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AI makes you boring

marginalia.nu

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Re: AI makes you boring

#371

Post by skydhash »

abustamam wrote: post #369
skydhash wrote: post #340

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Minified code is not for humans, it may as well been bytecode.

Agreed! That's why I told my llm to help me. But I think larger point being, it's not always feasible for humans to understand every line of code that runs in their software.

That’s where accountability comes in. It should be possible to have a non empty set of people that understand all the code. If I choose a dep to do unicode string parsing, that means I trust the author have good knowledge about unicode string parsing. And they should have the skills to maintain their code even if what I got is bytecoded or compiled.

Re: AI makes you boring

#372

Post by duskdozer »

ryandrake wrote: post #124
jcalvinowens wrote: post #47

Based on a lot of real world experience, I'm convinced LLM-generated documentation is worse than nothing. It's a complete waste of everybody's time. The number of people who I see having E-mail conversations where person A uses an LLM to turn two sentences into ten paragraphs, and person B uses an LLM to summarize the ten paragraphs into two sentences, is becoming genuinely alarming to me.

> The number of people who I see having E-mail conversations where person A uses an LLM to turn two sentences into ten paragraphs, and person B uses an LLM to summarize the ten paragraphs into two sentences, is becoming genuinely alarming to me. I remember in the early days of LLMs this was the joke meme. But, now seeing it happen in real life is more than just alarming. It's ridiculous. It's like the opposite of com…

The guess I've had was that most people were genuinely not reading emails/messages much or paying much attention to what they wrote to begin with, bolstered by the number of times I've tried to convey simple instructions or ask simple questions just to have most of it entirely ignored. I tried all kinds of organization, tried making them very short and direct, but still fruitless. So they don't experience the same loss

Re: AI makes you boring

#373

Post by abustamam »

llm_nerd wrote: post #321
JohnMakin wrote: post #28

> The cool part about pre-AI show HN is you got to talk to someone who had thought about a problem for way longer than you had Honestly, I agree, but the rash of "check out my vibe coded solution for perceived $problem I have no expertise in whatever and built in an afternoon" and the flurry of domain experts responding like "wtf, no one needs this" is kind of schadenfreude, but I feel guilty a little for enjoying it…

>and the flurry of domain experts responding like "wtf, no one needs this" People have been saying this about Show HNs for time eternal. There have been an insane number of poorly thought out, poorly considered, often Get-Rich-Quick type of creations, long before AI. Things where the submitter clearly doesn't understand the industry they're targeting, doesn't provide any sort of solution, etc. Really strange if peopl…

While I agree with your overall point, I think art is quite different.

I don't personally consume furry art but I am a fan of Studio Ghibli and the anime medium in general. And even within that medium, certain artists have a very different style than others. I can usually tell Makoto Shinkai's style vs Hayao Miyazaki's style vs Akira Toriyama's style. I don't think any of them ever claimed to have copied each other. But they have all worked thousands of hours to perfect their craft.

With AI, you get people like me, who can't draw stick figures, tell Chatgpt or nano banana to make an anime version of themselves and then voilà! You get something that could probably pass as Miyazaki's in a minute.

No artist has a claim or monopoly on a genre, but they do have a claim on their own art style. With AI being trained on artists' styles, the artists whose works literally trained the AIs are now being inundated with low effort copycats of their creations.

That being said, I wrote in another thread comment that AI is an accelerator of what already exists. In a codebase, if you have crappy code patterns, AI will just accelerate that.

In business, like you said, people who had crappy ideas have always been able to submit crappy business ideas. Only a few of them actually tried to execute on them. With AI, more of them can execute on them.

I think this "boringness" the article is talking about always existed. It just becomes more prevelant because AI reduces the barrier to entry.

Re: AI makes you boring

#374

Post by abustamam »

sigbottle wrote: post #266
gspr wrote: post #259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I do believe you, but I have to ask: what are these incredibly tedious "easy, time consuming parts of projects" everyone seems to bring up? Refactoring I can see, but I have a sense that's not what you mean here.

That's actually a great point. I feel like unless you know for sure that you will never need something again, nothing is disposable. I find myself diving into places I thought I would never care about again ALL the time. Every single time I have vibe coded a project I cared about, letting the AI rip with mild code review and rigorous testing has bit me in the ass, without fail. It doesn't extend it in the taste that…

In a simple text based game I'm vibe coding for fun, I created skills that help the specs evolve.

I started with chatgpt, I told it to make me a road map of game features.

Then I use that road map to guide my LLM (I use codex 5.3), with the specification — when working on tasks, if you learn anything that may be out of scope, add it to the road map.

There's a bit more to it than that, but so far I've got a playable game, and at some point the requirement of adding an admin dashboard for experiments got added to the road map, and that got implemented pretty well too.

At first I did review a lot of its code, but now I just let it rip and I've been happy with it thus far.

At work I use AI heavily but obviously since I'm responsible for whatever code I push I do actually review and test and understand, but mostly I just need to tweak some small things before it's good enough to ship.

Re: AI makes you boring

#375

Post by abustamam »

Refreeze5224 wrote: post #178
doublerabbit wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The boring parts where you learn. "Oh, I did that, this is now not that and it does this! But it was so boring building a template parser" - You've learnt. Boring is suppose to be boring for the sake of learning. If you're bored then you're not learning. Take a look back at your code in a weeks time and see if you still understand what's going on. Top level maybe, but the deep down cog of the engine of the applicatio…

> The boring parts where you learn. Exactly this. Finding that annoying bug that took 15 browser tabs and digging deep into some library you're using, digging into where your code is not performant, looking for alternative algorithms or data structures to do something, this is where learning and experience happen. This is why you don't hire a new grad for a senior role, they have not had time to bang their heads on e…

I actually learn quite a bit from my AI vibe coding and debugging. The other day I had a configuration issue in my codebase that only happened in prod. I didn't understand it (my coworker coded it and he was busy with something else at the time). I asked AI to help and it told me why it was broken and how to fix it, and also fixed it for me.

Since the issue was due to the intersection of k8s and effect, I don't think reading a bunch of docs would have really helped.

Of course I'm sure there's plenty of people who don't care about understanding the bugs and just want to fix things fast. But understanding these bugs helps me prompt/skill the LLM to prevent them in the future.

Re: AI makes you boring

#376

Post by NoGravitas »

llm_nerd wrote: post #321
JohnMakin wrote: post #28

> The cool part about pre-AI show HN is you got to talk to someone who had thought about a problem for way longer than you had Honestly, I agree, but the rash of "check out my vibe coded solution for perceived $problem I have no expertise in whatever and built in an afternoon" and the flurry of domain experts responding like "wtf, no one needs this" is kind of schadenfreude, but I feel guilty a little for enjoying it…

>and the flurry of domain experts responding like "wtf, no one needs this" People have been saying this about Show HNs for time eternal. There have been an insane number of poorly thought out, poorly considered, often Get-Rich-Quick type of creations, long before AI. Things where the submitter clearly doesn't understand the industry they're targeting, doesn't provide any sort of solution, etc. Really strange if peopl…

On the whole you're right, but it's also the case that scale matters. Show HNs have always been mostly bullshit, but producing a bullshit Show HN was on the same order of magnitude difficulty of producing a good one. If LLMs were to provide 10x productivity, we'd have the same number of good Show HNs, and 10x more bullshit ones.

Re: AI makes you boring

#377

Post by bonesss »

JohnMakin wrote: post #28

> The cool part about pre-AI show HN is you got to talk to someone who had thought about a problem for way longer than you had Honestly, I agree, but the rash of "check out my vibe coded solution for perceived $problem I have no expertise in whatever and built in an afternoon" and the flurry of domain experts responding like "wtf, no one needs this" is kind of schadenfreude, but I feel guilty a little for enjoying it…

> schadenfreude

I’ve been partaking in my fair share, but more and more I’m just feeling sad for my fellow coders ‘cause a lot of what I’m hearing is about bad local choices and burdensome tech stacks.

Sure, it’s kinda hilarious watching a bunch of fashion obsessed front-end devs discover bash, TDD, and that, like, specifications, like, can really be useful, you know, for building stuff or whatever.

But then I think about a version of me who came up a bit later, bit into some reasonable sounding orthodoxy about React or Node as my first production language and who would be having the same ‘profound’ revelations. I never would have learned better. I wouldn’t be as empowered from having these system programming concepts hammered into me. LLMs would be more ‘magic’, I’d extrapolate more readily…

I’ve found myself thinking a lot of thoughts tantamount to “why don’t you dummies just use Haskell, or Lisp, or OCaml, or F#, or Kotlin for that?!”, and from their PoV I’m seeing a broken ladder. A ladder that was orthodoxy and well-documented when I was coming up.

LLMs should ideally bring SICP and Knuth and emacs to the masses. Fingers crossed.

Re: AI makes you boring

#378

Post by grimgrin »

grimgrin wrote: post #254
grimgrin wrote: post #116

I land on this thread to ctrl-f "taste" and will refresh and repeat later That is for sure the word of the year, true or not. I agree with it, I think

it was up to 3 when I first posted it's at 10 now. note: the article does not say "taste" once

18, i'll stop. cheers

Re: AI makes you boring

#380

Post by notanastronaut »

nicbou wrote: post #223
Uehreka wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Writing and programming are both a form of working at a problem through text… Whoa whoa whoa hold your horses, code has a pretty important property that ordinary prose doesn’t have: it can make real things happen even if no one reads it (it’s executable). I don’t want to read something that someone didn’t take the time to write. But I’ll gladly use a tool someone had an AI write, as long as it works (which these th…

It makes sense. A vibe-coded tool can sometimes do the job, just like some cheap Chinese-made widget. Not every task requires hand-crafted professional grade tools. For example, I have a few letter generators on my website. The letters are often verified by a lawyer, but the generator could totally be vibe-coded. It's basically an HTML form that fills in the blanks in the template. Other tools are basically "take inp…

There is a sentiment around tools and a particular business sells perfectly fine, cheap, one use tools, for those jobs that you'll only need to do once, maybe twice. But if you want a good quality tool, you spend money on it and buy it elsewhere.

That's how I perceive vibe programming. A small one-off job that it would literally take me longer to write than to have generated? Perfectly fine. For anything else, there are professionals who get it done.

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