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

AI Made Writing Code Easier. It Made Being an Engineer Harder

ivanturkovic.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

301–310 of 330 posts

Re: AI Made Writing Code Easier. It Made Being an Engineer Harder

#301

Post by lelanthran »

wolletd wrote: post #299
lelanthran wrote: post #281

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Because humans write like this. Not when they do professional writing maybe, but when they just ramble. I keep seeing this assertion and I keep responding "Please, point to the volume of writing with this specific cadence that has a date prior to 2024" and I keep getting... crickets! You're asserting that this is a common way for humans to write, correct? Should be pretty easy, then, to find a large volume of examp…

Like I said: I think I write like this on some occasions. I wouldn't know how I would search for examples. I guess you'd have to search old reddit comment threads or something. But yeah, I have no motivation to do that, tbh. It could be that it's hard to find examples because they are scattered about in countless comment threads and single posts on countless platforms. Things I rarely keep links to, things nobody ind…

It doesn't have to be your writing you show - the assertion is that LLMs write this way because humans write this way.

My counter is that I don't find examples of this type of writing prior to 2024; not with the same frequency of "tells" per paragraph, at any rate.

Re: AI Made Writing Code Easier. It Made Being an Engineer Harder

#302

Post by rnimmer »

jmull wrote: post #252
rnimmer wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My immediate reaction was, "Only 7?" but that may not be a fair thing to think, depending on what the constraints were. The shift I've experienced is something akin to being able to finally focus on the aspects I've always enjoyed most: architecture and user experience. I review all the code, but through iteration my prompts have gotten better, and for the most part my automated codemonkey 'employee' produces good co…

> My immediate reaction was, "Only 7?" Anyone could ship thousands of projects, depending on the definition of "ship" and if you don't care what value the project has beyond notionally increasing your tally.

So the same thing the rest of my sentence gave credence to, the part you deleted?

Re: AI Made Writing Code Easier. It Made Being an Engineer Harder

#303

Post by RivieraKid »

necovek wrote: post #296
RivieraKid wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Disagree. Ideas were a necessary component of the one project I had success with. BTW, the line between ideas and execution is blurred. Is coming up with innovative UI and features ideas or execution?

Ideas are obviously a prerequisite, but they aren't "worth anything" because there is so many of them and without them being executed well (or sometimes, executed at all), they don't really bring any value. So really, they are comparatively cheap. I, for one, have hundreds of ideas, but always lacked the time to execute on 5% of them.

Good ideas (and the ability to recognize them) are very valuable in my opinion. It also depends on what you mean by an idea:

- A todo app better than the existing ones

- A todo app with these 3 features

- A todo app with these 3 features, here's how the UI would look

I have tens of ideas, but maybe 1 - 3 that I believe have a meaningful chance to become successful and generate income ($20k annually or more) with great execution. I find it hard to come up with ideas that have a fairly clear path to success and can generate income.

Re: AI Made Writing Code Easier. It Made Being an Engineer Harder

#304

Post by jatins »

phyzome wrote: post #150
jatins wrote: post #131

The post itself is 100% AI written https://www.pangram.com/history/6572a5c4-f548-46e2-977d-9813...

Reminder that AI-writing detection tools are largely junk.

Pangram is reliable. Quoting from their website

> Pangram achieves essentially zero false positive rates and false negative rates on medium-length to long passages.

Re: AI Made Writing Code Easier. It Made Being an Engineer Harder

#305

Post by ianlpaterson »

jerich wrote: post #261
JimBlackwood wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Why? Because the bottleneck was never typing code. It was always understanding the problem, making architectural decisions, debugging edge cases, and most importantly - knowing what NOT to build. For me, this is a bit different. Writing code has always been the bottleneck. I get most of my joy out of solving edge cases and finding optimizations. My favorite projects are when I’m given an existing codebase with the…

I’m the same way; I feel like Claude is doing more than just writing code, it’s getting me unstuck. I’ve been pulling projects out of the closet that have been sitting there for years. It’s because I can sit down and get started so seamlessly. Before, I might waste the first couple hours configuring my environment and tool setup, but with Claude Code I can just jump in and start building, start solving the real probl…

Concur - there are things I've been wanting to get to for (checks calendar) a decade+? that I'm now shipping. It's awesome.

Re: AI Made Writing Code Easier. It Made Being an Engineer Harder

#306

Post by krackers »

RevEng wrote: post #169
Spide_r wrote: post #11

Its worth mentioning that this essay has some signs of being either partially AI generated or heavily edited through an LLM. Some of the signs are there (It's not X, it's Y), With the blog having gone from nearly zero activity between 2015 and 2025 to have it explode in posts and text output since then also raises an eyebrow.

LLMs write this way because people write this way. Maybe not everyone, but enough for it to train the models to do it. Much of my writing reads like an LLM wrote it, but that doesn't make me an LLM.

No, this statement is not true for anything except a base model. Benchmaxxing during RL phase is how you get the advertisement style "punchy" writing, because even though people don't usually write that way it is eye catching and people will vote for the bullet-point emdash slop. I wonder if some lab will be bold enough to do "anti rlhf", lmarena score be damned.

Re: AI Made Writing Code Easier. It Made Being an Engineer Harder

#307

Post by archagon »

Spide_r wrote: post #11

Its worth mentioning that this essay has some signs of being either partially AI generated or heavily edited through an LLM. Some of the signs are there (It's not X, it's Y), With the blog having gone from nearly zero activity between 2015 and 2025 to have it explode in posts and text output since then also raises an eyebrow.

Why were flags manually removed? It's obvious that the community does not want to read AI slop.

Re: AI Made Writing Code Easier. It Made Being an Engineer Harder

#309

Post by johnnyanmac »

bonoboTP wrote: post #238
alex_suzuki wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you find those pockets?

I guess talking to people and making friends helps. Online, maybe seek out discords and befriend people and they may tell you. Not unlike how you find cool underground clubs.

Can't relate to either of those. I never made a friend online.

Re: AI Made Writing Code Easier. It Made Being an Engineer Harder

#310

Post by johnnyanmac »

herodoturtle wrote: post #278

Lots of comments here critiquing the article for allegedly being written by AI. I see the post is even flagged now. Irrespective of who wrote it or how it was written, the essay is packed with wisdom. I’ve been programming for 30+ years and leading teams for the last 20 - and I found the essay deeply insightful. I realise I’m a sample size of 1, but just figured I’d comment here to advocate against this post being fl…

Got unflagged. Really speaks to HN's priorities when slop can get unflagged but negative news against the tech overlords is "too political".

>Irrespective of who wrote it or how it was written, the essay is packed with wisdom.

As always: if they can't be bothered to write, why am I bothered to read it?

Especially on this topic. I know the exact fear mongering and catch phrases it's going to say here. "AI is here to stay", "you need to get with the times or get out", etc. There's nothing new nor wisdom in this.

Post reply on HN