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The hidden cost of AI coding

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Re: The hidden cost of AI coding

#261

Post by gilbetron »

dxroshan wrote: post #117
melvinroest wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The rest is boiler plate, cargo-culted, Dockerfile, build system and bash environment variable passing circle of hell that I really could care less about. Even more so, I remember making a Chrome extension and feeling intimidated. I knew that I'd be comfortable with most of it given that JS is used but I just didn't know how to start. With an LLM it is way faster to spin up some default config and get going versus…

> What I've noticed in that respect is that I just read what it does and then immediately reason why it's there .... How if it hallucinate and gives you wrong code and explanation? It is better to read documentations and tutorials first.

What do you do if you "hallucinate" and write the wrong code? Or if the docs/tutorial you read is out of date or incorrect or for a different version than you expect?

That's not a jab, but a serious question. We act like people don't "hallucinate" all the time - modern software engineering devops is all about putting in guardrails to detect such "hallucinations".

Re: The hidden cost of AI coding

#262

Post by jstummbillig »

yapyap wrote: post #246
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…

Why?

What has always held true so far: abstracts challenging parts of a task away. The only people you will outcompete are those, who now add little over .

But: If in the future people are just using to create a product that a lot of people can easily produce with , then, before long, that's not enough to stand out anymore. The floor has risen and the only way to stand out will always be to use in a way that other people don't.

Re: The hidden cost of AI coding

#263

Post by vendiddy »

ang_cire wrote: post #133

This comment section really shows the stark divide between people who love coding and thus hate AI, and people who hate coding and thus love AI. Honestly, I suspect the people who would prefer to have someone or something else do their coding, are probably the devs who are already outputting the worst code right now.

I love coding but I also love AI.

I don't know if I'm a minority but I'd like to think there are a lot of folks like me out there.

You can compare it to someone who is writing assembly code and now they've been introduced to C. They were happy writing assembly but now they're thrilled they can write things more quickly.

Sure, AI could lead us to write buggier code. Sure, AI could make us dumber because we just have AI write things we don't understand. But neither has to be the case.

With better tools, we'll be able to do more ambitious things.

Re: The hidden cost of AI coding

#264

Post by elicksaur »

jappgar wrote: post #202
elicksaur wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>most of us would delegate our work code to somebody else or something else if we could. Laughably narrow-minded projection of your own perspective on others.

We all delegate. Did you knit your own clothes or is that too boring for you? Enjoying to code/knit is fine but we can no longer expect to get paid well to do it.

Each activity we engage in has different use, value, and subjective enjoyment to different people. Some people love knitting! Personally, I do know how to sew small tears, which is more than most people in the US these days.

Just because I utilize the services of others for some things does not mean that it should be expected I want to utilize the service of others for all things.

This is a preposterous generalization and exactly why I said the OP premise is laughable.

Further, you’ve shifted OP’s point from subjective enjoyment of an activity to getting “paid well” - this is an irrelevant tangent to whether “most” people in general would delegate work if they could.

Re: The hidden cost of AI coding

#265

Post by apercu »

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…

I've always distilled this down to people who like the "craft" and those who like the "result".

Of course, everything is on a scale so it's not either/or.

But, like you, how I get there matters to me, not just the destination.

Outside the context of music, a project could be super successful but if the journey was littered with unnecessary stress due to preventable reasons, it will still leave a bad taste in my mouth.

Re: The hidden cost of AI coding

#266

Post by erelong »

Flow Management

Flow comes when challenge meets skill

Too much skill and too little challenge creates boredom;

too little skill and too much challenge creates anxiety

AI has reduced the challenge needed for achieving your goal, creating boredom

Remedy: find greater challenges?

Re: The hidden cost of AI coding

#267

Post by apercu »

yapyap wrote: post #246
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…

If they used an algorithm to come up with a cool melody and then did something with it, why look down on it?

Look at popular music for the last 400 years. How is that any different than simply copying the previous generations stuff and putting your own spin on it?

If you heard a CD in 1986 then in 2015 you wrote a song subconsciously inspired by that tune, should I look down on you?

I mean, I'm not a huge fan of electronic music because the vast majority of it sounds the same to me, but I don't argue that they are not "real musicians".

I do think that some genres of music will age better than others, but that's a totally different topic.

Re: The hidden cost of AI coding

#268

Post by elicksaur »

pdimitar wrote: post #162
elicksaur wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>most of us would delegate our work code to somebody else or something else if we could. Laughably narrow-minded projection of your own perspective on others.

[flagged]

What context did I skip? It seems like the statement stands on its own.

Re: The hidden cost of AI coding

#269

Post by apercu »

erelong wrote: post #266

Flow Management Flow comes when challenge meets skill Too much skill and too little challenge creates boredom; too little skill and too much challenge creates anxiety AI has reduced the challenge needed for achieving your goal, creating boredom Remedy: find greater challenges?

I would argue that the vast majority of challenges I have had in my (very long) tech career were not technical challenges anyway, rather they were "people" problems (e.g., extracting the actual requirements and maintaining scope stability).

Re: The hidden cost of AI coding

#270

Post by achierius »

pjmlp wrote: post #165
frollogaston wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same as when higher-level languages replaced assembly for a lot of use cases. And btw, at least in places I've worked, better traditional tooling would replace a lot more headcount than AI would.

I already see this happening with low code, SaaS and MACH architectures. What used to be a project doing a CMS backend, now is spent doing configurations on a SaaS product, and if we are lucky, a few containers/serveless for integrations. There are already AI based products that can automate those integrations if given enough data samples. Many believe AI will keep using current programming languages as translation s…

> just like those Assembly developers thought compiling via Assembly text generation and feeding into an Assembly would still be around

Confused by what you mean. Is this not the case?

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