Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

AI is making me dumb

jpain.io

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

271–280 of 328 posts

Re: AI is making me dumb

#271

Post by bartread »

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…

A problem I’ve found is that when you’re adding functionality or refactoring it often leaves unused methods or types behind, at least with multiple devs working on the same codebase.

This unused code gets further modified as time goes on: new functionality is wired in, or it gets further refactored. Usually it’ll still have tests that cover it. It gives the impression of being live code, but it’s not: it’s zombified.

So you get situations where it gets wired up to something and then that something doesn’t work and you wonder why and so you start digging about and you discover it’s because it has been wired into a path that is never executed.

The fog of relatively recent changes sometimes makes it hard to figure out if the code should be unused or if someone just forgot to hook it in as part of a bigger piece of work. Then you find nobody else is really sure either.

So that extra complexity comes at a cost. It can slow you down or trip you up; catch you by surprise.

Re: AI is making me dumb

#273

Post by joquarky »

fhub wrote: post #256
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…

I'm curious how much you have tuned your CLAUDE.md file. You can get very specific and direct about what your expectations/desires are. You can also have another agent do a critical review with your expectations/desires and feed that back.

Just be careful to not put too much in there or it won't have enough attention left over for the tasks.

Look at the doc hub pattern if your {agent}.md file is getting more than ~100 lines.

Re: AI is making me dumb

#274

Post by denkmoon »

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…

>asymptotically approach 100% debt

What to do if you're just one dev in an org of 50? Who are all pushing more and more code every PR? I'm gonna have to leave aren't I :(

Re: AI is making me dumb

#275

Post by binary0010 »

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…

I don't think people are talking about the least code possible, just not incredibly verbose and inefficient like what you get by default from llms.

For example I have a game I've been working on for a few years, I do stuff like "implement this simple psuedo physics system to make the bot follow the character like so...etc"

After some planning and back and forth.

It returns mostly working code a little odd on some edge case.

But as I've hand coded this thing for years. I could easily look at it. Laugh my ass off, it had multiple classes and around 1k lines of code, all kinds of crazy non performant crap.

The exact thing I needed, I reprogrammed in around 5 lines of very simple code that did exactly what I needed with no edge case weirdness.

Now the vibe coders actually ship that shit. I like to read vibe code games now and again, and there is no possible way those guys are ever shipping a real game, as every single decision is verbose along with the worst performance decisions over and over everywhere.

Sure it can get you some cute little toy projects, but it will absolutely fall apart if you are trying to make real games.

Don't know about saas apps or whatever. Maybe that stuff doesn't matter at all.

Re: AI is making me dumb

#277

Post by skydhash »

svachalek wrote: post #133
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…

I'm a very senior dev (32 years exp) but I've got the process nailed down tight enough with .md documents, skills, review agents, etc, that I don't typically have that feeling or any need to do anything extra. I don't think this makes me dumb though, I've just moved up stack. Rather than caring about assembly language or source code, I'm focused on requirements, architectural decisions, engineering process, and ever…

Are you the one coding a fix if there's a bug in production? If not, then you do not have the process nailed down.

Re: AI is making me dumb

#278

Post by protocolture »

thisisthenewme wrote: post #126

As a developer, I kind of feel like this all smells like job security. After using LLMs for a while, I have to admit it's pretty nice, and I like using it. I've been vibecoding a few apps, and it's a good dopamine hit to immediately see your ideas come to life. However, based on my experience, it will bite you if you trust it blindly. Even in my vibecoded projects, it keeps adding "features" without me asking for the…

>As a developer, I kind of feel like this all smells like job security.

Ditto, but as an infra guy, doubly so. People are making infrastructure decisions, they are writing config files, they are writing scripts and hacks and everything with AI. People are vibe networking entire ISPs. I saw one guy showing off how he had replaced his entire monitoring system with Claude. Its going to be good money for people with abstract problem solving skills. I cant imagine all the fun new problems people are vibing up for me right now.

Re: AI is making me dumb

#279

Post by skydhash »

godshatter wrote: post #245
throw4847285 wrote: post #138

We talk a lot about the risks of AI in schools, but those same risks apply in any learning environment. I recently started a new job and I find that AI is making it so much harder for me to onboard. I am adjusting to my role much slower than my peers who are using AI less. I am coding in a language I am unfamiliar with, which makes the lure of vibe coding stronger. I am at least skilled enough to recognize when Claud…

I'd suggest going the route of having Claude teach you what you need to know. How do I uppercase this string? What's the best way to tackle this problem? Is there a standard way to do this thing? Then you learn along the way. You don't have to use it as a search engine, just ask it what you need to know in the moment. It will shake it's token chains and give you something that's useful, especially for a beginner in t…

> How do I uppercase this string? What's the best way to tackle this problem? Is there a standard way to do this thing?

I strongly believe that it's better to just take a couple week of slow times and read a good book about the technical matter you're dealing with. Having bite sized answers isn't a good way to be proficient.

Re: AI is making me dumb

#280

Post by skydhash »

jasonjei wrote: post #202
hirvi74 wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What even is rote, mundane code? How much of this rote, mundane code do you honestly have in any given project?

I don't care to build a ledger or build an ETL system. I don't care to spend my time debugging IaC terraform systems. GPT allowed me to focus on the core functionality of my code instead of investing hours of my time on ancillary support systems that are well understood. Terraform is notoriously difficult even for the most skilled among us. It helped me manage and tune my Cloud Tasks queue for processing from the mic…

If there's one thing I learned from engineering and confirmed by my years in software development. It's easy to make something that work, but it's way harder to put guaranties on it. That's why copy-paste from Stack Overflow was a real strategy.
Post reply on HN