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AI coding made me faster, but I can't code to music anymore

praf.me

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Re: AI coding made me faster, but I can't code to music anymore

#41

Post by theshrike79 »

foo42 wrote: post #30

The tradeoff of higher velocity for less enjoyment may feel less welcome when it becomes the new baseline and the expectation of employers / customers. The excitement of getting a day's work done in an hour* (for example) is likely to fade once the expectation is to produce 8 of such old-days output per day. I suspect it doesn't matter how we feel about it mind you. If it's going to happen it will, whether we enjoy t…

The trick is not telling anyone you spent an hour to do 7 hours of work.

That's stupid and detrimental to your mental health.

You do it in an hour, spend maybe 1-2 hours to make it even better and prettier and then relax. Do all that menial shit you've got lined up anyway.

Re: AI coding made me faster, but I can't code to music anymore

#42

Post by stavros »

october8140 wrote: post #8

What kind of projects are people doing that are feeling the increased velocity?

Every kind of project is faster with AI, because it writes the code faster.

Then you have to QA it for ages to discover the bugs it wrote, but the initial perception of speed never leaves you.

I think I'm overall slower with AI, but I could be faster if I had it write simple functions that I could review one by one, and have the AI compose them the way I wanted. Unfortunately, I'm too lazy to be faster.

Re: AI coding made me faster, but I can't code to music anymore

#45

Post by tamimio »

That's an argument I had with a friend last year. I told him generative AI will make writing code easier, but the life of whoever is writing it far worse. Because writing code without using AI is done with some sort of due diligence: you memorize some stuff, look up other stuff in the docs or online, and you take some time actually solving the problem you have. If you succeed, you would've spent the needed time at YOUR pace, with an intrinsic reward of feeling good that you achieved something. With AI, on the other hand, you are in semi-cheat mode, throwing prompts after prompts and now you are trying to catch someone/something else's pace, zero reward, and more mentally exhausted.

The best approach is to use AI only when you are stuck and looking for potential solutions, but we all know that is not going to happen unless you have extreme self-control.

Re: AI coding made me faster, but I can't code to music anymore

#46

Post by [deleted] »

ForHackernews wrote: post #35
energy123 wrote: post #28

> writing a blurb that contains the same mental model Good nugget. Effective prompting, aside from context curation, is about providing the LLM with an approximation of your world model and theory, not just a local task description. This includes all your unstated assumptions, interaction between system and world, open questions, edge cases, intents, best practices, and so on. Basically distill the shape of the probl…

Hard to tell if this is parody or not but I chuckled at the idea of replacing tedious programming with a "simple stream" of handwritten XML.

[deleted]

Re: AI coding made me faster, but I can't code to music anymore

#47

Post by winrid »

zwnow wrote: post #9
p0w3n3d wrote: post #7

Absolutely—I feel like I can ship at a crazy velocity now, like I have a team of interns at my disposal to code up my every silly demand. It reminds me this scene: `Cut my eggs` `Your eggs are cut sir!' `Cut my milk' `I can't sir, it's liquid' `Imbecile! Freeze it, then cut it!'

> Absolutely—I feel like I can ship at a crazy velocity now, like I have a team of interns at my disposal to code up my every silly demand. I also wonder what type of simple CRUD apps people build that have such a performance gain? They must be building well understood projects or be incredible slow developers for LLMs to have such an impact, as I cant relate to this at all.

There are people using Claude to make entire 3d MMO games, so ...

Re: AI coding made me faster, but I can't code to music anymore

#49

Post by jwr »

In my experience, listening to music engages the creative part of your brain and severely limits what you can do, but this is not readily apparent.

If I listen to music, I can spend an hour CODING YEAH! and be all smug and satisfied, until I turn the music off and discover that everything I've coded is unnecessary and there is an easier way to achieve the same goal. I just didn't see it, because the creative part of my brain was busy listening to music.

From the post, it sounds like the author discovered the same thing: if you use AI to perform menial tasks (like coding), all that is left is thinking creatively, and you can't do that while listening to music.

Re: AI coding made me faster, but I can't code to music anymore

#50

Post by dakiol »

What happened to coding for joy in your free time? At work I do whatever the company wants as long as I get my money at the end of the month. Java? Sure boss. Golang? Let’s do it. LLMs? Whatever you want. TDD? Yep.

At home I still plan and devise my own worlds with joy. I may use LLMs for boring or repetitive tasks, or help or explanation; but I still can code better than the day before.

As usual, work != career.

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