The hidden cost of AI coding • Hacker News Board

Re: The hidden cost of AI coding

#431

Post by rerdavies » Fri, Apr 25, 2025, 11:35 AM UTC

scarface_74 wrote: post #391

celsius1414 wrote: post #386

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You likely don’t have a say in the matter, but you should have a junior developer. That’s where senior developers come from.

Why should I have a junior developer who is going to do negative work instead of poaching a mid developer who is probably underpaid since salary compression and inversion are real? As a manager, say I do hire a junior developer, invest time into them and they level up. I go to the HR department and tell them that they deserve a 30% raise to bring them inline with the other mid level developers. The HR department is g…

Sounds like you need to have a chat with your HR person. Retaining talent is definitely something an HR person should be concerned about.

Re: The hidden cost of AI coding

#432

Post by tpoacher » Fri, Apr 25, 2025, 12:04 PM UTC

A related thought, just leaving this here.

There's something great about old technology (though obviously one must be aware of survivorship bias when citing such technology), despite the fact that, logically speaking, new technology should have obviously been better.

Perhaps it's some variant of Jevons' paradox. The better / more efficient things get, the more of an impetus there is to use them in truly crappy ways. And this is how I'm starting to feel about programming with vs without an AI: you can either program manually to create truly creative, functional, elegant stuff, or use AI to produce garbage more efficiently. There just doesn't seem to be an in-between category, at least in terms of demand.

In case you haven't seen this video of a toaster from the 60s before, you're in for a treat: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1OfxlSG6q5Y

I'm also reminded of Edsger Dijkstra's quote on elegance: https://platosmirror.com/edsger-dijkstra-elegance-is-not-a-d...

Re: The hidden cost of AI coding

#433

Post by jajko » Fri, Apr 25, 2025, 12:06 PM UTC

Philpax wrote: post #424

BigJono wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Gee do you think maybe that's why all our software sucks balls these days?

No? Of all the reasons software sucks, multidisciplinary programmers are unlikely to be near the top.

They certainly are for me, working but horribly designed java projects done by plsql devs were a proper eyeballs bleeding long into the night.

Absolutely 0 framework or libs, nothing even for logging. Code architecture that would be left in the dust by most university semester projects.

This is how plsql codebases look, but boy Java (and rest of the world) moved quite far since 1995.

Re: The hidden cost of AI coding

#434

Post by bboozzoo » Fri, Apr 25, 2025, 12:25 PM UTC

tmpz22 wrote: post #93

only-one1701 wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What should I have done there? Tell it to make sure that it gives me all 10 objects I give it back? Tell it to not put brackets in the wrong place? This is a real question --- what would you have done?

In no particular order: * experiment with multiple models, preferably free high quality models like Gemini 2.5. Make sure you're using the right model, usually NOT one of the "mini" varieties even if its marketed for coding. * experiment with different ways of delivering necessary context. I use repomix to compile a codebase to a text file and upload that file. I've found more integrated tooling like cursor, aider, o…

With that many ways to try things out differently hoping for good results, it feels like this would become a huge time sink, wouldn't it?

Re: The hidden cost of AI coding

#435

Post by frankc » Fri, Apr 25, 2025, 1:33 PM UTC

7589447636 wrote: post #314

bredren wrote: post #252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is not just gatekeeping. It is a stubborn refusal to see that one could be programming something much more sophisticated if they could use these iteration loops efficiently. Many of these folks would do well to walk over to the intersection of Market, Bush, and Battery Streets in San Francisco and gaze up at the Mechanics Monument.

> It is a stubborn refusal to see that one could be programming something much more sophisticated if they could use these iteration loops efficiently Programming something more sophisticated with AI? AI is pretty much useless if you're doing anything somewhat novel. What it excels at is vomiting code that has already been written a million times so you can build yet another Electron cross-platform app.

This is just wrong. I don't know how else to say it as this point. If you are doing something novel, you need to be a lot more specific in what you tell it to do, but it can still put it together 5x faster than you can do manually. It's like saying you can't do something novel with junior developers. On their own? Not really. Guided by someone experienced who can do the systems design and has the domain knowledge to be the product manager? Yes, you definitely can. And it's not different with advanced LLMs. It's even better than having junior developer's working for you because they don't get tired or bored. They won't slack on writing docs or tests. I have written novel systems by having LLMs do the grunt work, and they have better docs and tests than I have ever done before because it's willing to do the things I don't find as interesting without complaint.

Re: The hidden cost of AI coding

#436

Post by frankc » Fri, Apr 25, 2025, 1:44 PM UTC

TrackerFF wrote: post #185

Some people love programming, for the sake of programming itself. They love the CS theory, they love the tooling, they love most everything about it. Other people see all that as an means to an end - and find no joy from the technical aspect of creating something. They're more interested in the end result / product, rather than the process itself. I think that if you're in group A, it can be difficult to understand g…

I think category A is too broad. I enjoy building systems, not typing code. You can still get that joy having an LLM do the coding. You don't need to let it do the systems design. Also, some of the building process is the system I care about it, and some of it is tooling for the system I care about. Those tools are means to an end and I am happy to defer the entire process to the LLM, and those are stand-alone usually which is right in it's wheelhouse.

Re: The hidden cost of AI coding

#437

Post by scarface_74 » Fri, Apr 25, 2025, 1:52 PM UTC

rerdavies wrote: post #431

scarface_74 wrote: post #391

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why should I have a junior developer who is going to do negative work instead of poaching a mid developer who is probably underpaid since salary compression and inversion are real? As a manager, say I do hire a junior developer, invest time into them and they level up. I go to the HR department and tell them that they deserve a 30% raise to bring them inline with the other mid level developers. The HR department is g…

Sounds like you need to have a chat with your HR person. Retaining talent is definitely something an HR person should be concerned about.

Your HR department doesn’t control the budget. They carry out directives from their management. This is endemic across the industry from small companies to in my experience of n=1 at BigTech.

Even there people get better offers coming in externally than they do an internal promotion.

On a related note, it was also easier coming in as an L6 (senior) than it was to get promoted from an L5 to an L6.

Re: The hidden cost of AI coding

#438

Post by dml2135 » Fri, Apr 25, 2025, 2:14 PM UTC

tptacek wrote: post #40

ToucanLoucan wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Solving problems for real people. Isn't the answer here kind of obvious? Look at the majority of the tech sector for the last ten years or so and tell me this answer again. Like I guess this is kind of true, if "problems for real people" equals "compensating for inefficiencies in our system for people with money" and "solutions" equals "making a poor person do it for them and paying them as little as legally possib…

Those of us who write software professionally are literally in a field premised on automating other people's jobs away. There is no profession with less claim to the moral high ground of worker rights than ours.

It’s not automation that is the problem, it’s that the fruits of that automation disproportionately go to those at the top. Don’t blame software engineering for that, blame capitalism.

Re: The hidden cost of AI coding

#439

Post by dml2135 » Fri, Apr 25, 2025, 2:24 PM UTC

myk9001 wrote: post #90

tptacek wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure. Compare the quality of life of the Computers to that of any stably employed person today who owns a computer.

Got it, you're talking about workers getting ahead as a category -- no objections to that. I doubt the displaced computers managed to find a better job on average. Probably even their kids were disadvantaged since the parents had fewer options to support their education. So, who knows if this specific group of people and their descendants ever fully recovered let alone got ahead.

Why should one be entitled to do one thing for their entire career?

The world changes. Those changes cause a need, a job fulfills that need. The world changes again, the need disappears. Why should the job then persist?

Re: The hidden cost of AI coding

#440

Post by scarface_74 » Fri, Apr 25, 2025, 2:26 PM UTC

godelski wrote: post #410

scarface_74 wrote: post #404

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m not saying it’s logical. I even said that as a hypothetical manager, I would fight for the junior to get paid market wages. But HR sets the budget. I have to work within the framework I have. Yes I know it’s insane that a manager can’t get the budget to give raises. But can get one to hire someone new at prevailing market rates. Given those are the facts, I had to aggressively job hop between 6 jobs between 2008-…

> How are you going to convince HR or the PHB that their policies are insane? The underlying issue at hand is much more widespread. I'm not trying to play wack-a-mole here. I'm trying to be infectious so that the knowledge becomes widespread. We had it before, so I don't think it is naive to think we can't have it again. It was considered "common sense" before, the question is why it was lost. Given your age I guess…

The only reason we had it before was because back in the 90s when I graduated, even outside of the dot com boom, regular old enterprise companies were looking for developers and there was a shortage. They didn’t have a choice but to hire juniors.

But as far as you get what you pay for, it’s not hard to find “good enough” framework enterprise developers and have a few good experience “seniors”. Especially with remote work, you dangle that in front of people my age, we are willing to take a haircut. For me now, remote work, autonomy, and a smaller company is worth being able to say “no” to more money when managers at Google (GCP) reach out to me.

By senior, I don’t mean “I codez real gud”, I mean the tech industries definition - someone who can deal with “scope” and “ambiguity” and has a history of highly impactful projects.

Just to be clear, I spent most of my career as an “enterprise dev” until 2020 at 46 when a position at AWS fell into my lap (Professional Services department). I’m no longer there. But it did cause me to pivot to cloud consulting specializing in app dev and now I am a “staff architect” at a third party company.