31–40 of 103 posts
imo, this isn't paranoid at all, and it very likely filters through the LLM, unless you provide a tool/skill and explicit instructions. Even then you're rolling the dice, and the diff will have to be checked.
Not to be that curmudgeon (who am I kidding), but it's made reviewing code very much less enjoyable, and I review more changes than I write. Engineers merrily sending fixes they barely understand (or, worse, don't think they need to understand) for the rest of us to handle, and somehow lines-of-code has become a positive metric again. How convenient!
I feel the same way. > That includes code outside of the happy path, like error handling and input validation. But also other typing exercises like processing an entity with 10 different types, where each type must be handled separately. Or propagating one property through the system on 5 different types in multiple layers. With AI, I feel I'm less caught up in the minutia of programming and have more cognitive space…
Not going to last long though, at least not professionally. AI will do the spec and architecture too. The LLM will do the entire pipeline between customer or market research to deployment. This is already possible with bug fixes pretty much. And many features too depending on the business.
But if AI is capable of that it’s not a big step to being capable of doing any white collar job, and we’ll either reorganize our economy completely or collapse.
At what point do LLMs enable bad engineering practices, if instead of working to abstract or encapsulate toilsome programming tasks we point an expensive slot machine at them and generate a bunch of verbose code and carry on? I'm not sure where the tradeoff leads if there's no longer a pain signal for things that need to be re-thought or re-architected. And when anyone does create a new framework or abstraction, it d…
I used to share this sentiment but the more I used AI for programming, the less I enjoyed it. Even writing "boring" code (like tests or summaries) by hand increased my understanding of what I wrote and how it integrates into the rest of the codebase, which I think is fun. Letting a robot write code for me, however tedious it would be to write manually, made me feel like I was working in someone else's codebase. It re…
I think you just have to give up ownership of the _code_ and focus on ownership of the _product_.
More concrete examples to illustrate the core points would have been helpful. As-is the article doesn't offer much - sorry.
For one, I am not sure what kind of code he writes? How does he write tests? Are these unit tests, property-based tests? How does he quantify success? Leaves a lot to be desired.
The way I like to think about it is to split work into two broad categories - creative work and toil . Creative work is the type of work we want to continue doing. Toil is the work we want to reduce. edit - an interesting facet of AI progress is that the split between these two types of work gets more and more granular. It has led me to actively be aware of what I'm doing as I work, and to critically examine whether…
You cannot remove the toil without removing the creative work. Just like how, in writing a story, a writer must also toil over each sentence, and should this be an emdash or a comma? and should I break the paragraph here or there? All this minutia is just as important to the final product as grand ideas and architecture are. If you don't care about those little details, then fine. But you sacrifice some authorship of…
I feel the same way. > That includes code outside of the happy path, like error handling and input validation. But also other typing exercises like processing an entity with 10 different types, where each type must be handled separately. Or propagating one property through the system on 5 different types in multiple layers. With AI, I feel I'm less caught up in the minutia of programming and have more cognitive space…
> explore new approaches and connect ideas faster This is the hidden super power of LLM - prototyping without attachment to the outcome. Ten years ago, if you wanted to explore a major architectural decision, you would be bogged down for weeks in meetings convincing others, then a few more weeks making it happen. Then if it didn't work out, it feels like failure and everyone gets frustrated. Now it's assumed you can…
In the sense that, I was trying to explain what I wanted to do to a coworker and my manager, and we kept going back and forth trying to understand the shape of it and what value it would add and how much time it would be worth spending and what priority we should put on it.
And I was like -- let me just spend like an hour putting together a partially working prototype for you, and claude got _so close_ to just completely one-shotting the entire feature in my first prompt, that I ended up spending 3 hours just putting the finishing touches on it and we shipped it before we even wrote a user story. We did all that work after it was already done. Claude even mocked up a fully interactive UI for our UI designer to work from.
It's literally easier and faster to just tell claude to do something than to explain why you want to do it to a coworker.