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AI coding is gambling

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Re: AI coding is gambling

#341

Post by munk-a »

NewsaHackO wrote: post #237
munk-a wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most people who are knitting do it purely for the experience of knitting. If you need clothes it's far more affordable to buy the cheap manufactured stuff. Some people certainly enjoy the creativity of expression and wish they could get to that easier - but most of those people have moved away from manual tasks like knitting and instead just draw or render their imagination. There's genuine value in making things by…

I think you misunderstood my post. Now many people do knitting for the joy of knitting, but people used to knit to create clothing to wear or to sell. Of course, automated knitting machines have largely replaced hand knitting, and people now still do it. If you are very good at hand knitting, you might see if you can sell some work. However, if you want to make knitted clothing at scale, you would be better served ta…

That would be a maximally economically efficient approach to producing knit clothes - but hand knit clothing still does have a significant market. This year I sought out a cobbler to get a new pair of shoes because my feet are a bit weird and the machine templates for what a foot should look like doesn't produce something I can comfortably wear. If you personally derive value from putting in the manual labor to produce "artisanal" goods in most fields you can find a market willing to pay the premium for your labor. This market is much smaller than the machine-driven equivalent so it can't support nearly the same quantity of producers as the market supported before automation came along but it is a niche you can operate within.

I don't disagree with your main thesis that an automated knitting machine can out produce hand-knit goods but I do think you're under appreciating that there still is a market for the non-automated goods. Even if they can't compete for the majority of the market markets are weird and non-uniform so those skills do still feed into a market.

Re: AI coding is gambling

#342

Post by lll-o-lll »

selixe_ wrote: post #263

I think "gambling" is a bit too strong, but there is a real shift in how we evaluate correctness. With traditional coding, you reason step by step and with AI-assisted code, you're often validating outputs after the fact. The risk isn't randomness per se it's over trusting something that looks correct. The skill ceiling is moving from "can you write it" to "can you reliably verify it"

But “reliably verify it” was always the critical difference between high and low quality engineering efforts.

Good programmers might have made things that “performed well”, and had “few bugs”, without this step, but it was not robust to changes over time. If we end up in a place where every project has solid automated verification, perhaps things get better overall.

Re: AI coding is gambling

#343

Post by estimator7292 »

itsgrimetime wrote: post #92

All of this new capability has made me realize that the reason i love programming _isn't_ the same as the OP. I used to think (and tell others) that I loved understanding something deeply, wading through the details to figure out a tough problem. but actually, being able to will anything I can think of into existence is what I love about programming. I do feel for the people who were able to make careers out of falli…

For me the joy comes from the understanding that the answer to "Is xyz possible?" is always, always "yes". It might be difficult, expensive, or take a long time, but my stance as an engineer is that anything is possible.

Hyperbole, yes, many things are in fact, not possible. But most people have the size of the two categories confused. The number of things that are categorically impossible is less than a rounding error compared to how many things are possible.

The joy and wonder of being an engineer is in taking problems deemed "impossible" and creating possibilities. It's in extracting a solution from infinite possibilities and redefining what possible even is.

Re: AI coding is gambling

#344

Post by dragonwriter »

wolandomny wrote: post #235

Obviously the following isn't a completely original take, but it's worth stating that AI coding is just a fundamentally different job than "traditional" or "manual" coding. The previous job was to spec something out to a comfortable degree without spending all of your time on a spec when there are so many unknowns that will come up during the engineering stage. Then, the job was to engineer at a snail's pace (compare…

I don’t know that that's true. Iterating on the spec and development together as in traditional agile development seems to work well with AI. The pace is different (an iteration might be hours instead of weeks) and the human role is mostly as a combined architect/analyst/lead dev/product owner, but the issue that real requirements are rarely clear before software hits the hands of users doesn't go away just because an AI wiped more of the code.

Re: AI coding is gambling

#345

Post by mh- »

lcampbell wrote: post #309
krupan wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Exactly. The following will work, assuming you're using a model and frontend that supports it:

> Let's play hangman. Just pick a 3 letter word for now, I want to make sure this works. Pick the secret word up front and make sure to write the secret word and game state in a file that you'll have access to for the rest of the session, since you won't remember what word you chose otherwise.

This was Opus 4.6 in Claude desktop, fwiw.

Note: I didn't bother experimenting with whether it worked without me explicitly telling it that it should record the game state to a file.

Re: AI coding is gambling

#346

Post by pdntspa »

tovej wrote: post #333
pdntspa wrote: post #292

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At a later date, perhaps. I haven't messed with this project since I got employed and it was written over summer 2025, when the tooling for agentic development was a lot worse. (Very ADD here) There's also the open question of how best to package a python app that makes use of PyTorch and SciPy for distribution to nontechnical users. I want to solve that before I start putting this in other people's hands. Careful wi…

Vibecoding is the term for building software with LLM tools. Did you do something different? I'm just getting tired of hearing claims of incredible software being built with LLM-based tools, but when I ask to see them, I get nothing. Your claim of 12-18 months for a windowed music metadata app seem weird. That seems like about a week with Dear ImGui and some file format reading libraries to me. Am I missing something…

> Vibecoding is the term for building software with LLM tools

without manual review and guidance. Coasting along purely on vibes. Hence the name. Agentic development is the middle ground where you're actively reviewing and architecting.

Dear Imgui isn't a 'proper' windowing toolkit. It's immediate-mode, it doesn't use OS affordances. Its not WinForms or GTK or QT (though to be fair QT isn't quite native but its by far the closest)

I never made any claims of 'incredible software'. I am building things that I need and want. I will give them to the world if I so choose and if they are good enough. And its not there yet.

And considering that I have almost zero domain knowledge in the area of DSP or audio analysis, that I'd only have a couple hours a day to work on it at best (energy, motivation, and other factors notwithstanding), and the amount of learning it would take to get to the point where something like that would be "about a week" is where most of that 12-18 months goes. And yes the metadata and GUI parts are easy, but the code that generates the metadata that is good enough to perform with? Across every possible container/meta/audio format? That produces quality results on both beatport downloads and 96khz vinyl rips? I'm trying to build something to consolidate my original music library (hundreds of thousands of files) with divergent sublibraries on multiple (proprietary) DJ platforms. Basically cleaning up after 20 years of fucking around without a plan. That's hard.

Re: AI coding is gambling

#347

Post by thangalin »

tovej wrote: post #329
thangalin wrote: post #286

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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

How is this greenfield?

How is it not?

You can trace the back commits to the first to show that it was started from scratch:

https://repo.autonoma.ca/repo/treetrek/commits/c7742cb3c580d...

Re: AI coding is gambling

#348

Post by bakugo »

pdntspa wrote: post #300
bakugo wrote: post #276

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But that's not programming because its a natural-language conversation? Correct. Programming is writing code. You are not writing code, therefore you are not programming. I don't understand what's so complicated about this.

I'm literally making a program. Present-progressive of the verb to program . I feel like you're pearl-clutching on semantics. By my read, programming != writing code, but writing code is most definitely programming. Oxford defines 'to program' as both.

You're not making a program. You're managing the AI that is making a program. You're a manager, maybe a designer or architect too, but not a programmer.

These are well defined roles that existed well before AI. You don't get to redefine them just because you feel like you should get to be part of some imaginary "programmers' club" without doing the actual thing that defines the "programmer" role.

Re: AI coding is gambling

#349

Post by jondwillis »

maplethorpe wrote: post #340
itsgrimetime wrote: post #92

All of this new capability has made me realize that the reason i love programming _isn't_ the same as the OP. I used to think (and tell others) that I loved understanding something deeply, wading through the details to figure out a tough problem. but actually, being able to will anything I can think of into existence is what I love about programming. I do feel for the people who were able to make careers out of falli…

If there was a website called InfiniteAppStore, which contained every app imaginable, and where you could type in your search and it would return the code for that app, would you find that as satisfying to use as Claude Code? On the surface this does not sound as satisfying, because it more resembles shopping than coding. But once Claude Code is finally tuned to do its job perfectly, you will essentially be using tha…

If there was an infinite App Store, we wouldn't have scarcity and I'd be doing literally anything else other than selling my time for money. I'd also be killed because there's no point to my owners/the world keeping me around anymore in that scenario, except, maybe for my winning personality/companionship.

Re: AI coding is gambling

#350

Post by Apocryphon »

maplethorpe wrote: post #340
itsgrimetime wrote: post #92

All of this new capability has made me realize that the reason i love programming _isn't_ the same as the OP. I used to think (and tell others) that I loved understanding something deeply, wading through the details to figure out a tough problem. but actually, being able to will anything I can think of into existence is what I love about programming. I do feel for the people who were able to make careers out of falli…

If there was a website called InfiniteAppStore, which contained every app imaginable, and where you could type in your search and it would return the code for that app, would you find that as satisfying to use as Claude Code? On the surface this does not sound as satisfying, because it more resembles shopping than coding. But once Claude Code is finally tuned to do its job perfectly, you will essentially be using tha…

To be fair, the shoppers of the InfiniteAppStore can still bikeshed endlessly about the merchandise.
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