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AI coding is gambling

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Re: AI coding is gambling

#441

Post by duskdozer »

yoyohello13 wrote: post #45

I 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.

Maybe they just wanted to leave early, and everyone's now required to maintain the AI hype-up so that's a nice excuse. Surely they'd be able to ssh in on their phone for a couple minutes if needed?

Re: AI coding is gambling

#442

Post by kowbell »

duskdozer wrote: post #439
dolebirchwood wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have three side projects that revolve around taking public access data from shitty, barely usable local government websites, and then using that data to build more intuitive and useful UIs around them. They're portfolio pieces, but also a public service. I already know how to build all of these systems manually, but I have better things to do. So, hell yeah I'm just going to prompt my way to output. If the code wor…

>If the code works, I don't care how it was written This doesn't concern you for something you're presenting as a portfolio piece?

Perhaps part of their portfolio is the code they've hand written, and part of it is demonstrating they are able to use this new tool to make something that works (despite how imperfect the tool is, as we see so many people point out)

Re: AI coding is gambling

#443

Post by rcxdude »

the_af wrote: post #403
devanil wrote: post #397

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't you think that's overreacting? I know it's an important moment for us, but your speech sounds kind of theological. Almost condemning him to hell for "feeling pleasure."

There's no condemning at all in the comment you're replying to, in fact the opposite: there's understanding. It's very weird because judging from this comment, and some other comment you wrote asking whether the other person believed creation requires hard work (which wasn't at all what they said), makes it seem as if you aren't reading the comments you're replying to.

It is hard to read the comment in question as anything other than 'the struggle is important to your satisfaction', which to me feels at the very least not unversally true (different people will find satisfaction from different things: for me personally I have far more ideas than I could ever make real, so 'having to come up with one' is not really something I expect to be a problem), at worst a kind of religious 'virtue through suffering' moral judgement.

(If the goal was to learn, then that's a different question. Learning generally requires putting the effort in. But I don't think that learning the lower-level details is actually the goal in a lot of cases, merely a means to an end)

Re: AI coding is gambling

#444

Post by pixl97 »

sublinear wrote: post #431
ctoth wrote: post #417

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 synthes…

I think you're missing my point. It has nothing to do with what I like. I'm saying there's a ton of nuance and human feedback necessary to build the software most developers work on for a living. It's built to requirements that evolve with the business. Businesses ultimately serve people with opinions and preferences. Businesses need to pass audits. Specs can change quarterly. Clients and their contracts come and go.…

> Businesses ultimately serve people with opinions and preferences

For now, at least.

Re: AI coding is gambling

#445

Post by supern0va »

cgg23 wrote: post #409
supern0va wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Anyone can be an "ideas guy". I think there's way more nuance to this than you're willing to admit here. There's a significant difference between the guy who thinks "I'm going to make X app to do Y and get loaded." and the person who really understands the details of what they want to create and has a concrete vision of how to shape it. I think that product shaping and detail oriented vision of how something should…

Disagree massively. A proper PM should be moving towards owning design and marketing pieces - not production of software. Software is a means to package an experience captured by the design and communicated via marketing. It's that simple. Most PMs don't match this description. So I understand the frustration's of engineers who have had to work with PMs.

A well constructed BRD is a very large chunk of the context needed for more successful use of an LLM. You're welcome to disagree, but I've found increasingly that the work artifacts from PMs are becoming even more essential to the actual development.

If you understand the design and user experience end to end and can express that effectively in writing, that's...your agent context. Why do a context hand-off to another human, or at least why remain as silo'd as we have historically been?

Re: AI coding is gambling

#446

Post by Aurornis »

angrymouse wrote: post #296
Aurornis wrote: post #267

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the Product Manager title was (and still is) one of the most abused titles in tech. A great product manager is indispensable for setting product direction in a way that can't be accomplished by others doing it part-time or advocating for their own needs. I've worked with some truly great product managers. I've also worked with a lot of awful product managers. The product manager title is squishy enough that i…

What do you think the good ones do? And how do they set direction in a way that’s good compared to a bad one?

Great product managers know the current customers, industry, potential additional customers, and the company very well. They communicate well. They can optimize the match between customer needs, marketing benefits, internal company priorities, and reasonable developer asks.

The best ones I’ve worked with have been so good that their roadmaps and conclusions feel obviously correct, and everyone has bought into the direction because their input was considered.

Re: AI coding is gambling

#447

Post by the_af »

rcxdude wrote: post #443
the_af wrote: post #403

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's no condemning at all in the comment you're replying to, in fact the opposite: there's understanding. It's very weird because judging from this comment, and some other comment you wrote asking whether the other person believed creation requires hard work (which wasn't at all what they said), makes it seem as if you aren't reading the comments you're replying to.

It is hard to read the comment in question as anything other than 'the struggle is important to your satisfaction', which to me feels at the very least not unversally true (different people will find satisfaction from different things: for me personally I have far more ideas than I could ever make real, so 'having to come up with one' is not really something I expect to be a problem), at worst a kind of religious 'vi…

I didn't read it like that.

I read it like... say, asking a genie to produce stuff for you out of thin air. "Make the most beautiful gem for me!". Then, "a marvelous painting that will impress my beloved!", "a meal worthy of a king!", etc.

After the novelty wears off, those are empty achievements. They are not yours, you haven't chipped a single facet of the gem, nor found it yourself, nor lifted a paintbrush or understood how paint flows. It's not about struggling (or not just that), it's about doing [1].

You haven't earned the things you didn't do. You don't think you're cooking when you order a ready meal. Same here.

And yet there's not a single bit of condemnation in the comment we're discussing. Just understanding, "this is a phase we all go through, but look...".

---

[1] I hate that we must add disclaimers now, but I promise this is me, a human, and not an LLM'ism, "it's not X. It's Y."

Re: AI coding is gambling

#448

Post by Capricorn2481 »

Retr0id wrote: post #202
bigstrat2003 wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Poker has elements of both luck and skill. The luck element + wagering money is what makes it gambling.

On a long enough timeframe, the luck averages out.

That sounds fucking horrible for coding.

Re: AI coding is gambling

#449

Post by Capricorn2481 »

margalabargala wrote: post #12
Retr0id wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know where I'd draw the line personally, but wherever you draw it there's a problem. If you give increasingly more advanced tasks to it, you will eventually cross the line.

How is this any different from assigning increasingly more advanced tasks to an employee?

Well the line comes a lot sooner than my coworkers.
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