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

AI coding

geohot.github.io

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 299 posts

Re: AI coding

#31

Post by vmg12 »

I think this gets to a fundamental problem with the way the AI labs have been selling and hyping AI. People keep on saying that the AI is actually thinking and it's not just pattern matching. Well, as someone that uses AI tools and develops AI tools, my tools are much more useful when I treat the AI as a pattern matching next-token predictor than an actual intelligence. If I accidentally slip too many details into the context, all of a sudden the AI fails to generalize. That sounds like pattern matching and next token prediction to me.

> This isn’t to say “AI” technology won’t lead to some extremely good tools. But I argue this comes from increased amounts of search and optimization and patterns to crib from, not from any magic “the AI is doing the coding”

* I can tell claude code to crank out some basic crud api and it will crank it out in a minute saving me an hour or so.

* I need an implementation of an algorithm that has been coded a million times on github, I ask the AI to do it and it cranks out a correct working implementation.

If I only use the AI in its wheelhouse it works very well, otherwise it sucks.

Re: AI coding

#32

Post by bdcravens »

ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #21
diarrhea wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Note that the study is just n=13 and on subjects without ADHD.

That’s the deal. People without ADHD take it, believing that it makes them “super[wo]men.”

I had a problem client that I ended up firing and giving money back to about 15 years ago. Lot of red flags, but the breaking point was when they offered me adderall so I could "work faster".

That said, I'll leave the conclusions about whether it's valuable for those with ADHD to the mental health professionals.

Re: AI coding

#33

Post by joefourier »

ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #2

> AI makes you feel 20% more productive but in reality makes you 19% slower. How many more billions are we going to waste on this? Adderall is similar. It makes people feel a lot more productive, but research on its effectiveness[0] seems to show that, at best, we get only a mild improvement in productivity, and marked deterioration of cognitive abilities. [0] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6165228/

I’m someone with ADHD who takes prescribed stimulants and they don’t make me work faster or smarter, they just make me work. Without them I’ll languish in an unfocused haze for hours, or zone in on irrelevant details until I realise I have an hour left in the day to get anything done. It could make me 20% less intelligent and it would still be worth it; this is obviously an extreme, but given the choice, I’d rather be an average developer that gets boring, functional code done on time than a dysfunctional genius who keeps missing deadlines and cannot be motivated to work on anything but the most exciting shiny new tech.

Re: AI coding

#34

Post by KronisLV »

martini333 wrote: post #8

I agree. I use LLM to do things like brainstorm, explaining programming concepts and debug. I will not use it to write code. The output is not good enough, and I feel dumber. I only see the worst of my programming collegues coding with AI. And the results are actual trash. They have no actual understanding of the code "they" are writing, and they have no idea how to actually debug what "they" made, if LLM is not help…

Is this fundamentally different from them copy pasting code from StackOverflow or random blog posts, without understanding it?

You know, aside from AI making it super easy and fast to generate this tech debt in whatever amounts they desire?

Re: AI coding

#35

Post by pmg101 »

numbers_guy wrote: post #19
demirbey05 wrote: post #18

I started fully coding with Claude Code. It's not just vibe coding, but rather AI-assisted coding. I've noticed there's a considerable decrease in my understanding of the whole codebase, even though I'm the only one who has been coding this codebase for 2 years. I'm struggling to answer my colleagues' questions. I am not defending we should drop AI, but we should really measure its effects and take actions accordingl…

This is the chief reason I don't use integrations. I just use chat, because I want to physically understand and insert code myself. Else you end up with the code overtaking your understanding of it.

Yes. I'm happy to have a sometimes-wrong expert to hand. Sometimes it provides just what I need, sometimes like with a human (who are also fallible), it helps to spur my own thinking along, clarify, converge on a solution, think laterally, or other productivity boosting effects.

Re: AI coding

#36

Post by raincole »

ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #23
Eikon wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s interesting how science can become closer to pseudoscience than proper research through paper-milling. It seems like that with such small groups and effects you could run the same “study” again and again until you get the result that you initially desired.

So it should be easy to find studies that prove that non-ADHD people that take it, have dramatically improved productivity.

It's very easy to find studies that prove that Adderall (etc.) improve non-ADHD people's cognition ability. And it's equally easy to find studies that prove otherwise. The parent comment is very spot on. You can find evidence supporting anything nowadays.

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3489818/table/tbl1/

Re: AI coding

#37

Post by pityJuke »

> It’s why the world wasted $10B+ on self driving car companies that obviously made no sense. There’s a much bigger market for truths that pump bags vs truths that don’t.

Did geohot not found one of these?

Re: AI coding

#38

Post by KoolKat23 »

vmg12 wrote: post #31

I think this gets to a fundamental problem with the way the AI labs have been selling and hyping AI. People keep on saying that the AI is actually thinking and it's not just pattern matching. Well, as someone that uses AI tools and develops AI tools, my tools are much more useful when I treat the AI as a pattern matching next-token predictor than an actual intelligence. If I accidentally slip too many details into th…

I think this comes down to levels of intelligence. Not knowledge, I mean intelligence. We often underestimate the amount of thinking/reasoning that goes into a certain task. Sometimes the AI can surprise you and do something very thoughtful, this often feels like magic.

Re: AI coding

#39

Post by ChrisMarshallNY »

joefourier wrote: post #33
ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #2

> AI makes you feel 20% more productive but in reality makes you 19% slower. How many more billions are we going to waste on this? Adderall is similar. It makes people feel a lot more productive, but research on its effectiveness[0] seems to show that, at best, we get only a mild improvement in productivity, and marked deterioration of cognitive abilities. [0] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6165228/

I’m someone with ADHD who takes prescribed stimulants and they don’t make me work faster or smarter, they just make me work . Without them I’ll languish in an unfocused haze for hours, or zone in on irrelevant details until I realise I have an hour left in the day to get anything done. It could make me 20% less intelligent and it would still be worth it; this is obviously an extreme, but given the choice, I’d rather…

I have family that had ADHD, as a kid (they called it “hyperactivity,” back then). He is also dyslexic.

The ADHD was caught early, and treated, but the dyslexia was not. He thought he was a moron, for much of his early life, and his peers and employers did nothing to discourage that self-diagnosis.

Since he learned of his dyslexia, and started treating it, he has been an engineer at Intel, for most of his career (not that I envy him, right now).

Re: AI coding

#40

Post by sMarsIntruder »

I stopped reading at this point:

> It’s why the world wasted $10B+ on self driving car companies that obviously made no sense. There’s a much bigger market for truths that pump bags vs truths that don’t.

This reeks of bias-dismissing massive investments as ‘obvious’ nonsense while hyping its own tinygrad as the ‘truth’ in AI coding.

Author is allowed to claim ‘most people do not care to find the truth’ but it’s hypocritical when the post ignores counterpoints, like PyTorch’s dominance in efficient coding benchmarks.

Author doesn’t seem to care about finding the full truth either, just the version that pumps its bag.

Post reply on HN