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AI coding is gambling

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Re: AI coding is gambling

#411

Post by snackerblues »

pdntspa wrote: post #377
californical wrote: post #293

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean, yes - you’re reviewing and architecting, but not creating. Same as if you use an image diffusion model. You can describe very clearly what you want, and iterate carefully until you get a picture that looks good. But nobody would say that they “drew a nice picture”, since they haven’t done any drawing. (except maybe the mega-power-users who use the tool and have a warped view of their accomplishment)

I'll never say that I wrote the code, because I didn't.

>wrote the code

aka programmed.

Re: AI coding is gambling

#412

Post by Robotbeat »

maplethorpe wrote: post #340
itsgrimetime wrote: post #92

All of this new capability has made me realize that the reason i love programming _isn't_ the same as the OP. I used to think (and tell others) that I loved understanding something deeply, wading through the details to figure out a tough problem. but actually, being able to will anything I can think of into existence is what I love about programming. I do feel for the people who were able to make careers out of falli…

If there was a website called InfiniteAppStore, which contained every app imaginable, and where you could type in your search and it would return the code for that app, would you find that as satisfying to use as Claude Code? On the surface this does not sound as satisfying, because it more resembles shopping than coding. But once Claude Code is finally tuned to do its job perfectly, you will essentially be using tha…

I dunno, browsing McMaster-Carr feels like both shopping and creating at the same time.

Typing is just choosing from the latent space something special, too. Could just be random words, or, even fewer, random grammatically correct sentences.

Re: AI coding is gambling

#413

Post by m3kw9 »

maplethorpe wrote: post #340
itsgrimetime wrote: post #92

All of this new capability has made me realize that the reason i love programming _isn't_ the same as the OP. I used to think (and tell others) that I loved understanding something deeply, wading through the details to figure out a tough problem. but actually, being able to will anything I can think of into existence is what I love about programming. I do feel for the people who were able to make careers out of falli…

If there was a website called InfiniteAppStore, which contained every app imaginable, and where you could type in your search and it would return the code for that app, would you find that as satisfying to use as Claude Code? On the surface this does not sound as satisfying, because it more resembles shopping than coding. But once Claude Code is finally tuned to do its job perfectly, you will essentially be using tha…

[dead]

Re: AI coding is gambling

#414

Post by IAmGraydon »

maplethorpe wrote: post #340
itsgrimetime wrote: post #92

All of this new capability has made me realize that the reason i love programming _isn't_ the same as the OP. I used to think (and tell others) that I loved understanding something deeply, wading through the details to figure out a tough problem. but actually, being able to will anything I can think of into existence is what I love about programming. I do feel for the people who were able to make careers out of falli…

If there was a website called InfiniteAppStore, which contained every app imaginable, and where you could type in your search and it would return the code for that app, would you find that as satisfying to use as Claude Code? On the surface this does not sound as satisfying, because it more resembles shopping than coding. But once Claude Code is finally tuned to do its job perfectly, you will essentially be using tha…

>But once Claude Code is finally tuned to do its job perfectly, you will essentially be using that infinite app store

You really believe that? What has lead you to the conclusion that LLMs will ever be capable of that?

Re: AI coding is gambling

#415

Post by em-bee »

satyrnein wrote: post #384
maplethorpe wrote: post #340

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If there was a website called InfiniteAppStore, which contained every app imaginable, and where you could type in your search and it would return the code for that app, would you find that as satisfying to use as Claude Code? On the surface this does not sound as satisfying, because it more resembles shopping than coding. But once Claude Code is finally tuned to do its job perfectly, you will essentially be using tha…

For folks who are not familiar, this is "The Library of Babel" by Borges. There is no creating, just selecting among characters sequences we already knew were possible.

the library of babel contain all possible books, but people are unable o find the good ones among the sea of random rubbish.

the LLM equivalent would be to prompt "give me an app", without specifying what that app does and then repeating that until you get the app you are looking for, each time, checking by hand if the app does what you want.

Re: AI coding is gambling

#417

Post by ctoth »

sublinear wrote: post #375
itsgrimetime wrote: post #92

All of this new capability has made me realize that the reason i love programming _isn't_ the same as the OP. I used to think (and tell others) that I loved understanding something deeply, wading through the details to figure out a tough problem. but actually, being able to will anything I can think of into existence is what I love about programming. I do feel for the people who were able to make careers out of falli…

That's a lot of words just to say you never liked programming. You could just as easily make claims about carpentry or cooking because you discovered Ikea or microwave meals. They serve a purpose and technically satisfy the needs of anyone, yet they aren't a good enough solution for anything important. That's where we're at with this tech.

I'm building a Klatt-style formant speech synthesizer targeting behavioral compatibility with a specific commercial synthesizer. The architecture is driven by hundreds of academic papers, uses declarative YAML with CEL expressions for phased rule execution, and every parameter is citation-backed to specific phonetics research[0].

Nobody is selling this off a shelf. The market for "Eloquence-compatible formant synthesizer with a citation-backed parameter space" is approximately me.

I could not have built this without AI coding tools, and I've been a professional developer for 15+ years. I wrote the specs, I chose the architecture, I read the papers, I know what the output needs to sound like. The sheer surface area of translating hundreds of papers worth of acoustic phonetics into a working runtime would have taken me years solo. With Claude Code it's taken months, and I'm still the one catching when it misinterprets a Klatt coefficient or botches a formant transition rule, because you have to actually know the domain to do that.

Reducing what you do not understand to "Ikea or microwave meals?" Because you don't like it? or aren't familiar with it? Is saying a thing about you. Not about people who know how to use the tools.

[0]: https://github.com/ctoth/Qlatt/

Re: AI coding is gambling

#418

Post by em-bee »

hungryhobbit wrote: post #186
strangattractor wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One size never fits all. I am old enough to remember what a game changer Spreadsheets (VisiCalc) where. They made the personal computer into a SwissArmy knife for many people that could not justify investing large sums of money into software to solve a niche problem. Until that time PCs simply were not a big thing. I believe AI will do something similar for programming. The level of complexity in modern apps is high…

I remember when my dev team included some people using Emacs, some using Eclipse (this was pre-VS Code), and some using IntelliJ. Developers will always disagree on the best tool for X ... but we should all fear the Luddites who refuse to even try new tools, like AI. That personality type doesn't at all mesh with my idea of a "good programmer".

a sculptor or a painter are doing something inherently different from someone who describes the outcome and have it created by someone else.

in my world they are called product managers or product owners (scrum) but they are not programmers. prompting an LLM is producing a product but it is not programming.

i refuse to use AI because i want to remain a programmer, and not become a manager.

Re: AI coding is gambling

#419

Post by 2postsperday »

ApolloFortyNine wrote: post #289
hext wrote: post #268

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you enjoy the flamewar, check out /r/SelfHosted which has been losing it's mind over the last few months. The heavy heavy majority of that community is somehow incredibly anti AI despite the fact that the previous "spammy" posts (before ai assisted projects) were all "what is wrong with my docker compose file"??

I had to unsub from that subreddit when I saw a cool new application and the top comments were just dogging it for the signs of Claude Code (claude.md). This is a subreddit about selfhosting things others built for free. Honestly, often for piracy purposes. It's insane how entitled people have become.

The problem is that every day someone "creates" a "new" ffmpeg GUI or similar. There is already a million "ffmpeg GUIs", many of which existed before the advent of AI.

We don't need a thousand copies of a tool which is practially useless, espically when I could of just prompted an LLM for a command for ffmpeg to convert to randomfile.emk3ukz file or whatever. The spam was getting unreal.

Re: AI coding is gambling

#420

Post by simonw »

jlarcombe wrote: post #391
simonw wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know that the "humans learn, LLMs don't" argument holds any more with coding agents. Coding agents look at existing text in the codebase before they act. If they previously used a pattern you dislike and you tell them how to do differently, the next time they run they'll see the new pattern and are much more likely to follow that example. There are fancier ways of having them "learn" - self-updating CLAUDE.md…

If you think this is anything like working with a bright junior developer then i simply can't understand why.

That's not what I think, and it's not what I said.
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