411–420 of 611 posts
Context matters most here-- does a solid framework exist for the work you're trying to do? Then use it, otherwise write what you need and understand the risks that come with freshly written code.
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Id wager my life savings that devs aren’t even 1.5x more productive using these tools.
Dead wrong. Because the world is still filled with problems that would once have been on the wrong side of the is it worth your time matrix ( https://xkcd.com/1205/ ) There are all sorts of things that I, personally, should have automated long ago that I threw at claud to do for me. What was the cost to me? Prompt and a code review. Meanwhile, on larger tasks an LLM deeply integrated into my IDE has been a boon. Havi…
I also primarily write Elixir, and I have found most Agents are only capable of writing small pieces well. More complicated asks tend to produce unnecessarily complicated solutions, ones that may “work,” on the surface, but don’t hold up in practice. I’ve seen a large increase in small bugs with more AI coding assistance.
When I write code, I want to write it and forget about it. As a result, I’ve written a LOT of code which has gone on to work for years without touching it. The amount of time I spent writing it is inconsequential in every sense. I personally have not found AI capable of producing code like that (yet, as all things, that could change).
Does AI help with some stuff? Sure. I always forget common patterns in Terraform because I don’t often have to use it. Writing some initial resources and asking it to “make it normal,” is helpful. That does save time. Asking it to write a gen server correctly, is an act of self-harm because it fundamentally does not understand concurrency in Erlang/BEAM/OTP. It very much looks like it does, but it 100% does not.
tldr; I think the ease of use of AI can cause us to over produce and as a result we miss the forest for the trees.
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I spent Dry January working on a new coding project and since all my nerd friends have been telling me to try to code with LLM's I gave it a shot and signed up to Google Gemini... All I can say is "holy shit, I'm a believer." I've probably got close to a year's worth of coding done in a month and a half. Busy work that would have taken me a day to look up, figure out, and write -- boring shit like matplotlib illustra…
What kind of project / prompts - what’s working for you? /I spent a good 20 years in the software world but have been away doing other things professionally for couple years. Recently was in the same place as you, with a new project and wanting to try it out. So I start with a generic Django project in VSCode, use the agent mode, and… what a waste of time. The auto-complete suggestions it makes are frequently wrong,…
Not sure why we had so different experiances. Maybe you are using other models? Maybe you miss something in your prompts? Letting it start with a plan which I can then check did definitly help a lot. Also a summary of the apps workings and technical decissions (also produced by the model) did maybe help in the long run.
It's strange to me when articles like this describe the 'pain of writing code'. I've always found that the easy part. Anyway, this stuff makes me think of what it would be like if you had Tolkein around today using AI to assist him in his writing. 'Claude, generate me a paragraph describing Frodo and Sam having an argument over the trustworthiness of Gollum. Frodo should be defending Gollum and Sam should be on his s…
Writing he code should be the easy part and one of the smaller time sinks actually. The fruits of the labour is in the planning, the design, the architecture and the requirements that you want to achieve now and potentially in the future.. these all require a serious amount of effort and foresight to plan out. When you're ready, maybe you've done some POC in areas you were unsure, maybe some good skeletons work to se…
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What point have we reached? All I see is HN drowning in insufferable, identical-sounding posts about how everything has changed forever. Meanwhile at work, in a high stakes environment where software not working as intended has actual consequences, there are... a few new tools some people like using and think they may be a bit more productive with. And the jury's still out even on that. The initial excitement of LLMs…
> I think I'm done with HN at this point. On the bright side, this forum is gonna be great fun to read in 2 or 3 years, whether the AI dream takes off, or crashes to the ground.
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One thing I’ve noticed is that effort may be saved but not as much time. The agent can certainly type faster than me but I have to sit there and watch it work and then check its work when done. There’s certainly some time savings but not what you think.
Another thing I've noticed is that using AI, I'm less likely to give existing code another look to see if there's already something in it that does what I need. It's so simple to get the AI to spin up a new class / method that gets close to what I want, so sometimes I end up "giving orders first, asking questions later" and only later realizing that I've duplicated functionality.
I usually keep one agent/prompt/context ripping through new features and another 1-3 agents/prompts/contexts reviewing, testing, planning.
A significant number of developers and businesses are going to have an absolutely brutal rude awakening in the not too distant future. You can build things this way, and they may work for a time, but you don't know what you don't know (and experience teaches you that you only find most stuff by building/struggling; not sipping a soda while the AI blurts out potentially secure/stable code). The hubris around AI is goi…
Have you considered that betting against the models and ecosystem improving might be a bad bet, and you might be the one who is in for a rude awakening?
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Writing he code should be the easy part and one of the smaller time sinks actually. The fruits of the labour is in the planning, the design, the architecture and the requirements that you want to achieve now and potentially in the future.. these all require a serious amount of effort and foresight to plan out. When you're ready, maybe you've done some POC in areas you were unsure, maybe some good skeletons work to se…
So waterfall sdlc...
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How would it improve skills? Does driving a car improve your running speed?
I have to stretch your analogy in weird ways to make it function within this discussion: Imagine two people who have only sat in a chair their whole lives. Then, you have one of them learn how to drive a car, whereas the other one never leaves the chair. The one who learned how to drive a car would then find it easier to learn how to run, compared to the person who had to continue sitting in the chair the whole time.