OP briefly touches on it, but vibe coding is (typically) absent of struggle, besides the usual frustrations with code flat out not working or the LLM not understanding the nuance of human language. Whenever I build a solution that a PM has asked for, I can typically make some predictions about what possible problems are going to be and potential solutions, but you don't know what you don't know. It's not until I immerse myself in a problem space that I actually understand what some of the roadblocks might be. The LLMs that I've tried are more than happy to keep hacking at a problem and implement workarounds, instead of taking a step back and wonder if the approach is wrong.
AI makes you boring
291–300 of 397 posts
Re: AI makes you boring
#292Based on a lot of real world experience, I'm convinced LLM-generated documentation is worse than nothing. It's a complete waste of everybody's time. The number of people who I see having E-mail conversations where person A uses an LLM to turn two sentences into ten paragraphs, and person B uses an LLM to summarize the ten paragraphs into two sentences, is becoming genuinely alarming to me.
> The number of people who I see having E-mail conversations where person A uses an LLM to turn two sentences into ten paragraphs, and person B uses an LLM to summarize the ten paragraphs into two sentences, is becoming genuinely alarming to me. I remember in the early days of LLMs this was the joke meme. But, now seeing it happen in real life is more than just alarming. It's ridiculous. It's like the opposite of com…
> But, now seeing it happen in real life is more than just alarming. It's ridiculous. It's like the opposite of compressing a payload over the wire: We're taking our output, expanding it, transmitting it over the wire, and then compressing it again for input. Why do we do this?
I assume this is satire.
Re: AI makes you boring
#293Based on a lot of real world experience, I'm convinced LLM-generated documentation is worse than nothing. It's a complete waste of everybody's time. The number of people who I see having E-mail conversations where person A uses an LLM to turn two sentences into ten paragraphs, and person B uses an LLM to summarize the ten paragraphs into two sentences, is becoming genuinely alarming to me.
LLM-generated documentation is great for LLMs to read so they can code better and/or more efficiently. You can write it manually, but as I've discovered over the decades, humans rarely read documentation anyway. So you'll be spending a lot of time writing good for the bots.
Re: AI makes you boring
#294Earlier quoted context omitted.
Don't you think their is an opposite of that effect too? I feel like I can breeze past the easy, time consuming infrastructure phase of projects, and spend MUCH more time getting to high level interesting problems?
I do believe you, but I have to ask: what are these incredibly tedious "easy, time consuming parts of projects" everyone seems to bring up? Refactoring I can see, but I have a sense that's not what you mean here.
For me, the answer to this question is: parts that involve no architectural decisions, and that won't need to be extended or built upon significantly in the future.
When I'm working on a greenfield project that I intend to build out further (which is what I am currently doing), I find that there's not a lot of work that fits those criteria. I expect that can change drastically when you're working on something that is either more mature, or more narrowly scoped (and thus won't need to be extended too much, meaning poor architectural decisions are not a big issue).
Re: AI makes you boring
#295This issue exists in art and I want to push back a little. There has always been automation in art even at the most micro level. Take for example (an extreme example) the paintbrush. Do you care where each bristle lands? No of course not. The bristles land randomly on the canvas, but it’s controlled chaos. The cumulative effect of many bristles landing on a canvas is a general feel or texture. This is an extreme exam…
> Coincidentally, these same people think the most “artistic” process is the most intentional one.
While people do think like this, it misses the point.
Yes, all forms of art is FULL of randomness and people copying each other. The thing that makes it special is that it took people going out and living and having experiences to create it. They have to actively absorb prior art, learn about it, analyze it, generally be influenced by it. You have to seek out paints, clay, musical instruments, etc etc and at least somewhat learn how to use them. It's not about being difficult to do (although it's certainly impressive but not part of the emotional takeaway), but everyone's process is different and their experiences go into what they create. When I see a photograph of a tree, I think: "Someone went to where that tree is!" and that's part of the feeling and excitement of a really artful photo.
Now, someone who has only ever heard the term "free jazz" can sit in their parents' basement and type out "make me a free jazz song" and shit out the result onto the internet. It's really not the same thing at all.
Re: AI makes you boring
#296Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Writing and programming are both a form of working at a problem through text… Whoa whoa whoa hold your horses, code has a pretty important property that ordinary prose doesn’t have: it can make real things happen even if no one reads it (it’s executable). I don’t want to read something that someone didn’t take the time to write. But I’ll gladly use a tool someone had an AI write, as long as it works (which these th…
> even if no one reads it I gotta disagree with you there! Code that isn't read doesn't do anything. Code must be read to be compiled, it must be read to be interpreted, etc. I think this points to a difference in our understanding of "read" means, perhaps? To expand my pithy "not gonna read if you didn't write" bit: The idea that code stands on its own is a lie. The world changes around code and code must be changed…
[deleted]
Re: AI makes you boring
#297Earlier quoted context omitted.
What concerns me is how easily the “rest of the world” is changing their opinions about what’s good. If the result isn’t good, then it isn’t good, sure. But in my experience there’s a large contingent of people, especially the youth, that are more reactionary about AI than they are interested in creativity. Their idea of creative value is inherently tied to self-expression and individualism, which AI and systems-base…
The reality is there is very little non-individualistic art (algorithmic, AI generated etc) that has much qualitative merit. Art for the most part has always been the expression of an individual, even art tightly bound to a cultural context.
>The reality is there is very little non-individualistic art (algorithmic, AI generated etc) that has much qualitative merit
Big opinions there. A large amount of art that you think comes from individual expression is often not. There are countless examples of artists that secretly used algorithmic processes. A great example is Vermeer: https://youtu.be/94pCNUu6qFY?si=M6UQ-XuHNtoj2-3a.
This is what I mean about how this individualistic philosophy of creativity actually just results in artistic gatekeeping and manipulation of the audience
It’s very common for artists to add on individual expression narratives at the end of the process just so they can market the art, and the reality is that the individualism was never there to begin with. It’s just manipulation and advertising, and it sucks because the success of advertising like this actually undermines the quality of the art world. Because audiences are so susceptible to advertising narratives, artists are forced to spend more time on advertising more than art
> Art for the most part has always been the expression of an individual, even art tightly bound to a cultural context.
This is also not true. This idea mostly comes from the Romantic period. Modern day versions of it are often really just referencing a single book from the 1930s called The Principles of Art by a guy named R.G. Collingwood. It’s a very recent way of seeing art. Historically, art was connected to religion, and therefore thought to be valuable because it was universal rather than individualistic and personal
Re: AI makes you boring
#298Earlier quoted context omitted.
[flagged]
> the signal-to-noise ratio in AI-drafted comms is brutal This is also the case for AI generated projects btw, the backend projects that I’ve been looking at often contains reimplementations of common functionality that already exists elsewhere, such as in-memory LRU caches when they should have just used a library.
Bad example, you really should just write caching yourself. It’s far too little code to pull in a dependency and if you write it yourself in every project that needs it then you will get good at it, so cache invalidation bugs won’t be an issue.
Re: AI makes you boring
#299Earlier quoted context omitted.
> the signal-to-noise ratio in AI-drafted comms is brutal This is also the case for AI generated projects btw, the backend projects that I’ve been looking at often contains reimplementations of common functionality that already exists elsewhere, such as in-memory LRU caches when they should have just used a library.
Bad example, you really should just write caching yourself. It’s far too little code to pull in a dependency and if you write it yourself in every project that needs it then you will get good at it, so cache invalidation bugs won’t be an issue.
Poe's Law strikes again!
Re: AI makes you boring
#300While I agree overall, I'm going to do some mild pushback here: I'm working on a "vibe" coded project right now. I'm about 2 months in (not a weekend), and I've "thought about" the project more than any other "hand coded" project I've built in the past. Instead of spending time trying to figure out a host of "previously solved issues" AI frees my human brain to think about goals, features, concepts, user experience a…
Exactly. People project all kinds of ethics on writing code. The constant hum of anti-LLM on HN is monotonous and telling. Hurt egos everywhere.
I dunno, I think the boosters show their hurt feelings here more often than the detractors do.