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AI coding made me faster, but I can't code to music anymore

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Re: AI coding made me faster, but I can't code to music anymore

#251

Post by zdragnar »

SketchySeaBeast wrote: post #220
zdragnar wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> “more more more” If you're a salaried or hourly employee, you aren't paid for your output, you are paid for your time, with minimum expectations of productivity. If you complete all your work in an hour... you still owe seven hours based on the expectations of your employment agreement, in order to earn your salary and benefits. If you'd rather work in an output based capacity, you'll want to move to running your o…

That's funny, because, at more than one place I've worked as a salaried employee, when I had to work OT, the narrative was "you're salary because you're paid to get the job done, doesn't matter how many hours it takes". Unfortunately, "the job" somehow never worked out to be less than 40 hours a week.

> you are paid for your time, with minimum expectations of productivity

There's legal distinctions between part time and full time employment. Hence, you are expected to put in a minimum number of hours. However, there's nothing to say that the minimum expectation is the minimum for classification for full time employment.

If AI lets you get the job done in 1 hour when you otherwise would have worked overtime, you're still technically being paid to work more than that one hour, and I don't know of any employer that'll pay you to do nothing.

Re: AI coding made me faster, but I can't code to music anymore

#252

Post by Grimblewald »

gibagger wrote: post #145
hudon wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What caused textile machines to replace the manual labor wasn’t the quality of their output, it was quantity. In fact, manually made clothing was of higher quality than what was machine-produced.

A low quality fabric makes the fashion police come and arrest you. Low quality software kills people.

Have plenty of people, quite literally worth less than most material goods (evident from current social positions and continued trajectories) so why would companies care if it makes more money overall? Our lives have a value and in general its insultingly low.

Re: AI coding made me faster, but I can't code to music anymore

#253

Post by Grimblewald »

nemoniac wrote: post #61

The line that stood out for me was that "a 4-hour session of AI coding is more cognitively intense than a 4-hour session of non-AI coding." Many programmers are rejecting AI coding because they miss the challenge they enjoy getting from conventional programming but this author finds it even more challenging. Or perhaps challenging in a different way?

If you know how to do it well, you just do it well, its hard work but dooable. What is harder is learning to understand why what was written, that looks good, is actually bad. Usually something small, tucked away, or an issue arising from multiple things spanning distinct functions that culminate in a werid issue. That kind of detective work is draining and time consuming. It doesnt come with the emotional boost of looking at your work and feeling pride. Instead you look at something that finally works and feel releif that its over. That alone paves the way to a totally different emotional and cognitive relationship with your work. That is why for me, at least, it is more cogntiviely intense.

Re: AI coding made me faster, but I can't code to music anymore

#254

Post by Grimblewald »

skydhash wrote: post #209
bluefirebrand wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I suspect the difference lies in people who think in code versus people who translate their thoughts into code I think in code and programming concepts when I am writing software . I don't really know how to explain that, but I don't often feel like there is any friction between my thoughts and the code I make I think that many coders do not have this. They have an extra "translation" step that introduces friction in…

Another datapoint of one. It's not really that I think in code. It's more like code is as much as a language to me as writing english, or holding the pencil to draw something. I got a change request, or I read something from the docs, and the the mental concept I have realign itself to the new knowledge. Getting code out is always effortless. There's no difference between return the list of names of all the books tha…

This is it for me as well. It comes down to which is quicker to write. If I need an exact solution or implementation, then I just write it, because the code is significantly more efficient to describe the problem in than in plain english. An exception being visual things like plots, if we just care about a way to get to a plot, vague english is fine and likely less effort than writing code.

i.e. function to calculate things, just write it; want to plot some data, vibe it. I can see immediatly if its not quite right and in a line can ask for the change i needed, zero cognitive effort required to fix issue, and hey presto, we have what we want.

i think this stems from the fact natural language is generally quite inefficent for logical statements / arguments / instructions but can gather visual ideas far more efficiently than code can.

Re: AI coding made me faster, but I can't code to music anymore

#255

Post by saurik »

jwr wrote: post #49

In my experience, listening to music engages the creative part of your brain and severely limits what you can do, but this is not readily apparent. If I listen to music, I can spend an hour CODING YEAH! and be all smug and satisfied, until I turn the music off and discover that everything I've coded is unnecessary and there is an easier way to achieve the same goal. I just didn't see it, because the creative part of…

This was actually studied at some point (at least 15-20 decades ago, as I remember learning about this in college): they gave the same programming problem to a bunch of developers and had some listen to music while they did the task while others worked in silence. There was no real difference between how long it took to do the task between the same group... but the people who listened to music were much much less likely to realize that the entire task was a red herring and the code reduced down to return 0;.

Re: AI coding made me faster, but I can't code to music anymore

#256

Post by anewhnaccount2 »

bogtog wrote: post #160
sfn42 wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just think it's distracting. I get caught up listening to the lyrics and kind of mentally singing along, stuff like that which disrupts my thought and distracts from what I actually want to be thinking about. I think this is individual, I have the same problem in social settings - if I'm having a conversation and a song I like is playing in the background I some times stop listening to the conversation and focus on…

Same here on all fronts about distractions. I can't tell whether when people talk about listening to music while working/studying: (1) they mean music with no lyrics, (2) they are unserious and okay with their work being constantly interrupted, or (3) they can resist thinking about the lyrics. Some work may allow for seamless pivoting between work vs. enjoyable distraction, e.g., a clerk, but I often hear about peopl…

Sometimes I listen to music without lyrics like surf or gabber. Other times its genre music like northern soul or punk or familiar music where the lyrics are so familiar or vacuous/cliche that they don't distract. I wouldn't listen to really lyrically focussed music like singer songwriter stuff generally. So I think there's a spectrum rather than just instrumental music vs everything else.

Re: AI coding made me faster, but I can't code to music anymore

#257

Post by PretzelPirate »

gyosko wrote: post #170
david-gpu wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I bet some people felt the same way when we collectively moved from assembly to compilers.

Yeah, if not only for the small fact that you are leaving a well defined set of rules for pure chaos and randomness this time around.

In reality, the outcome doesn't appear to be the result of "pure chaos and randomness" if you ground your tools. Test cases and instructions do a fantastic job of keeping them focused and moving down the right path.

If I see an LLM consistently producing something I don't like, I'll either add the correct behavior to the prompt, or create a tool that will tell it if it messed up or not, and prompt it to call the tool after each major change.

Re: AI coding made me faster, but I can't code to music anymore

#258

Post by AaronAPU »

ai_assisted_dev wrote: post #88
AaronAPU wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I did that for 2 hours yesterday and then scrapped everything the agents did because it didn’t work and left everything in disarray.

It takes quite the practice. At least I have been shipping stuff to users like this for the entire year.

I’ve had success as well. But was sharing the negative experience. It’s a mix for sure.

Re: AI coding made me faster, but I can't code to music anymore

#259

Post by 8note »

october8140 wrote: post #8

What kind of projects are people doing that are feeling the increased velocity?

i just had it do a "set up the company styled auth, following a few wikis and a lot of trial and error until you get to the right thing"

in the olden days, id imagine getting that right to take about a week and a half and something everyone hated about spinning up a new service

with the LLM, i gave it a feedback loop of being able to do an initial sign in, integration test running steps with log reading on the client side, and a deploy and log reading mechanism for the server side.

i was going to write out an over-seer-y script for another LLM to trigger the trial and error script, but i ended up just doing that myself. What i skipped was the needing to run any one of the steps, and instead i got nicely parsed errors, so i could go look for wikis on what parts of the auth process i was missing and feed in those wiki links and such to the trial and error bot. i skipped all the log reading/parsing to get to what the next actionable chunk is, and instead, i got to hang around in the sun for a bit while the LLM churned on test calls and edits.

im now on a cleanup step to turn the working code into nicely written code that id actually want commited, but getting to the working code stage took very little of my own effort; only the problem solving and learning about how the auth works

Re: AI coding made me faster, but I can't code to music anymore

#260

Post by erelong »

I've seen multiple posts like this

I still stand by my previous response, which is about flow:

flow happens when your skills meet a sufficient challenge

AI has disrupted this by basically increasing your skills

when you have too many skills but not enough of a challenge, you feel boredom

if you have too much of a challenge and not enough skills, you feel anxiety

so you'd need a bigger challenge to feel like you're in flow if you have increased your skill ability

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