Very refreshing take on ai coding
Eight years of wanting, three months of building with AI
291–300 of 349 posts
Re: Eight years of wanting, three months of building with AI
#292Earlier quoted context omitted.
Well for me, the amount of time/effort as a function my of my motivation has acted as a natural gatekeeper to bad ideas. Just because I can do something with AI now doesn’t necessarily mean that I should . I am also weary of trading time and effort for outright money right out of my own pocket to find out, especially when I find the people I’d be giving money to so reprehensible. I don’t live somewhere where develope…
Your position makes an immense amount of sense for your described situation. As I said, I'm retired, and so I've never had to clean up AI slop at $DAYJOB. Since the whole AI thing would be a learning experience for me, it would include trying to toilet train the AI itself, as others have intimated can be done in some cases, rather than dealing with a bunch of already-checked-into-the-repo-slop. And that may be a losi…
The biggest thing that has changed in my experience (at least in a professions setting) is now that people have AI agents they don’t really have any motivation to improve. If you tell them something that needs to be changed they just reprompt the agent until it’s good enough - but the most sinister thing is they keep making the same mistakes over and over again. There is no growth, no shared understanding that disseminates through review - just re-prompting. They often just directly use my review comments as prompts! People don’t understand code they generated themselves just a few days later. But not in a “oh just let me reread this again real quick” kind of way but a “I have absolutely no clue wtf I am even looking at” way.
I’ve been sounding the alarm in my own circles about the lack of junior roles now because of AI - which will lead to a shortage of seniors in just a few years - but there is something even more sinister: juniors no longer improve enough to be intermediates and seniors, and worse…seniors and intermediates have regressed to juniors through laziness and cognitive offloading.
Like if I’m just sending code review to a middle man prompter - why not just skip the middle man? I’m already wrangling a handful of AI agents myself every day, so what is even the point of this extra person anyway? I don’t want to replace people with AI but if the person is so lazy that even I would probably prefer just doing the prompting myself then why shouldn’t I replace them with AI?
Re: Eight years of wanting, three months of building with AI
#293I agree. Keeping it short, and keeping it checkable works for me. Once it starts to become long and fuzzy, AI gets derailed.
Re: Eight years of wanting, three months of building with AI
#294The description of working with AI tools really resonates with me. It's dangerous to work on my codebase when I'm tired, since I don't feel like doing it properly, so I play slots with Claude, and stay up later than I should. I usually come back later and realize the final code that gets generated is an absolute mess. It is really good for getting up to speed with frameworks and techniques though, like they mentioned…
You should take advantage of these states of cognitive exhaustion by asking Claude to document and explain the codebase to you, and checking whether it still makes sense. If there are things that you have trouble understanding in that state, make a note of them to check later whether they can be simplified.
Or, you know, rest :-)
Re: Eight years of wanting, three months of building with AI
#295This post is excellent, and accurately describes my experience writing pcons (pcons.org) as a side project. I was one of the original developers of SCons and have wanted to rebuild it better for more than a decade. All the same roadblocks Maganti describes kept me from starting it, and Claude Opus 4.6 suddenly opened the door, and now it's live and people are starting to use it as a cmake or scons replacement. My experience over the last few months mirror Maganti's in many ways: ease of refactoring, investigating many more design ideas, getting frustrated with blind alleys and its not understanding the big picture, and ultimately getting a product I'm proud of.
Vision, taste and good judgment are going to be the key skills for software developers from now on.
Re: Eight years of wanting, three months of building with AI
#296Refreshing to see an honest and balanced take on AI coding. This is what real AI-assisted coding looks like once you get past the initial wow factor of having the AI write code that executes and does what you asked. This experience is familiar to every serious software engineer who has used AI code gen and then reviewed the output: > But when I reviewed the codebase in detail in late January, the downside was obvious…
i feel like it's worth noting that for a long time prior to AI, I heard a ton of anecdotes about codebases at big companies being very shitty spaghetti more often than not, and if one of the maintainers left it was often a nightmare of managing, refactoring, or in some cases re-writing whenever issues popped up with new integrations
If AI needs to re-write everything from scratch everytime you make a design change, that may have some obvious inefficiencies and limitations to it but if it can also do that in a few hours or a week, is it really that bad comapred to months of stalling and excuses from devs trying to understand the work of someone before them who wasnt given enough time to make well documented clean code to begin with?
Like it is undoubtedly worse for hobby projects to rely on the AI output 100%, but im actually not so sure for commercial products. It'll be the same type of spagetti garbage everywhere. There will be patterns in its nonsense that over years people will start to get accustomed to. Youll have people specialize in cleaning up AI generated code, and itll more or less be a relatively consistent process compared to picking up random developer spaghetti
maybe this is a hot take though
Re: Eight years of wanting, three months of building with AI
#297Earlier quoted context omitted.
I’ve found that LLMs will frequently do extremely silly things that no person would do to make typescript code pass the typechecker.
Yeah, I've found LLMs cannot write good Typescript code period. The good news is that they are excellent at some other languages.
I can't agree here. https://pelorus-nav.com/ (one of my side projects) is 95-98% written by Claude Opus 4.6, all in very nice typescript which I carefully review and correct, and use good prompting and context hygiene to ensure it doesn't take shortcuts. It's taken a month or so but so worth it. And my packing list app packzen.org is also pretty decent typescript all through.
Re: Eight years of wanting, three months of building with AI
#298[dead]
Re: Eight years of wanting, three months of building with AI
#299Earlier quoted context omitted.
> It is quite literally making this technology, information, and power available to only the elite. I don't know what to say to you. More people are coding now with AI than ever coded before. If your argument was true, then that would just mean that there are more elites than ever. Obviously that's not what's happening. > What payout? Zero AI companies are profitable. Because they're reinvesting profits into continue…
> I don't know what to say to you. More people are coding now with AI than ever coded before. If your argument was true, then that would just mean that there are more elites than ever. Obviously that's not what's happening. I don't know how I can explain this any more clearly. If you need AI to create software, and the cost of AI is $200/month, then only people who can afford $200/month can create software. Costs wil…
> $200/month is already out of reach of the majority of the population. Increases from here means only a small percentage of the richest people can afford it.
This is an absurd claim. There are many things the majority of the population spends money on that cost more than this.
Re: Eight years of wanting, three months of building with AI
#300Earlier quoted context omitted.
I’ve found that LLMs will frequently do extremely silly things that no person would do to make typescript code pass the typechecker.
Yeah, I've found LLMs cannot write good Typescript code period. The good news is that they are excellent at some other languages.
I think it can write working TypeScript code, and it can write good TypeScript code if it is guided by a knowledgable programmer. It requires actually reviewing all the code and giving pointed feedback though (which at that point is only slightly more efficient than just writing it yourself).