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I am happier writing code by hand

abhinavomprakash.com

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Re: I am happier writing code by hand

#261

Post by mupuff1234 »

AstroBen wrote: post #249
mupuff1234 wrote: post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> God it's a depressing thought that whatever work you do is just a throwaway no-one will use I didn't say that. In fact if your code doesn't significantly change over time it probably means your project wasn't successful.

Maybe we're talking about different things? That's one of the biggest benefits of software quality and the long-term investment: how easy is your thing to change?

Right, but that usually means higher quality software design, and less so the exact low level details of function A or function B (in most cases)

If anything I'd claim using LLMs can actually free up your time to really focus on the proper design of the software.

I think the disconnect here is that people bashing LLMs don't understand that any decent engineer isn't just going around vibe coding, but instead creating a well thought design (with or without AI) and using LLMs to speed up the implementation.

Re: I am happier writing code by hand

#262

Post by _zagj »

sgarland wrote: post #21
candiddevmike wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If you want to code by hand, then do it! No one's stopping you. But we shouldn't pretend that you will be able to do that professionally for much longer. If you can't code by hand professionally anymore, what are you being paid to do? Bring the specs to the LLMs? Deal with the customers so the LLMs don't have to?

This is what I don’t understand: why highly-paid SWEs seem to think that their salaries will remain the same (if they even still have a job) if their role is now a glorified project manager.

They're delusional, but that's to be expected if you imagine them as the types for whom everything in life has always just kinda worked out. The idea that things could suddenly not work out is almost unimaginable to them, so of course things will change, but not, for them, substantially for the worse.

Re: I am happier writing code by hand

#263

Post by nijave »

wtetzner wrote: post #222
redox99 wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you can't deliver features faster with AI assistance then you're either using it wrong or working on very specialized software that AI can't handle yet .

I haven't seen any evidence yet that using AI is improving developer performance, just a bunch of people who "feel" like it does.

I'm still on the fence about codegen but it's certainly helping explain code quickly without manually step through and providing quick access to docs

Re: I am happier writing code by hand

#264

Post by nijave »

rf15 wrote: post #9

This is pointing out one factor of vibecoding that is talked about too little: that it feels good, and that this feeling often clouds people's judgment on what is actually achieved (i.e. you lost control of the code and are running more and more frictionless on hopes and dreams)

I like "vibe doc reading" and "vibe code explanation" but am continually frustrated with vibe coding. I can certainly generate code but it's definitely not my style and I feel reluctant to put my name on it since it's frequently non trivial to completely understand and validate when you're not actually writing it. Additionally, I find vibe coding to generate very verbose and overly abstracted code that's harder to read. I have to spend time pairing the generated code back down and removing things that really weren't needed.

Re: I am happier writing code by hand

#265

Post by [deleted] »

igravious wrote: post #215
tux1968 wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're not wrong. But your same objection was made against compilers. That they are opaque, have differences from one to another, and can introduce bugs, they're not actually deterministic if you upgrade the compiler, etc. They separate the programmer from the code the computer eventually executes. In any case, clinging to the fact that this technology is different in some ways, continues to ignore the many ways it's…

They may not be wrong per se but that argument is essentially a strawman argument. If these tools are non-deterministic then how did someone at Anthropic spend the equivalent of $20,000 of Anthropic compute and end up with a C compiler that can compile the Linux kernel (one of the largest bodies of C code out there). There is clearly something that completely missies the point about the but-muh-non-determinism argume…

[deleted]

Re: I am happier writing code by hand

#266

Post by nijave »

freeopinion wrote: post #59

I think it is pretty indisputable that there is a valuable place for AI. I recently had to interact with a very horrible db schema. The best approach I came up with to solve my challenge involved modelling a table with 300 columns. Converting some sql ddl to a Rust struct was simple but tedious work. A prompt with less than 15 words guided an AI to produce the 900+ loc for me. It took a couple seconds to scan it to s…

It's still possible to script out codegen. Frequently use Python to generate code like that.

Really I'd rather have AI generate a codegen script that deterministically does the struct from schema generation

I've had enough instances where it's slid in a subtle change like adding "ing" to a field name to not fully trust it

Re: I am happier writing code by hand

#267

Post by nijave »

throw7272855 wrote: post #209

Coding with AI falls in one of three categories: 1. The thing to be written is available online. AI is a search engine to find it, maybe also translate it to the language of choice. 2. The thing (system or component or function) is genuinely new. The spec has to be very precise and the AI is just doing the typing. This is, at best working around syntax issues, such as some hard-to-remember particular SQL syntax or so…

Really I don't think frameworks have kept up and LLMs are the hammer in Law of the Hammer.

Re: I am happier writing code by hand

#268

Post by xigoi »

Xenoamorphous wrote: post #111
Trasmatta wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm tired of the carpentry analogy. It feels like a thought stopping cliche, because it's used in every thread where this topic comes up. It misses the fact that coding is fundamentally different, and that there are still distinct advantages to writing at least some code by hand, both for the individual and the company.

To me the biggest difference is that there’s some place for high quality, beautiful and expensive handcrafted woodwork, even if it’s niche in a world where Ikea exists. Nobody will ever care whether some software was written by humans or a machine, as long as it works and works well.

I, for one, prefer to use software where the person who wrote it understands how it works.

Re: I am happier writing code by hand

#269

Post by grumple »

softwaredoug wrote: post #31

Even if Claude writes 100% code, I think there will be a bifurcation between people who are finicky about 10 lines of code. And those finicky about high level product experiences. I think the 10 lines of code people worry their jobs now become obsolete. In cases where the code required googling how to do X with Y technology, that's true. That's just going to be trivially solvable. And it will cause us to not need as…

One of the first bugs I found - and fixed - at my current job instantly made us an extra 200k/year. One line of code (potentially a one character fix?), causing a little bug nobody noticed, which I only saw because I like to comb through application logs, and caused by a peculiarity of the data. Would an LLM have written better code? Maybe. But I've seen a lot of bad code churned out by LLMs, even today. I'm not saying every line matters - particular for frontend code - but sometimes individual lines of code, or even individual characters, can be tremendously important, and not be written in any spec, not tested with all possible data combinations, or documented anywhere. At a previous job, I spent several days unraveling another one-line bug that was keeping a multi-million dollar project from running at all. Again, totally non-obvious unless you had a tremendous amount of context and were running a pretty complex system to figure it out, with a sort of tenacity the LLMs don't currently possess.

Re: I am happier writing code by hand

#270

Post by xigoi »

redox99 wrote: post #238
AstroBen wrote: post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No-one serious is claiming 6x productivity improvements for close to equal quality This is proving GP's point that you're going off feels and/or exaggerating

Quality is better both from a user and a code perspective. From a user perspective I often implement a feature and then just throw it away no worries because I can reimplement it in an hour again based on my findings. No sunken cost. Also I can implement very small details that otherwise I'd have to backlog. This leads to a higher quality product for the user. From a code standpoint I frequently do large refactors th…

> I have a level of test coverage that would be infeasible for a one man show.

When a metric becomes a target, it ceases to be a good metric.

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