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AI coding is gambling

notes.visaint.space

301–310 of 471 posts

Re: AI coding is gambling

#301
post #288

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do you feel good about programming despite not writing in machine code?

False equivalence. x86 assembly is a programming language, C is a programming language, Javascript is a programming language. English is NOT a programming language. If it was, you wouldn't need "AI" to convert English into a real programming language before that, in turn, can be converted to machine code.

My boss can make people do countless things in the proper order, with just a few words. Sounds like a programming language to me.

Re: AI coding is gambling

#302
post #282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But are you doing real food preparation unless you are hunting and dressing the animals and foraging for your own food?

Yes. You are doing any of the work yourself rather than instructing someone else on how to do it.

You are doing something, but 99% of the work has been done for you. I guess it's like vibe coding and telling the model to fix issues when you see them.

Re: AI coding is gambling

#303
post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> but I finally feel like I'm _good_ at programming, which is insane Yes, it is insane. You couldn't torture this confession out of me. But that's the drug they're selling you, isn't it? You don't even write code, but you're getting a self-inflated sense of worth. It must be addicting! Of course, whether or not the programs you prompt are actually good surely has no relation to whether you feel they're good, since yo…

> Anyone can be an "ideas guy". I disagree with this. I've worked with amazing "ideas guys" who just cranked out customer insights and interesting concepts, and I've worked with lousy ones, who just kinda meandered and never had a focused vision beyond a milquetoast copy of the last thing they saw. There's a real skill to forming good concepts, and it's not a skill everyone has!

Anyone can be an "ideas guy" because there's no failure event that stops you. Contrast this with being a plumber. Not anyone can be a plumber.

Re: AI coding is gambling

#304

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> but I finally feel like I'm _good_ at programming, which is insane Yes, it is insane. You couldn't torture this confession out of me. But that's the drug they're selling you, isn't it? You don't even write code, but you're getting a self-inflated sense of worth. It must be addicting! Of course, whether or not the programs you prompt are actually good surely has no relation to whether you feel they're good, since yo…

> LLMs are not actually doing a great job of translating ideas into tangibly useful software Here is the source code for a greenfield, zero-dependency, 100% pure PHP raw Git repository viewer made for self-hosted or shared environments that is 99.9% vibe-coded and has had ~10k hits and ~7k viewers of late, with 0 errors reported in the logs over the last 24 hours: https://repo.autonoma.ca/repo/treetrek

https://repo.autonoma.ca/repo/treetrek/blob/HEAD/pages/Templ...

Did it really have to be zero-dependency...

Re: AI coding is gambling

#305

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> but I finally feel like I'm _good_ at programming, which is insane Yes, it is insane. You couldn't torture this confession out of me. But that's the drug they're selling you, isn't it? You don't even write code, but you're getting a self-inflated sense of worth. It must be addicting! Of course, whether or not the programs you prompt are actually good surely has no relation to whether you feel they're good, since yo…

Anyone can be an "ideas guy", very few are good at it. "I am still waiting to see LLMs build an idea into something other people use at scale" - so Microsoft using Claude Code doesn't count?

Nope. I specifically excluded LLM wrappers, which I think is a fair qualification for a "first useful software at scale". If it turns out that LLMs can produce useful things that aren't LLM wrappers, then maybe later we can evaluate whether LLM wrappers are worthwhile. But if LLM wrappers are only used to produce other LLM wrappers, which are used to produce other LLM wrappers, it's merely indicative of a pyramid scheme wherein people are trying to sell you on hype because they can't sell you anything that actually produces utility in the real world (browsers, compilers, IDEs, production databases, music production software, photo editing software, Excel, viable Discord replacement, any of the reasons people used computers as tools to accomplish things).

On the note of Microsoft specifically, they've shipped a critical OS-destroying bug every month for several months straight now, and people seem to be generally in agreement that Windows 11 has only been going further and further downhill. I have literally not seen a single person with a positive opinion on anything W11 or associated programs have done in the last 6 months. Which does not create a compelling case for translating LLM wrapper into real-world useful code.

Re: AI coding is gambling

#306
post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Anyone can be an "ideas guy". I disagree with this. I've worked with amazing "ideas guys" who just cranked out customer insights and interesting concepts, and I've worked with lousy ones, who just kinda meandered and never had a focused vision beyond a milquetoast copy of the last thing they saw. There's a real skill to forming good concepts, and it's not a skill everyone has!

Anyone can be an "ideas guy" because there's no failure event that stops you. Contrast this with being a plumber. Not anyone can be a plumber.

I think that the point about building with agents though. Your ideas meet reality sooner and you actually get feedback on whether they are worth anything or not. So you're not really being an ideas guy in the sense of just throwing ideas out there. You're being an ideas guy in the sense of testing your ideas, which is really the essence of what building startups is: figuring out what people want.

Re: AI coding is gambling

#307

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How does it 'count almost everything as gambling'? They just said 'non-deterministic' output is gambling-like, that is not 'almost everything'. Most computation that you use on a day-to-day basis (depending on how much you use AI now I suppose) is in all ways deterministic. Using probabilistic algorithms is not new, but it your point is not clicking...

Working with humans is decidedly not deterministic, though. And the discussion here is comparing AI coding agents and humans.

That starts to get into a very philosophical space talking about human action as deterministic or not. I think keeping to the fact that the artifacts (ie code) we are working off will have deterministic effects (unless we want it not to) is exactly the point. That is what lets chaotic human brains communicate with machines at all. Adding more chaos to the system doesn't strike me as obviously an improvement.

Re: AI coding is gambling

#309
post #158
post #110

I think this article makes a valid point. However, if AI coding is considered gambling, then being a project manager overseeing multiple developers could also be seen as a form of gambling to a certain degree. In reality, there isn't much difference between the two. AI models are non-deterministic, and humans are also non-deterministic. You could assign the same task to two different developers and end up with entire…

I ssk an AI to play hangman with me and looked at it's reasoning. It didn't just pick a secret word and play a straightforward game of hangman. It continually adjusted the secret word based on the letters I guessed, providing me the "perfect" game of hangman. Not too many of my guesses were "right" and not too many "wrong" and I after a little struggle and almost losing, I won in the end. It wasn't a real game of han…

The reasoning generally isn't kept in the context, so after choosing the secret word in the first reasoning block, the LLM will have completely forgotten it in the second and subsequent requests.

So, it technically didn't change the secret word so much as it was trying to infer what its own secret word might have been, based on your guesses.

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