It is and will always be about: 1) properly defining the spec 2) ensuring the implementation satisfies said spec
AI coding is gambling
41–50 of 471 posts
Re: AI coding is gambling
#42few thoughts on this- it's not gambling if the most expected outcome actually occurs. It also depends on what you're coding with; - If you're coding with opus4.6, then it's not gambling for a while. - If you'r coding with gemini3-flash, then yeah. One thing I have noticed though is- you have to spend a lot of tokens to keep the error/hallucination rate low as your codebase increases in size. The math of this problem…
> it's not gambling if the most expected outcome actually occurs.
> you have to spend a lot of tokens to keep the error/hallucination rate low
Ironically, I find your comment more effective at convincing me AI coding is gambling than the original article. You're talking about it the exact same way that gamblers do about their games.
Re: AI coding is gambling
#43few thoughts on this- it's not gambling if the most expected outcome actually occurs. It also depends on what you're coding with; - If you're coding with opus4.6, then it's not gambling for a while. - If you'r coding with gemini3-flash, then yeah. One thing I have noticed though is- you have to spend a lot of tokens to keep the error/hallucination rate low as your codebase increases in size. The math of this problem…
> it's not gambling if the most expected outcome actually occurs. > you have to spend a lot of tokens to keep the error/hallucination rate low Ironically, I find your comment more effective at convincing me AI coding is gambling than the original article. You're talking about it the exact same way that gamblers do about their games.
lol that's interesting. care to explain why?
Re: AI coding is gambling
#44So.
Is.
Life.
You've discovered probability, there was an 80% change of that. Roll a dice and do not pass go.
Again. The output from llm is a probable solution, not right, not wrong.
Re: AI coding is gambling
#45I was just thinking about this. I was reading those tweets about the SV party were people were going home early to “check on their agents” or the “token anxiety” people are having over whether they are optimizing their agent usage. This is all giving me addiction vibes. Especially at the end of the day it seems like there is not much to show for it.
Re: AI coding is gambling
#46Yes, that's literally how LLM's work, they're probabilistic.
Re: AI coding is gambling
#47You got to know when to Ship it,
Know when to Re-prompt,
Know when to Clear the Context,
And know when to RLHF.
You never trust the Output,
When you’re staring at the diff view,
There’ll (not) be time enough for Fixing,
When the Tokens are all spent.
Re: AI coding is gambling
#48I see whole teams pushed by c- level going full in with spec driven + tdd development. The devs hate it because they are literally forbidden to touch a single line if code. but the results speak for themselves, it just works and the pressure has shifted to the product people to keep up. The whole tooling to enable this had to be worked out first. All Cursor and extreme use of a tool called Speckit, connected to Notio…
> literally forbidden to touch a single line if code. That is extremely stupid. What does that ban get you? I reqct to this because a friend mentioned exactly this. And I was dumbfounded.
> That is extremely stupid. What does that ban get you?
confidence in firing coders I presume..
Re: AI coding is gambling
#49As always, scope the changes to no larger than you can verify. AI changes the scale, but not the strategy.
Now you have more resources to test, reduce permissions scope, to build a test bench & procedure. All of the excuses you once had for not doing the job right are now gone.
You can write 10k + lines of test code in a few minutes. What is the gamble? The old world was a bigger gamble.
Re: AI coding is gambling
#50Everything is "fast, cheap, good--pick two." This is no different.
I like the analogy but which 2 is AI coding?
Fast & Cheap (but not Good?) - I wouldn't really say that AI coding is "cheap"
Cheap & Good (but not Fast) - Again, not really "cheap"
Fast & Good (but not Cheap) - This seems like maybe where we're at? Is this a bad place?