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AI doesn’t reduce work, it intensifies it

simonwillison.net

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Re: AI doesn’t reduce work, it intensifies it

#281

Post by isjsiwndkwj »

rybosworld wrote: post #206
cedws wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m finding that the code LLMs produce is just average. Not great, not terrible. Which makes sense, the model is basically a complex representation of the average of its training data right? If I want what I consider ‘good code’ I have to steer it. So I wouldn’t use LLMs to produce significant chunks of code for something I care about. And publishing vibe coded projects under my own GitHub user feels like it devalues…

We've gone from "it's glorified auto-complete" to "the quality of working, end-to-end features, is average", in just ~2 years. I think it goes without saying that they will be writing "good code" in short time. I also wonder how much of this "I don't trust them yet" viewpoint is coming from people who are using agents the least. Is it rare that AI one-shots code that I would be willing to raise as a PR with my name o…

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Re: AI doesn’t reduce work, it intensifies it

#282

Post by elicash »

MrBuddyCasino wrote: post #252
elicash wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can be libertarian and a capitalist and still be pro-union. At the end of the day, a Collective Bargaining Agreement is just a private contract between two parties. It can be a way to raise wages without government setting a minimum price for labor. While I'd agree most of its proponents (like myself) also favor other left-wing policies, I'm just saying it doesn't need to be.

Unions are labour cartels for the purpose of extracting above-market wages from the commons, a sort of mafia. They are incompatible with capitalism and libertarianism, especially with libertarianism.

By this logic, every corporation is a cartel to extract below-market wages from the commons. Both sides are bargaining collectively. And so you'd be saying both are incompatible with libertarianism.

There are strands of libertarian thought, I suppose, where government shouldn't be incorporating businesses at all. But it's still legit to say libertarianism is compatible with corporations and with labor unions.

Re: AI doesn’t reduce work, it intensifies it

#283

Post by rybosworld »

cedws wrote: post #279
rybosworld wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We've gone from "it's glorified auto-complete" to "the quality of working, end-to-end features, is average", in just ~2 years. I think it goes without saying that they will be writing "good code" in short time. I also wonder how much of this "I don't trust them yet" viewpoint is coming from people who are using agents the least. Is it rare that AI one-shots code that I would be willing to raise as a PR with my name o…

First you have to classify what “good code” is, something that programmers have still not settled on in the over half a century that the field has existed. I also think what the other reply said is true, going from average to “good code” is way harder because it implies a need for LLMs to self critique beyond what they do today. I don’t think just training on a set of hand picked samples is enough. There’s also the k…

AI's can self-critique via mechanisms like chain of thought or user specified guard rails like a hook that requires the test suite to pass before a task can be considered complete/ready for human review. These can and do result in higher quality code.

Agree that "good code" is vague - it probably always be. But we can still agree that code quality is going up over time without having a complete specification for what defines "good".

Re: AI doesn’t reduce work, it intensifies it

#284

Post by 9rx »

MrBuddyCasino wrote: post #252
elicash wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can be libertarian and a capitalist and still be pro-union. At the end of the day, a Collective Bargaining Agreement is just a private contract between two parties. It can be a way to raise wages without government setting a minimum price for labor. While I'd agree most of its proponents (like myself) also favor other left-wing policies, I'm just saying it doesn't need to be.

Unions are labour cartels for the purpose of extracting above-market wages from the commons, a sort of mafia. They are incompatible with capitalism and libertarianism, especially with libertarianism.

Cartels are not at odds with libertarianism. In fact, freedom of association is the fundamental underpinning of libertarianism. Unions are the libertarian solution to labour woes. Other groups normally favour regulation instead.

Libertarians don't have a theoretical problem with cartels because if a cartel tries to push for above-market prices, someone else will swoop in and start doing it for less, taking all the cartel customers with them.

Re: AI doesn’t reduce work, it intensifies it

#285

Post by cedws »

rybosworld wrote: post #283
cedws wrote: post #279

Earlier quoted context omitted.

First you have to classify what “good code” is, something that programmers have still not settled on in the over half a century that the field has existed. I also think what the other reply said is true, going from average to “good code” is way harder because it implies a need for LLMs to self critique beyond what they do today. I don’t think just training on a set of hand picked samples is enough. There’s also the k…

AI's can self-critique via mechanisms like chain of thought or user specified guard rails like a hook that requires the test suite to pass before a task can be considered complete/ready for human review. These can and do result in higher quality code. Agree that "good code" is vague - it probably always be. But we can still agree that code quality is going up over time without having a complete specification for what…

Unfortunately I can only give anecdotes, but in my experience the LLM's 'thinking' does not lead to code quality improvements in the same way that a programmer thinking for a while would.

In my experience having LLMs write Go, it tends to factor code in not so great way from the start, probably due to lacking the mental model of pieces composing together. Furthermore, once a structure is in place, there doesn't seem to be a trigger point that causes the LLM to step back and think about reorganising the code, or how the code it wants to write could be better integrated into what's already there. It tends to be very biased by the structures that already exist and not really question them.

A programmer might write a function, notice it becoming too long or doing too much, and then decide break it down into smaller subroutines. I've never seen an LLM really do this, they seem biased towards being additive.

I believe good code comes from an intuition which is very hard to convey. Imprinting hard rules into the LLM like 'refactor long functions' will probably just lead to overcorrection and poor results. It needs to build its own taste for good code, and I'm not sure if that's possible with current technology.

Re: AI doesn’t reduce work, it intensifies it

#286

Post by rybosworld »

eqvinox wrote: post #236
rybosworld wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I (and lots of people) used to think the models would run out of training data and it would halt progress. They did run out of human-authored training data (depending on who you ask), in 2024/2025. And they still improve.

> And they still improve. But what asymptote are they approaching? Average code? Good code? Great code?

I'd argue that "good", or at least "good enough", is when they reach a point where it becomes preferable to spend your time prompting rather than reading and writing code. That the final output meets the feature specifications is more or less the goal.

A lot of developers are having a difficult time accepting that the code doesn't matter nearly as much anymore, myself included. The feedback cycles that made hot fixing, bug fixing, customer support, etc. so expensive, have shrunk by orders of magnitude. A codebase that can be maintained by humans is perhaps not a goal worth pursuing anymore.

To really see this and feel this, I think it's worthwhile to spend at least a weekend or two seeing what you can build without writing or reviewing any of the code. Use a frontier model. Opus 4.6 or Codex 5.3. Probably doesn't matter which one you choose.

If you give it an honest try, you'll see that a lot of the limitations are self-imposed. Said another way: the root problem is some flavor of the user under specifying a prompt, having inconsistent design docs, and not implementing guard rails to prevent the AI from reintroducing bugs you previously squashed.

It's a very new way of working and it feels foreign. But there are a lot of very smart, very successful people doing this. People who have written millions of lines of code over their lifetime, and who enjoyed doing it, are now fully delegating the task.

Re: AI doesn’t reduce work, it intensifies it

#288

Post by fhd2 »

CSSer wrote: post #39
fhd2 wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What kills me personally is that I'm constantly 80% there, but the remaining 20% can be just insurmountable. It's really like gambling: Just one more round and it'll be useful, OK, not quite, just one more, for hours.

Do you mean in terms of adding one more feature or in terms of how a feature you're adding almost works but not quite right? I find the latter a lot more challenging to cut my losses when it's on a good run (and often even when I know I could just write this by hand), especially because there's as much if not more intrigue about whether the tool can accomplish it or not. These are the moments where my mind has drifte…

Yeah the latter. Doesn't happen much with super obvious stuff, but especially when I'm a bit fuzzy on requirements, it can be just endless iterations.

Re: AI doesn’t reduce work, it intensifies it

#289

Post by Herring »

thisisit wrote: post #254
rybosworld wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We've gone from "it's glorified auto-complete" to "the quality of working, end-to-end features, is average", in just ~2 years. I think it goes without saying that they will be writing "good code" in short time. I also wonder how much of this "I don't trust them yet" viewpoint is coming from people who are using agents the least. Is it rare that AI one-shots code that I would be willing to raise as a PR with my name o…

Building expertise isn't a straight line. Going from a bad to average is much easier than going from average to good.

Yeah Tesla and Waymo know this quite well. There's a reason we don't have moon bases yet.

Re: AI doesn’t reduce work, it intensifies it

#290

Post by fhd2 »

darkwater wrote: post #184
shakna wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sitting on an idea doesn't necessarily mean being inactive. You can think at the same time as doing something else. "Shower thoughts" are often born of that process.

I know, and letting an agent/LLM "think" about some ideas does not waste your time either. Yes, it "wastes" energy and you need to read and think about the results after, we don't have neural interfaces to computer, so the inner thinking feedback loop will always be faster. But I keep thinking GP comment was unfair: you can just have your idea in the background to check whether it is good or not exactly the same, and…

It's not a complaint about LLMs, it's a complaint about my own behaviour. Maybe I didn't make that clear enough.

Maybe like one of the siblings said, I just shouldn't jump right into execution even if that barrier has been lowered. But it sure is tempting for me.

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