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AI coding is gambling

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Re: AI coding is gambling

#251

Post by awesome_dude »

applfanboysbgon wrote: post #173
itsgrimetime wrote: post #92

All of this new capability has made me realize that the reason i love programming _isn't_ the same as the OP. I used to think (and tell others) that I loved understanding something deeply, wading through the details to figure out a tough problem. but actually, being able to will anything I can think of into existence is what I love about programming. I do feel for the people who were able to make careers out of falli…

> but I finally feel like I'm _good_ at programming, which is insane Yes, it is insane. You couldn't torture this confession out of me. But that's the drug they're selling you, isn't it? You don't even write code, but you're getting a self-inflated sense of worth. It must be addicting! Of course, whether or not the programs you prompt are actually good surely has no relation to whether you feel they're good, since yo…

> because having ideas is not the hard part.

I agree. It's the "buy in" from the market.

The biggest names in Software Products have (other peoples) ideas to sell, they're selling the buggy versions of those ideas - Microsoft, Salesforce, even early Facebook, these weren't triumphs of 'monk-like discipline' in the code. They were triumphs of market buy in and timing.

Re: AI coding is gambling

#252

Post by nkrisc »

watzon wrote: post #110

I think this article makes a valid point. However, if AI coding is considered gambling, then being a project manager overseeing multiple developers could also be seen as a form of gambling to a certain degree. In reality, there isn't much difference between the two. AI models are non-deterministic, and humans are also non-deterministic. You could assign the same task to two different developers and end up with entire…

Only if you consider generative AI and human beings to be effectively equivalent.

Being a project manager is more or less something humans have been doing since the dawn of time.

Generative AI takes money as input and gives some output. If you don’t like the output, more money goes in. It’s far more akin to gambling than organizing human labor.

Re: AI coding is gambling

#253

Post by quikoa »

rsoto2 wrote: post #227
7777332215 wrote: post #159

The problem with AI coding is that you no longer own the foundational tools.

What?? Surely once these companies have locked in their Claude workflows claude wouldn't somehow raise the price. Or steal inventions like Amazon does. Surely.

Surely they aren't selling subscriptions at a loss to gain market share either.

Re: AI coding is gambling

#254

Post by capitalsigma »

simonw wrote: post #10

Assigning work to an intern is gambling: they're inherently non-deterministic and it's a roll of the dice whether the work they do will be good enough or you'll have to give them feedback in order to get to what you need.

People don't write blog posts about how they wake up at 3AM to assign new tasks to their intern, nor do they build "orchestration frameworks" that involve N layers of interns passing tasks down between eachother

Re: AI coding is gambling

#255

Post by szatkus »

mpalmer wrote: post #242
comboy wrote: post #63

Fascinating how HN is torn about vibe coding still. Everybody pretty much agrees that it works for some use cases, yet there is a flamewar (I mean, cultured, HN-type one) every time. People seem to be more comfortable in a binary mindset.

For my part at least, I get the most riled up against the binary thinkers!

This. A lot of people on HN acts as you can only write code manually (almost, generators and snippets are allowed, because we are used to them) or vibe coding the whole project through a WhatsApp conversation. As if there was nothing in between and the same approach should work for all kinds of projects.

Personally I use coding agents for boring parts (I really don't enjoy putting the same piece of string to 20 different classes just to register a new component) and they work quite well, I'm going to use them for foreseeable future, because they make coding much more enjoyable for me. On the other hand I don't have an OpenClaw box burning billions of tokens weekly for me, because I usually don't have ideas that could be clearly specified.

Re: AI coding is gambling

#256

Post by RhythmFox »

IanCal wrote: post #219
input_sh wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Until it produces predictable output, it's gambling. But it can't produce predictable output because it's a non-deterministic tool. What you're describing is increasing your odds while gambling, not that it's not gambling. Card counting also increases your odds while gambling, but it doesn't make it not gambling.

This is a pretty wild comparison in my opinion, it counts almost everything as gambling which means it has almost no use as a definition. The most obvious issue is it’d class working with humans as gambling. Fine if you want to make that as your definition but it seems unhelpful to the discussion.

How does it 'count almost everything as gambling'? They just said 'non-deterministic' output is gambling-like, that is not 'almost everything'. Most computation that you use on a day-to-day basis (depending on how much you use AI now I suppose) is in all ways deterministic. Using probabilistic algorithms is not new, but it your point is not clicking...

Re: AI coding is gambling

#258

Post by bakugo »

itsgrimetime wrote: post #92

All of this new capability has made me realize that the reason i love programming _isn't_ the same as the OP. I used to think (and tell others) that I loved understanding something deeply, wading through the details to figure out a tough problem. but actually, being able to will anything I can think of into existence is what I love about programming. I do feel for the people who were able to make careers out of falli…

> Going to McDonalds made me realize that the reason I love cooking isn't the actual cooking itself. Being able to order a food at McDonalds and getting it without doing anything myself is the best part about cooking! Now that I only eat McDonalds, I feel like I'm _good_ at cooking.

You do not like and have never liked programming. You wanted to be a manager. They are completely different things.

Re: AI coding is gambling

#259

Post by cadamsdotcom »

> My job went from connecting these two things being the hard and reward part, to just mopping up how poorly they’ve been connected.

That’s only half of the transition.

The other half - and when you know you’ve made it through the “AI sux” phase - is when you learn to automate the mopping up. Give the agent the info it needs to know if it did good work - and if it didn’t do good work, give it information so it knows what to fix. Trust that it wants to fix those things. Automate how that info is provided (using code!) and suddenly you are out of the loop. The amount of code needed is surprisingly small and your agent can write it! Hook a few hundred lines of script up to your harness at key moments, and you will never see dumb AI mistakes again (because it fixed them before presenting the work to you, because your script told it about the mistakes while you were off doing something else)

Think of it like linting but far more advanced - your script can walk the code AST and assess anything, or use regex - your agent will make that call when you ask for the script. If the script has an exit code of 2, stderr is shown to the agent! So you (via your script) can print to stderr what the agent did wrong - what line, what file, wha mistake.

It’s what I do every day and it works (200k LOC codebase, 99.5% AI-coded) - there’s info and ideas here: https://codeleash.dev/docs/code-quality-checks

This is just another technique to engineer quality outcomes; you’re just working from a different starting point.

Re: AI coding is gambling

#260

Post by RcouF1uZ4gsC »

beepbooptheory wrote: post #229
pdntspa wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because the programming is and was always a means to an end. Obsessing over the specific mechanical act of programming is taking the forest for the trees. I agree with gp that the speed in which I am able to execute my vision is exhilarating. It is making me love programming again. My side projects, which have been hanging on the wall for years , are actually getting done. And quickly! The actual act of keying in cod…

"I really really love cooking. In fact, I have optimized my cooking completely, I go out to restaurants every night!" I believe gp and others just like food instead of cooking. Which is fine, but if that's the case, why go around telling everyone you're a cook?

But are you doing real food preparation unless you are hunting and dressing the animals and foraging for your own food?
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