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The hidden cost of AI coding

terriblesoftware.org

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Re: The hidden cost of AI coding

#271

Post by RHSeeger »

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…

> So if someone generates their music with AI to get their idea to music you don’t look down on it?

It depends entirely on how they're using it. AI is a tool, and it can be used to help produce some wonderful things.

- I don't look down on a photographer because they use a tool to take a beautiful picture (that would have taken a painter longer to paint)

- I don't look down on someone using digital art tools to blur/blend/manipulate their work in interesting ways

- I don't look down on musicians that feed their output through a board to change the way it sounds

AI (and lots of other tools) can be used to replace the creative process, which is not great. But it can also be used to enhance the creative process, which _is_ great.

Re: The hidden cost of AI coding

#273

Post by Workaccount2 »

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…

People who can't spin pottery shouldn't be allowed to have bowls, especially mass produced by machine ones.

I understand your point, but I think it is ultimately rooted in a romantic view of the world, rather than the practical truth we live in. We all live a life completely inundated with things we have no expertise in, available to us at almost trivial cost. In fact it is so prevalent that just about everyone takes it for granted.

Re: The hidden cost of AI coding

#274

Post by lucaspauker »

bgwalter wrote: post #167
RedNifre wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right, just how back in the day, people who loved writing assembly hated high level languages and people who found assembly too tedious loved compilers.

First of all, Lisp, Fortran and COBOL had been around most of the time when assembly was popular. Assembly was used because of resource constraints. Secondly, you are not writing anything you get from an LLM. You prompt it and it spits out other people's code, stripped of attribution. This is what children do: Ask someone to fix something for you without understanding the result.

Good artists copy, great artists steal

Re: The hidden cost of AI coding

#275

Post by docmechanic »

selfhoster11 wrote: post #170
docmechanic wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s only true if you tokenize words rather than characters. Character tokenization generates new content outside the training vocabulary.

All major tokenisers have explicit support for encoding arbitrary byte sequences. There's usually a consecutive range of tokens reserved for 0x00 to 0xFF, and you can encode any novel UTF-8 words or structures with it. Including emoji and characters that weren't a part of the model's initial training, if you show it some examples.

Pretty sure that we’re talking apples and oranges. Yes to the arbitrary byte sequences used by tokenizers, but that is not the topic of discussion. The question is will the tokenizer come up with words not in the training vocabulary. Word tokenizers don’t, but character tokenizers do.

Source: Generative Deep Learning by David Foster, 2nd edition, published in 2023. From “Tokenization” on page 134.

“If you use word tokens: …. willnever be able to predict words outside of the training vocabulary.”

"If you use character tokens: The model may generate sequences of characters that form words outside the training vocabulary."

Re: The hidden cost of AI coding

#276

Post by docmechanic »

emaro wrote: post #111
docmechanic wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s only true if you tokenize words rather than characters. Character tokenization generates new content outside the training vocabulary.

Kind of, but character-based tokens make it a lot harder and more expensive to learn semantics.

Source: Generative Deep Learning by David Foster, 2nd edition, published in 2023. From “Tokenization” on page 134.

“If you use word tokens: …. willnever be able to predict words outside of the training vocabulary.”

"If you use character tokens: The model may generate sequences of characters that form words outside the training vocabulary."

Re: The hidden cost of AI coding

#277

Post by masfuerte »

nairadithya wrote: post #254
ThrowawayTestr wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I like solving problems but I hate coding. Wasting 20 minutes because you forgot a semicolon or something is not fun. AI let's me focus on the problem and not bother with the tedious coding bit.

This doesn't even make sense, forgetting a semicolon is immediately caught by the compiler. What positive benefits does AI provide here?

It depends on the language. Javascript is fine without semicolons until it isn't. Of course, a linter will solve this more reliably than AI.

Re: The hidden cost of AI coding

#278

Post by wolvesechoes »

clbrmbr wrote: post #204

I have actually had some really great flow evenings lately, the likes of which I have not enjoyed in many years, precisely because of AI-assisted coding. The trick is to break the task down in to components that are of moderate complexity so that the AI can handle them (Gemini 2.5 Pro one-shots), and keep your mind on the high-level design which today's AI cannot coordinate. What helps me is to think of it like I'm a…

I always wonder what kind of projects are we talking about. I am currently writing a compiler and simulation engine for differential-algebraic equations. I tried few models, hoping they would help me, but they could not provide any help with small details nor with bigger building blocks.

I guess if you code stuff that had been coded a lot in public repos, it is fine, otherwise AI does not help in any way. Actually, I think I wasted more time trying to make it produce the output I wish for than it took me to do this myself.

Re: The hidden cost of AI coding

#279

Post by kelsey978126 »

clbrmbr wrote: post #204

I have actually had some really great flow evenings lately, the likes of which I have not enjoyed in many years, precisely because of AI-assisted coding. The trick is to break the task down in to components that are of moderate complexity so that the AI can handle them (Gemini 2.5 Pro one-shots), and keep your mind on the high-level design which today's AI cannot coordinate. What helps me is to think of it like I'm a…

people seem to forget this type of argument from the article was used for stack overflow for years, calling it the destruction of programming. "How can you get into flow when you are just copying and pasting?". Those same people are now all sour grapes for AI assisted development. There will always be detractors saying that the documentation you are using is wrong, the tools that you are using are wrong, and the methodology you are using is wrong.

AI assisted development is no different from managing an engineering team. "How can you trust outsourced developers to do anything right? You won't understand the code when it breaks"... "How can you use an IDE, vim is the only correct tool" etc etc etc.

Nothing has changed besides the process. When people started jumping on object orientation they called procedures the devil itself, just as procedures were once called structured programming and came to banish away the considered harmful goto. Everything is considered harmful when theres something new around the corner that promises to either make development more productive or developers more interchangeable. These are institutional requirements and will never go away.

Embrace AIOP (AI oriented programming) to banish copy and paste google driven development which is now considered harmful.

Re: The hidden cost of AI coding

#280

Post by smj-edison »

jll29 wrote: post #121
smj-edison wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bit of a tangent but... Haven't we been automating jobs away since the industrial revolution? I know AI may be an exception to this trend, but at least with classical programming, demand goes up, GDP per capita goes up, and new industries are born. I mean, there's three ways to get stuff done: do it yourself, get someone else to do it, or get a machine to do it. #2 doesn't scale, since someone still has to do it. If…

We have always automated, because we can. What is qualitatively different this time is that it affects intellectual abilities - there is nothing higher up in the work "food chain". Replacing physical work you could always argue you'd have time to focus on making decisions. Replacing decision making might mean telling people go sit on the beach and take your universal basic income (UBI) cheque, we don't need you anymo…

I agree that we have been able to automate a lot of jobs, but it's not like intellectual jobs have completely replaced physical labor. Electricians, phlebotomists, linemen, firefighters, caregivers, etc, etc, are jobs that current AI approaches don't even scratch. I mean, Boston dynamics has barely been able to get a robot to walk.

So no, we don't need to retrain them to be AI engineers if we have an active shortage of electricians and plumbers. Now, perhaps there aren't enough jobs—I haven't looked at exact numbers—but we still have a long ways to go before I think everything is automated.

Everything being slop seems to be the much more likely issue in my eyes[1].

[1] https://titotal.substack.com/p/slopworld-2035-the-dangers-of...

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