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AI is making me dumb

jpain.io

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261–270 of 328 posts

Re: AI is making me dumb

#261

Post by lmm »

0xbadcafebee wrote: post #254

It is impossible to be made less smart by not manually writing code. If it were possible, you would be stupider every time you go on vacation. Your brain's neuronal connections do not die from talking to a chat bot. What's actually happened is you took a break from a highly technical skill. Every person on the planet will "forget" some part of that technical skill if they don't use it in a while. But the information…

> you would be stupider every time you go on vacation

Are you sure people aren't?

Re: AI is making me dumb

#262

Post by henry_bone »

WalterBright wrote: post #82

Well, James, forgive me for being so inquisitive; but during the past few weeks, I’ve wondered whether you might be having some second thoughts about the mission.

Nice. HAL, from "A Space Odyssey", right?

From this, can we infer you're not exactly "all in" on coding via LLM Walter?

I, for one, am not. I've gone on the record with my thoughts in prior LLM related comment threads. They will make us dumb.

Re: AI is making me dumb

#263

Post by borski »

ryandrake wrote: post #72
Rooster61 wrote: post #11

I can't relate that much to this. Every time I use AI to write code, I'm constantly fighting a feeling on the back of my neck that I need to look over everything it has done and supplement/alter it with my own code. That ick feeling counteracts the dopamine hit of having a working app after a few minutes of vibe coding, and I don't think that's going anywhere anytime soon. That said, I have experience. I could absolu…

In my experience, Claude only knows how to spew code. Every problem you want it to solve, it translates into "more code" rather than "less code". You have to very closely code review everything it does, otherwise your codebase is going to just grow and grow, and asymptotically approach 100% debt. I code review everything that Claude produces, and I'd estimate about 90-95% of the time, my reaction is WOW it works but…

You can also tell it to specifically focus on removing unnecessary code as a pass, and it does that pretty well.

Re: AI is making me dumb

#264

Post by WalterBright »

henry_bone wrote: post #262
WalterBright wrote: post #82

Well, James, forgive me for being so inquisitive; but during the past few weeks, I’ve wondered whether you might be having some second thoughts about the mission.

Nice. HAL, from "A Space Odyssey", right? From this, can we infer you're not exactly "all in" on coding via LLM Walter? I, for one, am not. I've gone on the record with my thoughts in prior LLM related comment threads. They will make us dumb.

This sort of thing has cropped up before, and it has always been due to human error.

Re: AI is making me dumb

#265

Post by borski »

lmm wrote: post #261
0xbadcafebee wrote: post #254

It is impossible to be made less smart by not manually writing code. If it were possible, you would be stupider every time you go on vacation. Your brain's neuronal connections do not die from talking to a chat bot. What's actually happened is you took a break from a highly technical skill. Every person on the planet will "forget" some part of that technical skill if they don't use it in a while. But the information…

> you would be stupider every time you go on vacation Are you sure people aren't?

They usually come back smarter, actually.

Re: AI is making me dumb

#266

Post by denizay »

"With coding, I've been using AI entirely for a year or two. I've been entirely prompting and I haven't written a single line of code."

I just can't understand this as a programmer. I use AI a lot as well when I program but I still write a lot of the code by myself just because it is easier to write the code I want, specially if I know what I want, than to make AI understand what kind of implementation I'm thinking of.

Re: AI is making me dumb

#267

Post by joquarky »

ryandrake wrote: post #72
Rooster61 wrote: post #11

I can't relate that much to this. Every time I use AI to write code, I'm constantly fighting a feeling on the back of my neck that I need to look over everything it has done and supplement/alter it with my own code. That ick feeling counteracts the dopamine hit of having a working app after a few minutes of vibe coding, and I don't think that's going anywhere anytime soon. That said, I have experience. I could absolu…

In my experience, Claude only knows how to spew code. Every problem you want it to solve, it translates into "more code" rather than "less code". You have to very closely code review everything it does, otherwise your codebase is going to just grow and grow, and asymptotically approach 100% debt. I code review everything that Claude produces, and I'd estimate about 90-95% of the time, my reaction is WOW it works but…

It really does want to make everything overcomplicated.

I end most of my pre-plan prompts with "KISS - Keep it simple" to keep it mostly under control.

I also keep each file under 1000 lines and do a full scan of code and docs for cruft every 20-30 task cycles.

Been working on the same project for six montha and glad to say there is minimal bloat.

Re: AI is making me dumb

#268

Post by fatata123 »

notarobot123 wrote: post #171
ryandrake wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my experience, Claude only knows how to spew code. Every problem you want it to solve, it translates into "more code" rather than "less code". You have to very closely code review everything it does, otherwise your codebase is going to just grow and grow, and asymptotically approach 100% debt. I code review everything that Claude produces, and I'd estimate about 90-95% of the time, my reaction is WOW it works but…

At this point, it's worth asking whether lots of relatively straightforward verbose code is actually significantly worse than the least code necessary for the problem. Obviously, architecture matters. What might matter less is verbosity. The reason we aimed for minimal "accidental complexity" up to now was directly related to the cost/pain of changing and maintaining that code. Hasn't the economics of maintenance and…

[dead]

Re: AI is making me dumb

#269

Post by henry_bone »

WalterBright wrote: post #264
henry_bone wrote: post #262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nice. HAL, from "A Space Odyssey", right? From this, can we infer you're not exactly "all in" on coding via LLM Walter? I, for one, am not. I've gone on the record with my thoughts in prior LLM related comment threads. They will make us dumb.

This sort of thing has cropped up before, and it has always been due to human error.

Hmm, Thanks HAL. :-)

Re: AI is making me dumb

#270

Post by joquarky »

borski wrote: post #263
ryandrake wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my experience, Claude only knows how to spew code. Every problem you want it to solve, it translates into "more code" rather than "less code". You have to very closely code review everything it does, otherwise your codebase is going to just grow and grow, and asymptotically approach 100% debt. I code review everything that Claude produces, and I'd estimate about 90-95% of the time, my reaction is WOW it works but…

You can also tell it to specifically focus on removing unnecessary code as a pass, and it does that pretty well.

I do one of these occasionally and it usually finds redundancies and/or inconsistencies to clean up. It's very effective and should be part of any process involving agentic coding.
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