machine code that a compiler outputs . That’s the future, like it or not. You can’t say compilers are slow because I add on the time I…

A compiler produces the same, deterministic output, every single time.

A stochastic parrot can never be trusted, let alone one that tweaks its model every other night.

I totally get that not all code ever written needs to be correct.

Some throw-away experiments can totally be one-shot by AI, nothing wrong with that. Depending on the industry one works in, people might be on different points of the expectation spectrum for correctness, and so their experience with LLMs vary.

It's the RAD tool discussion of the 2000s, or the "No-Code" tools debate of the last decade, all over again.

Re: Generative AI coding tools and agents do not work for me

#259

Post by nilirl »

freehorse wrote: post #247
nilirl wrote: post #237

The main claim made: When there's money or reputation to be lost, code requires the same amount of cognition; irrespective of who wrote the code, AI or not. Best counter claim: Not all code has the same risk. Some code is low risk, so the risk of error does not detract from the speed gained. For example, for proof of concepts or hobby code. The real problem: Disinformation. Needless extrapolation, poor analogies, ove…

> Best counter claim: Not all code has the same risk. Some code is low risk, so the risk of error does not detract from the speed gained. For example, for proof of concepts or hobby code. Counter counter claim for these use cases: when I do proof of concept, I actually want to increase my understanding of said concept at the same time, learn challenges involved, and in general get a better idea how feasible things ar…

Fair. I rescind those examples and revise my counter: When you gain much more from speed than you lose with errors, AI makes sense.

Revised example: Software where the goal is design experimentation; like with trying out variations of UX ideas.

Re: Generative AI coding tools and agents do not work for me

#260

Post by nobunaga »

olmo23 wrote: post #250
plasticeagle wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

ChatGPT and Gemini literally only know the answer because they read StackOverflow. Stack Overflow only exists because they have visitors. What do you think will happen when everyone is using the AI tools to answer their questions? We'll be back in the world of Encyclopedias, in which central authorities spent large amounts of money manually collecting information and publishing it. And then they spent a good amount o…

Where does the knowledge come from? People can only post to SO if they've read the code or the documentation. I don't see why LLMs couldn't do that.

ITT: People who think LLMs are AGI and can produce output that the LLM has come up with out of thin air or by doing research. Go speak with someone who is actually an expert in this field how LLMs work and why the training data is so important. Im amazed that people in the CS industry seem to talk like they know everything about a tech after using it but never even writing a line of code for an LLM. Our indsutry is doomed with people like this.
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