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

Generative AI coding tools and agents do not work for me

blog.miguelgrinberg.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

341–350 of 464 posts

Re: Generative AI coding tools and agents do not work for me

#341

Post by skydhash »

cardanome wrote: post #337
skydhash wrote: post #311

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Git blame can do a lot in those situations. Find the general location of the bug, then assign everyone that has touched it to the ticket.

Is that really something you are doing in your job? Most of my teams have been very allergic to assigning personal blame and management very focused on making sure everyone can do everything and we are always replaceable. So maybe I could phrase it like "X could help me with this" but saying X is responsible for the bug would be a no no.

Not really. I was talking more in the context of the parent comment. If your management is dysfunctional, allowing AI slop without the accountability, then you go with this extreme measure.

I don't mind fixing bugs, but I do mind reckless practices that introduce them.

Re: Generative AI coding tools and agents do not work for me

#342

Post by throwaway12345t »

I don’t understand this one at all. Say you need to update a somewhat unique implementation of a component across 5 files. In pseudocode, it might take you 30 seconds to type out whatever needs to be done. It would take maybe 3-4 minutes to do it.

I set that up to run then do something different. I come back in a couple minutes, scan the diffs which match expectations and move on to the next task.

That’s not everything but those menial tasks where you know what needs to be done and what the final shape should look like are great for AI. Pass it off while you work on more interesting problems.

Re: Generative AI coding tools and agents do not work for me

#343

Post by xpe »

> In recent times I had to learn Rust, Go, TypeScript, WASM, Java and C# for various projects, and I wouldn't delegate this learning effort to an AI, even if it saved me time.

Either/or fallacy. There exist a varied set of ways to engage with the technology. You can read reference material and ask for summarization. You can use language models to challenge your own understanding.

Are people really this clueless? (Yes, I know the answer, but this is a rhetorical device.)

Think, people. Human intelligence is competing against artificial intelligence, and we need to step it up. Probably a good time to stop talking like we’re in Brad Pitt’s latest movie, Logical Fallacy Club. If we want to prove our value in a competitive world, we need to think and write well.

I sometimes feel like bashing flawed writing is mean, but maybe the feedback will get through. Better to set a quality bar. We should aim to be our best.

Re: Generative AI coding tools and agents do not work for me

#344

Post by thefz »

I learned C# first then async/await then the TPL then MVVM by banging my head against the problems I had to solve. I still retain the knowledge to this day because I had to think long and hard and test a lot, prototype and verify.

Having a chatbot telling me what to write would have not sorted the same effect.

It's like having someone tell you the solutions to your homework.

Re: Generative AI coding tools and agents do not work for me

#345

Post by thefz »

dspillett wrote: post #226
waprin wrote: post #19

To some degree, traditional coding and AI coding are not the same thing, so it's not surprising that some people are better at one than the other. The author is basically saying that he's much better at coding than AI coding. But it's important to realize that AI coding is itself a skill that you can develop. It's not just , pick the best tool and let it go. Managing prompts and managing context has a much higher ski…

> To some degree, traditional coding and AI coding are not the same thing LLM-based¹ coding, at least beyond simple auto-complete enhancements (using it directly & interactively as what it is: Glorified Predictive Text) is more akin to managing a junior or outsourcing your work. You give a definition/prompt, some work is done, you refine the prompt and repeat (or fix any issues yourself), much like you would with an…

> I want to deal with and understand the minutia of what I am doing, I got into programming, database bothering, and infrastructure kicking, because I enjoyed it, enjoyed learning it, and wanted to do it

A million times yes.

And we live in a time in which people want to be called "programmers" because it's oh-so-cool but not doing the work necessary to earn the title.

Re: Generative AI coding tools and agents do not work for me

#346

Post by raincole »

nobunaga wrote: post #260
olmo23 wrote: post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Where does the knowledge come from? People can only post to SO if they've read the code or the documentation. I don't see why LLMs couldn't do that.

ITT: People who think LLMs are AGI and can produce output that the LLM has come up with out of thin air or by doing research. Go speak with someone who is actually an expert in this field how LLMs work and why the training data is so important. Im amazed that people in the CS industry seem to talk like they know everything about a tech after using it but never even writing a line of code for an LLM. Our indsutry is d…

> LLM has come up with out of thin air

People don't think that. Especially not the commentor you replied to. You're human-hallucinating.

People think LLM are trained on raw documents and code besides StackOverflow. Which is very likely true.

Re: Generative AI coding tools and agents do not work for me

#347

Post by raxxorraxor »

socalgal2 wrote: post #180

> Another common argument I've heard is that Generative AI is helpful when you need to write code in a language or technology you are not familiar with. To me this also makes little sense. I'm not sure I get this one. When I'm learning new tech I almost always have questions. I used to google them. If I couldn't find an answer I might try posting on stack overflow. Sometimes as I'm typing the question their search wo…

For anything non-trivial you have to verify the results.

I disabled AI autocomplete and cannot understand how people can use it. It was mostly an extra key press on backspace for me.

That said, learning new languages is possible without searching anything. With a local model, you can do that offline and have a vast library of knowledge at hand.

The Gemini results integrated in Google are very bad as well.

I don't see the main problem to be people just lazily asking AI for how to use the toilet, but that real knowledge bases like stack overflow and similar will vanish because of lacking participation.

Re: Generative AI coding tools and agents do not work for me

#348

Post by jazzyjackson »

jamesrcole wrote: post #331
rainonmoon wrote: post #325

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the corpus of human knowledge. Goodness this is a dim view on the breadth of human knowledge.

what do you object to about it? I don't see an issue with referring to "the corpus of human knowledge". "Corpus" pretty much just means the "collection of".

Human knowledge != Reddit/Twitter/Wikipedia

Re: Generative AI coding tools and agents do not work for me

#349

Post by dpcan »

asciimov wrote: post #69
dpcan wrote: post #65

This article is just simply not true for most people who have figured out how to use AI properly when coding. Since switching to Cursor, my coding speed and efficiency has probably increased 10x conservatively. When I'm using it to code in languages I've used for 25+ years, it's a breeze to look over the function it just saved me time by pre-thinking and typing it out for me. Could I have done it myself, yeah, but it…

Out of curiosity how much are you spending on AI? How much do you believe a programmer needs to layout to “get good”?

I have a $20/month GPT subscription, and the $20/month cursor plan. I've yet to come close to going over my limits with either service. I use the unlimited Tab completions in cursor which are what end up saving me an enormous amount of time. I probably use 5 to maybe 10 chats a day in cursor, but I jump over to GPT if I think I'm going to require a few extra chats to get to the bottom of something.

I think that getting "good" at using AI means that you figure out exactly how to formulate your prompts so that the results are what you are looking for given your code base. It also means knowing when to start new chats, and when to have it focus on very specific pieces of code, and finally, knowing what it's really bad at doing.

For example, if I need to have it take a list of 20 fields and create the HTML view for the form, it can do it in a few seconds, and I know to tell it, for example, to use Bootstrap, Bootstrap icons, Bootstrap modals, responsive rows and columns, and I may want certain fields aligned certain ways, buttons in certain places for later, etc, and then I have a form - and just saved myself probably 30 minutes of typing it out and testing the alignment etc. If I do things like this 8 times a day, that's 4 hours of saved time, which is game changing for me.

Re: Generative AI coding tools and agents do not work for me

#350

Post by dpcan »

amlib wrote: post #109
dpcan wrote: post #65

This article is just simply not true for most people who have figured out how to use AI properly when coding. Since switching to Cursor, my coding speed and efficiency has probably increased 10x conservatively. When I'm using it to code in languages I've used for 25+ years, it's a breeze to look over the function it just saved me time by pre-thinking and typing it out for me. Could I have done it myself, yeah, but it…

What do you even mean with a 10x increase in efficiency? Does that means you commit 10x more code every day? Or that "you" essentially "type" code 10x faster? In the later case all the other tasks surrounding code would still take around the same netting you much less than 10x increase in overall productivity, probably less than 2x?

My favorite example, and the ones I show my team and my employer, is that I can have AI look at a string of fields for my database table and generate all the views for the display, add, and edit forms for those fields in exactly the way I instruct, and that saves me as much as 30 minutes every time I do it. If I do this 8 times in a day, that would save me about 4 hours. Especially when those forms require things like lookups and extra JavaScript functionality.

Another great example, is the power of tabbing with Cursor. If I want to change the parameters of a function in my React app, I can be at one of the functions anywhere in my screen, add a variable that relates to what is being rendered, and I can now quickly tab through to find all the spots that also are affected in that screen, and then it usually helps apply the changes to the function. It's like smart search and replace where I can see every change that needs made but it knows how to make it more intelligently than just replacing a line of code - and I didn't have to write the regex to find it, AND it usually helps get the work done in the function as well to reflect the change. That could save me 3-5 minutes, and I could do that 5 times a day maybe, and another almost half-hour is saved.

The point is, these small things add up SO fast. Now I'm incredibly efficient because the tedious part of programming has been sped up so much.

Post reply on HN