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My AI skeptic friends are all nuts

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Re: My AI skeptic friends are all nuts

#361

Post by NeutralCrane »

capnrefsmmat wrote: post #90

The argument seems to be that for an expert programmer, who is capable of reading and understanding AI agent code output and merging it into a codebase, AI agents are great. Question: If everyone uses AI to code, how does someone become an expert capable of carefully reading and understanding code and acting as an editor to an AI? The expert skills needed to be an editor -- reading code, understanding its implication…

> Question: If everyone uses AI to code, how does someone become an expert capable of carefully reading and understanding code and acting as an editor to an AI?

LLMs are very much like pair programmers in my experience. For the junior engineer, they are excellent resources for learning, the way a senior engineer might be. Not only can they code what the junior can’t, they can explain questions the junior has about the code and why it’s doing what it’s doing.

For senior devs, it is a competent pair programmers, acting as an excellent resource for bouncing ideas off of, rubber ducking, writing boilerplate, and conducting code reviews.

For expert devs, it is a junior/senior dev you can offload all the trivial tasks to so you can focus on the 10% of the project that is difficult enough to require your expertise. Like a junior dev, you will need to verify what it puts together, but it’s still a huge amount of time saved.

For junior devs specifically, if they are not curious and have no interest in actually learning, they will just stop at the generated code and call it a day. That’s not an issue with the tool, it’s an issue with the dev. For competent individuals with a desire to learn and grow, LLMs represent one of the single best resources to do so. In that sense, I think that junior devs are at a greater advantage than ever before.

Re: My AI skeptic friends are all nuts

#362

Post by mlsu »

I tried the agent thing on:

- Large C codebase (new feature and bugfix)

- Small rust codebase (new feature)

- Brand new greenfield frontend for an in-spec and documented openAPI API

- Small fixes to an existing frontend

It failed _dramatically_ in all cases. Maybe I'm using this thing wrong but it is devin-level fail. Gets diffs wrong. Passes phantom arguments to tools. Screws up basic features. Pulls in hundreds of line changes on unrelated files to refactor. Refactors again and again, over itself, partially, so that the uncompleted boneyard of an old refactor sits in the codebase like a skeleton (those tokens are also sent up to the model).

It genuinely makes an insane, horrible, spaghetti MESS of the codebase. Any codebase. I expected it to be good at svelte and solidJS since those are popular javascript frameworks with lots of training data. Nope, it's bad. This was a few days ago, Claude 4. Seriously, seriously people what am I missing here with this agents thing. They are such gluttonous eaters of tokens that I'm beginning to think these agent posts are paid advertising.

Re: My AI skeptic friends are all nuts

#363

Post by ugh123 »

bloat wrote: post #29

So we replace the task of writing tedious boilerplate with the task of reading the AI's tedious boilerplate. Which takes just as long. And leaves you with less understanding. And is more boring.

>So we replace the task of writing tedious boilerplate with the task of reading the AI's tedious boilerplate. Which takes just as long. And leaves you with less understanding. And is more boring.

These all sound like your projected assumptions. No, it generally does not take longer to review sizable code changes than it does to write it. This is further alleviated if the code passes tests, either existing or new ones created by the ai.

Re: My AI skeptic friends are all nuts

#364

Post by stouset »

davidclark wrote: post #145

>If you were trying and failing to use an LLM for code 6 months ago †, you’re not doing what most serious LLM-assisted coders are doing. Here’s the thing from the skeptic perspective: This statement keeps getting made on a rolling basis. 6 months ago if I wasn’t using the life-changing, newest LLM at the time, I was also doing it wrong and being a luddite. It creates a never ending treadmill of boy-who-cried-LLM. Why…

I saw this article and thought, now's the time to try again!

Using Claude Sonnet 4, I attempted to add some better configuration to my golang project. An hour later, I was unable to get it to produce a usable configuration, apparently due to a recent v1-to-v2 config format migration. It took less time to hand-edit one based on reading the docs.

I keep getting told that this time agents are ready. Every time I decide to use them they fall flat on their face. Guess I'll try again in six months.

Re: My AI skeptic friends are all nuts

#365

Post by haiku2077 »

lapcat wrote: post #255

> If you were trying and failing to use an LLM for code 6 months ago, you’re not doing what most serious LLM-assisted coders are doing. This sounds like the "No true Scotsman" fallacy. > People coding with LLMs today use agents. Agents get to poke around your codebase on their own. That's a nonstarter for closed source, unless everything is running on-device, which I don't think it is? > Part of being a senior develo…

You can run the agents on your own infrastructure (all the way down to a Mac Mini sitting on your desk), or Microsoft, OpenAI and I'm pretty sure Anthropic can sell you an Enterprise service that guarantees a certain level of confidentiality. I work in aerospace, one of the most paranoid industries, and even we got a Copilot subscription that met our needs...

Re: My AI skeptic friends are all nuts

#366

Post by rednafi »

A lot of people who are wary of LLMs aren’t against the technology itself, but rather the narrative surrounding it. You can take advantage of the tool while turning a blind eye to the discourse.

This 16-minute, expletive-filled, edgy-old-man-trying-too-hard-to-be-cool article could easily be dismissed as yet another AI creed that somehow found its way to the top of the HN front page.

Re: My AI skeptic friends are all nuts

#367

Post by [deleted] »

a_bonobo wrote: post #351

I find the Konwinski Prize to be very interesting in this context. 1 million dollars to whoever's open source LLM solves >90% of a set of novel Github issues. https://www.kaggle.com/competitions/konwinski-prize/ Currently, the #1 spot sits at a score of 0.09, not 0.9. A far cry from being useful. I know that open source models are not as good as closed source, but still, we're a long way from LLMs being good for code…

[deleted]

Re: My AI skeptic friends are all nuts

#368

Post by Hilift »

cesarb wrote: post #312

This article does not touch on the thing which worries me the most with respect to LLMs: the dependence . Unless you can run the LLM locally, on a computer you own, you are now completely dependent on a remote centralized system to do your work. Whoever controls that system can arbitrarily raise the prices, subtly manipulate the outputs, store and do anything they want with the inputs, or even suddenly cease to opera…

That's going full speed ahead though. Every major cloud provider has an AI offering, and there are now multiple AI-centric cloud providers. There is a lot of money and speculation. Now Nvidia has their own cloud offering that "democratize access to world-class AI infrastructure. Sovereign AI initiatives require a new standard for transparency and performance".

Re: My AI skeptic friends are all nuts

#369

Post by bgwalter »

mgraczyk wrote: post #153

We are beyond the point of trying to convince naysayers. I will simply not hire anybody who is not good at using LLMs, and I don't think I would ever work with anybody who thinks they aren't very useful. It's like working with somebody who things compilers are useless. Obviously wrong, not worth spending time trying to convince. To anyone who reads this article and disagrees with the central point: You are missing th…

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Re: My AI skeptic friends are all nuts

#370

Post by someothherguyy »

davidclark wrote: post #145

>If you were trying and failing to use an LLM for code 6 months ago †, you’re not doing what most serious LLM-assisted coders are doing. Here’s the thing from the skeptic perspective: This statement keeps getting made on a rolling basis. 6 months ago if I wasn’t using the life-changing, newest LLM at the time, I was also doing it wrong and being a luddite. It creates a never ending treadmill of boy-who-cried-LLM. Why…

Also, professional programmers have varying needs. These people are coding in different languages, with varying complexity, domains, existing code bases and so on.

People making arguments based on sweeping generalizations to a wide audience are often going to be perceived as delusional, as their statements do not apply universally to everyone.

To me, thinking LLMs can code generally because you have success with them and then telling others they are wrong in how they use them is making a gigantic assumptive leap.

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