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My AI skeptic friends are all nuts

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Re: My AI skeptic friends are all nuts

#31

Post by briandrupieski »

ofjcihen wrote: post #7

I feel like we get one of these articles that addresses valid AI criticisms with poor arguments every week and at this point I’m ready to write a boilerplate response because I already know what they’re going to say. Interns don’t cost 20 bucks a month but training users in the specifics of your org is important. Knowing what is important or pointless comes with understanding the skill set.

> with poor arguments every week

This roughly matches my experience too, but I don't think it applies to this one. It has a few novel things that were new ideas to me and I'm glad I read it.

> I’m ready to write a boilerplate response because I already know what they’re going to say

If you have one that addresses what this one talks about I'd be interested in reading it.

Re: My AI skeptic friends are all nuts

#32

Post by renjimen »

01HNNWZ0MV43FF wrote: post #11

Damn. Well I'll spend a few bucks trying it out and I'll ask my employer if they're okay with me using agents on company time, but But I'm not thrilled about centralized, paid tools. I came into software during a huge FOSS boom. Like a huge do it yourself, host it yourself, Publish Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere, all the power to all the people, borderline anarchist communist boom. I don't want it to be like other ind…

You can self host an open-weights LLM. Some of the AI-powered IDEs are open source. It does take a little more work than just using VSCode + Copilot, but that's always been the case for FOSS.

Re: My AI skeptic friends are all nuts

#33

Post by adamgordonbell »

metalliqaz wrote: post #14

Can someone explain to me what this means? > People coding with LLMs today use agents. Agents get to poke around your codebase on their own. They author files directly. They run tools. They compile code, run tests, and iterate on the results. ... Is this what people are really doing? Who is just turning AI loose to modify things as it sees fit? If I'm not directing the work, how does it even know what to do? I've bee…

you are giving it instructions but it's running a while loop with a list of tools and it can poke around in your code base until it thinks it's done whatever you ask for.

See Claude Code, windsurf, amp, Kilcode, roo, etc.

I might describe a change I need to have made and then it does it and then I might say "Now the tests are failing. Can you fix them?" and so on.

Sometimes it works very great. sometimes you find yourself arguing with the computer.

Re: My AI skeptic friends are all nuts

#34

Post by thousand_nights »

i feel like surprisingly, front end work which used to be viewed by programmers as "easier" is now more difficult of the two, because it's where LLMs suck the most

you get a link to a figma design and you have to use your eyes and common sense to cobble together tailwind classes, ensure responsiveness, accessibility, try out your components to make sure they're not janky, test out on a physical mobile device, align margins, padding, truncation, wrapping, async loading states, blah blah you get it

LLMs still suck at all that stuff that requires a lot of visual feedback, after all, you're making an interface for humans to use, and you're a human

in contrast, when i'm working on a backend ticket ai feels so much more straightforward and useful

Re: My AI skeptic friends are all nuts

#35

Post by smy20011 »

> Often, it will drop you precisely at that golden moment where shit almost works, and development means tweaking code and immediately seeing things work better. That dopamine hit is why I code.

Only if you are familiar with the project/code. If not, you were throw into a foreign codebase and have no idea how to tweak it.

Re: My AI skeptic friends are all nuts

#37

Post by leoh »

>but it’s bad at rust

I have to say, my ability to learn Rust was massively accelerated via LLMs. I highly recommend them for learning a new skill. I feel I'm roughly at the point (largely sans LLMs) now where I can be nearly as productive in Rust as Python. +1 to RustRover as well, which I strongly prefer to any other IDE.

Re: My AI skeptic friends are all nuts

#38

Post by ckiely »

The argument that programmers are into piracy and therefore should shut up about theft is nonsensical. Not defending piracy, but at least an artist or creator is still credited and their work is unadulterated. Piracy != plagiarism.

Re: My AI skeptic friends are all nuts

#39

Post by iLoveOncall »

I simply do not get this argument about LLMs writing tedious code or scaffolding. You don't need or want LLMs for that, you want libraries and frameworks.

I barely write any scaffolding code, because I use tools that setup the scaffolding for me.

Re: My AI skeptic friends are all nuts

#40

Post by halpow »

fellowniusmonk wrote: post #23

I think the hardest part is not spending the next 3 months of my life in a cave finishing all the hobby/side projects I didn't quite get across the line. It really does feel like I've gone from being 1 senior engineer to a team that has a 0.8 Sr. Eng, 5 Jrs. and one dude that spends all his time on digging through poorly documented open source projects and documenting them for the team. Sure I can't spend quite as mu…

> I haven't written a commit summary in months

I don't know what you're posting, but if it's anything like what I see being done by GitHub copilot, your commit messages are junk. They're equivalent to this and you're wasting everyone's time:

    // Sets the value
    const value = "red"
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