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AI Can Make You Suck Faster Too

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Re: AI Can Make You Suck Faster Too

#41

Post by generic92034 »

dvt wrote: post #23
coatmatter wrote: post #16

If one truly believes it's not in a bubble, then borrow and leverage an unlimited amount and bet the house & your family on creating a business with infinite growth and value. Don't know how to do your own prompts? Borrow and then hire others to do it for you. If those who you hire don't know, they can hire others too.* [* This is not financial advice. Please don't actually do this.]

You could make the converse argument, too: why don't you borrow and leverage and bet and short these AI companies, if you so vehemently think it's a bubble? The bottom line is that markets are complicated, useful technologies are often accompanied by bubbles, investors are not always rational, and people generally try to make the best decision with the information they have available. The answer is likely somewhere i…

> You could make the converse argument, too: why don't you borrow and leverage and bet and short these AI companies, if you so vehemently think it's a bubble?

Because going long and going short are very different. For successfully shorting something you need to have a pretty precise estimate of when the crash will happen. Being a comparatively short time off can cost you everything.

Re: AI Can Make You Suck Faster Too

#42

Post by spiderfarmer »

Why does it have to lead to a 10x increase in revolutionary companies?

Next to maintaining and expanding my own network of websites I 10xd writing boring CRUD applications for companies that were otherwise unable to afford it, making all their employees more productive. There's true economic value in that.

Re: AI Can Make You Suck Faster Too

#43

Post by Quothling »

sriniwasx wrote: post #26

The code smell in my repos are at an all time high and I'm a senior dev, can't image how worse vibe coders have it.

I think it depends on what area of the world you work. We recenty had one of our plant managers build a web portal to keep track of some of our operational tech, with features you wouldn't find in standard products. I've been turning it into a container app that can actually deploy safely into our cloud infrastrcture. It's quite frankly better quality than what most external software companies have provided us with in the past.

Don't get me wrong. It's not great. It would never pass any of our policies for things that actually operate stuff on the power grid, but as an administrative tool that can live in total isolation from the vital networks. It's perfectly fine. It's also not like we would have hired the best software companies to build it otherwise. We'd hire some low-level cheap consultant house who would then likely get cheap student labour to build it. With that in mind though, the AI is much better than what the realistic alternative would be.

Money wise it's also cheaper. It's been roughly €1000 + the time it's taken us both. If I had known they were doing it, I would have rolled out the developer cowork app/skills/whateveryoucallconfigurationsthesedays to them. This would have avoided their AI building it to be depoyed on a VM rather than in our managed k8s in our Azure. It would also have written the code a little different, used UV and maybe django rather than flask. But hey. For what it is, it's like a 90% cost saving compared to buying what would've been a less maintainable and lower quality system.

I think perhaps the greater issue will be finding people who want to extract the gold from the heap of shit and getting it to run in production. I don't personally mind, but it's not like any of my colleagues would've wanted the task.

Re: AI Can Make You Suck Faster Too

#44

Post by jtrn »

I have a coffee cup with the writing "Do stupid thing faster with cafe". That's how I feel about myself when I use AI carelessly... The speed with which I can make a mess is astronomical!

Re: AI Can Make You Suck Faster Too

#45

Post by jonplackett »

reconnecting wrote: post #12
dr_dshiv wrote: post #5

“I wanted to see if I can get in on this 10x magic. I decided to put my money where my mouth was and I bought $10 worth of DeepSeek credits to use with a project I was working on.“ Wow. I guess that’s the punchline!

I'm sure DeepSeek isn't the point here. You can change the name to whatever you prefer and the article still holds. Actually, I think the author put DeepSeek on purpose to avoid the obvious ChatGPT/Claude comparison — because whatever he chose, there would be a question of why model A and not B, while the point of the article isn't about models comparison at all .

I think the point is that $10 isn’t exactly a lot of money to put where your mouth is, nor a serious effort to see if it works.

Re: AI Can Make You Suck Faster Too

#46

Post by terhechte »

reconnecting wrote: post #12
dr_dshiv wrote: post #5

“I wanted to see if I can get in on this 10x magic. I decided to put my money where my mouth was and I bought $10 worth of DeepSeek credits to use with a project I was working on.“ Wow. I guess that’s the punchline!

I'm sure DeepSeek isn't the point here. You can change the name to whatever you prefer and the article still holds. Actually, I think the author put DeepSeek on purpose to avoid the obvious ChatGPT/Claude comparison — because whatever he chose, there would be a question of why model A and not B, while the point of the article isn't about models comparison at all .

It is the point. Also open source model enthusiast tell you otherwise, there is a coding quality gap between these models. If I use DeepSeek, I do so knowing that I have to limit to simpler tasks on smaller, well specified prompts. What the author did, letting the model do the planning, is not something DeepSeek will excel at. I'm using GPT (Terra, Sol, Luna), Claude (Opus 5, Fable), Qwen 3.8 and GLM 5.3 Flash daily and have to vary which model I use where because there's a huge intelligence step function difference here. That's why this article is so useless:

Imagine someone trying to make the case that riding bicycles is a terrible experience and their whole argument is that they took a random cheapo bike with flat tires and rode it for 3min and that wasn't fun. Sure, but if you buy a 25k carbon bike you will have a different experience. I'd not trust that person. If someone told me they have 10 bikes they ride daily and can explain the differences, in detail, between their bikes, and what they excel at. I'd trust that person's opinion.

Re: AI Can Make You Suck Faster Too

#47

Post by MrScruff »

In general, the frontier models are not capable of reliably authoring non-trivial code without careful oversight yet. They are great at producing code that can pass tests, but not neccessarily a code review. This means if you care about code quality you still need a human in a loop understanding what has been done, and that becomes the bottleneck. And less disciplined folks will indeed become increasingly dependent.

However, over time the complexity of problems where you can get away with less/no oversight is increasing. And the models are already great at solving certain classes of problems where one doesn't really care that much about code quality, that wouldn't have even been attempted in a pre-LLM world. Over the weekend I was using Claude to add features to the compiled (no source available) firmware of one of my audio devices, adding workflow features by patching assembly and custom DSP code.

In coding, as with other areas, what's emerging is jagged intelligence.

Re: AI Can Make You Suck Faster Too

#48

Post by orwin »

I now started to us AI to help review my juniors PRs, because I couldn't keep up with the amount of code they ship. It started poorly, but now I have my method: I first read the code and flag the lines I'm not sure about, then ask any frontier model (I like Claude here for analysis, even if I don't use it for the rest) to explain the PR and to put effort on the parts I flagged (basically explain in detail the code, not only the PR), and to search through the libraries. Sometimes it notices something I would have missed (like missing an 'order_by' or off by one errors, because the underlying lib wasn't coded like the original AI pretended it was).

I also changed the way I do review because it has been more than a year and the juniors/new hire are still lost, wether on domain knowledge for the older new hire, or just capabilities for the juniors, and discussing with other departments, it's the same for like 95% of them. Now, rather than correcting the PR or adding a request for change, I add a whole unit/functional test to the PR and let that as an exercise to pass the test. They can use AI but I tell them to try to find what part of the code doesn't work before generating the fix, hopefully they'll take ownership of the code if I keep doing that.

Re: AI Can Make You Suck Faster Too

#49

Post by oblio »

spiderfarmer wrote: post #42

Why does it have to lead to a 10x increase in revolutionary companies? Next to maintaining and expanding my own network of websites I 10xd writing boring CRUD applications for companies that were otherwise unable to afford it, making all their employees more productive. There's true economic value in that.

This is fine, but software also needs maintenance, especially security updates. If we have an explosion of new software without the corresponding increase in maintenance work - very likely from clients that pay peanuts for software - the world will be taken over by botnets and malware.

It's going to be a worldwide software experiment.

Re: AI Can Make You Suck Faster Too

#50

Post by mikenew »

nottorp wrote: post #20
mikenew wrote: post #9

> The chatbot recommended some of the dumbest shit you could possibly do The "I tried it and it sucked" is borderline conspiratorial at this point. There are enough talented, thoughtful developers saying there's something real here, and it is worth believing them and investing some time to understand it, even if you come out the other side and decide you don't want to use LLMs. Use a very good model. Set up a good ha…

You describe my experience with Claude (except my gut feeling is that system prompts and especially skills are useless, and I've even done limited testing that agrees with that). However, your discourse is not the usual borderline religious discourse that's used by LLM advocates. You're not extreme enough either pro or against LLMs :)

Ha, well that's good because I would hate to be labeled an "LLM advocate". I've been on the negative side of the conversation many times, and I think the downsides are very real and often ignored. But calling them useless is just not reality.

As far as system prompts and skills, my approach has been to start with nothing and add very specific instructions as I notice issues or feel like I need them. Mostly around trying to keep it terse, kill the obnoxious rhetoric ("It's not X. It's Y"), and give specific guidance on how to write code. Skills are things like "use edge-tts to generate spoken audio for this answer and send it to me" kind of thing.

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