I thought the article was going to be about AI zealotry but it was just AI zealotry.
My article on why AI is great (or terrible) or how to use it
31–40 of 241 posts
Re: My article on why AI is great (or terrible) or how to use it
#32Who knew that these massive high-dimensional probability distributions would drive us insane
Re: My article on why AI is great (or terrible) or how to use it
#33I suspect that lots of developers who are sour on relying on AI significantly _would_ agree with most of this, but see the result of that logic leading to (as the article notes) "the skill of writing and reading code is obsolete, and it's our job to make software engineering increasingly entirely automated" and really don't like that outcome so they try to find a way to reject it. "The skillset you've spend decades d…
Remains to be seen if that pill needs swallowing at all. At least for reading code.
Re: My article on why AI is great (or terrible) or how to use it
#34I don't care that AI development is more fun for the author. I wouldn't care if all the evidence pointed toward AI development being easier, faster, and less perilous. The externalities, at present, are unacceptable. We are restructuring our society in a way that makes individuals even less free and a few large companies even more powerful and wealthy, just to save time writing code, and I don't understand why people…
Good news: the evidence points to it being slower than non-ai workflows. So we're destroying our economy, society, and planet to make worse software, more slowly! :)
Re: My article on why AI is great (or terrible) or how to use it
#35Re audio, I have been working on a nice little tool called Claudio[0] which adds sounds to Claude Code in a nice configurable sort of way. It's still pretty new but it's a lot better than directly hooking to avplay :)
Re: My article on why AI is great (or terrible) or how to use it
#36I will never as long as I live understand the argument that AI development is more fun. If you want to argue that you’re more capable or whatever, fine. I disagree but I don’t have any data to disprove you. But saying that AI development is more fun because you don’t have to “wrestle the computer” is, to me, the same as saying you’re really into painting but you’re not really into the brush aspect so you pay someone…
~20 years working in tech for me, mostly big companies, and I’ve never been more miserable. I also can’t stop myself from using Claude Code and the like. I think it’s a bit like a gambling addiction. I’m riding high the few times it pays off, but most of the time it feels like it’s just on the edge of paying off (working) and surely the next prompt will push it over the edge.
> I also can’t stop myself from using Claude Code and the like.
just.. uninstall it? i've removed all ai tooling from both personal+work devices and highly recommend it. there's no temptation to 'quickly pull up $app just to see' if it doesn't exist
Re: My article on why AI is great (or terrible) or how to use it
#37I will never as long as I live understand the argument that AI development is more fun. If you want to argue that you’re more capable or whatever, fine. I disagree but I don’t have any data to disprove you. But saying that AI development is more fun because you don’t have to “wrestle the computer” is, to me, the same as saying you’re really into painting but you’re not really into the brush aspect so you pay someone…
Well, washing cloths has definitely become "more fun" since the invention of washing machines... Cleaning your flat has become "more fun" since vacuum cleaners. Writing has become "more fun" since editors overtook typewriters. Bedroom studios power most of the clubs I know. Navigating a city as a blind pedestrian has definitely become more fun since the introduction of the oh-so-evil-screentime-bad smartphone. I could go on forever. Moving has become more fun since the invention of the wheel... See?
Re: My article on why AI is great (or terrible) or how to use it
#38For a senior engineer, some very odd takes here: "Our ability to zoom in and implement code is now obsolete Even with SOTA LLMs like Opus 4.5 this is downright untrue. Many, many logical, strategic, architectural, and low level code mistakes are still happening. And given context window limitations of LLMs (even with hacks like subagents to work around this) big picture long-term thinking about code design, structure…
> Our ability to zoom in and implement code is now obsolete Even with SOTA LLMs like Opus 4.5 this is downright untrue. Many, many logical, strategic, architectural, and low level code mistakes are still happening. And given context window limitations of LLMs (even with hacks like subagents to work around this) big picture long-term thinking about code design, structure, extensibility, etc. is very tricky to do right…
[dead]
Re: My article on why AI is great (or terrible) or how to use it
#39AI Development is good for those who want to do it. But not a terminal career decision for those who don't.
Re: My article on why AI is great (or terrible) or how to use it
#40I will never as long as I live understand the argument that AI development is more fun. If you want to argue that you’re more capable or whatever, fine. I disagree but I don’t have any data to disprove you. But saying that AI development is more fun because you don’t have to “wrestle the computer” is, to me, the same as saying you’re really into painting but you’re not really into the brush aspect so you pay someone…
~20 years working in tech for me, mostly big companies, and I’ve never been more miserable. I also can’t stop myself from using Claude Code and the like. I think it’s a bit like a gambling addiction. I’m riding high the few times it pays off, but most of the time it feels like it’s just on the edge of paying off (working) and surely the next prompt will push it over the edge.
This is definitely the feeling i get. Sometimes it works amazingly well that I think "Oh may be the hype was right all along, have I become the old guy yelling at claude?" but the other times it fails spectacularly, adds a really nasty bug which everyone misses for a month or cant even find the file I find by searching.
I am also now experimenting with my own version of opencode and I change models a lot, and it helps me learn how each model fails at different tasks, and it also helps me figure out the most cost effective model for each task. I may have spent too much time on this.