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My AI skeptic friends are all nuts

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Re: My AI skeptic friends are all nuts

#461

Post by joshdata »

aucisson_masque wrote: post #200

> Professional software developers are in the business of solving practical problems for people with code. We are not, in our day jobs, artisans. Steve Jobs was wrong: we do not need to carve the unseen feet in the sculpture. Nobody cares if the logic board traces are pleasingly routed. If anything we build endures, it won’t be because the codebase was beautiful. I think it comes all down to that, do you have pride i…

Totally agree with you that pride is important, but there's definitely more. Being a good engineer is frequently a problem of design --- whether it's user experience or code abstractions. Design is partly art, and that makes us artisans at least some of the time. The code that I've written that has endured the longest --- decades --- has been code that was designed well.

Re: My AI skeptic friends are all nuts

#462

Post by yahoozoo »

Aziell wrote: post #459

I was a bit skeptical at first too, but once I let AI dive into my code, run tests, refactor functions, and even catch its own bugs, it felt like I suddenly had a really competent teammate. AI has been genuinely helpful for me , it saves time and lets me focus on the things that actually matter.

> lets me focus on the things that actually matter.

This reads right out of the PR release for these AI companies and their agentic coding solutions.

Re: My AI skeptic friends are all nuts

#463

Post by hello_computer »

cookiengineer wrote: post #427

Seeing everything these days being about vibe coding, I feel a little old with my VIM setup and my LSP servers who I already thought were a nice productivity increase. The problems I have with the stuff relating to MCP is that the tech around it is developing so fast that it's hard for outsiders to catch up with what the best working setup is, for example. What would you do, for example, if you want to selfhost this?…

[flagged]

Re: My AI skeptic friends are all nuts

#464

Post by tkgally »

Both off and on topic: I got access to Claude’s voice mode today, and for my second test I asked it for its thoughts about both the linked blog post and the HN discussion here. The full transcript is at [1]. Some parts that stood out (slightly edited):

Me: So what is your assessment of the discussion at Hacker News?

Claude: The Hacker News discussion strikes me as much more grounded than the blog post itself. What I find compelling is that many commenters are sharing specific technical experiences rather than making broad ideological arguments. When someone describes spending hours fighting with Claude agents that keep refactoring code into spaghetti, that's concrete data about the current state of these tools. ...

Me: Well, what about you, Claude? You are made by a company whose president has recently made some public statements saying that, you know, 50% of white collar jobs will be replaced soon. And the company, Anthropic, also is very aggressively developing and selling tools to help with AI coding. What are your thoughts about that?

Claude: That's a really fair question to ask me directly. I think there's an obvious tension in my position here since I'm built by a company that has clear financial incentives around AI adoption, including coding tools. When I look at my own capabilities honestly, I can see both sides of this. I'm genuinely useful for certain coding tasks like explaining unfamiliar code, generating boilerplate, or helping debug specific problems. I've helped people learn new programming languages faster than they might have otherwise. But I'm also clearly not at the level where I could replace an experienced software engineer working on complex system design or novel problem solving. ...

[1] https://claude.ai/share/c934e67c-f132-43e8-8c31-ab238b5be25a

Re: My AI skeptic friends are all nuts

#465

Post by mdnahas »

paradox242 wrote: post #392

I like Thomas, but I find his arguments include the same fundamental mistake I see made elsewhere. He acknowledged that the tools need an expert to use properly, and as he illustrated, he refined his expertise over many years. He is of the first and last generation of experienced programmers who learned without LLM assistance. How is someone just coming out of school going to get the encouragement and space to indepe…

I wonder if that will make the great generation of human coders. Some of our best writers were the generation that spanned between oral education and mass production of books. Late generations read and wrote, rather than memorized and spoke. I think that was Shakespeare’s genius. Maybe our best coders will be supercharged with AI, and subsequent ones enfeabled by it.

Shakespeare was also popular because he was published as books became popular. Others copied him.

Re: My AI skeptic friends are all nuts

#466

Post by tptacek »

meander_water wrote: post #436

I suspect a large proportion of claims made for productivity increases are skewed by the fact that the speed at which code is produced by AI makes you _feel_ productive, but these gains are largely replaced by the effort to understand, refactor, review and clean up the code. The high that you get when something "works" tends to stick more in your memory than the time when you had to spend a day cleaning up dead code,…

This is cope. I know my own experience, and I know the backgrounds and problem domains of the friends I'm talking to that do this stuff better than I do. The productivity gains are real. They're also intuitive: if you can't look at a work week and spot huge fractions of work that you're doing that isn't fundamentally discerning or creative, but rather muscle-memory rote repetition of best practices you've honed over your career, you're not trying (or you haven't built that muscle memory yet). What's happening is skeptics can't believe that an LLM plus a couple hundred lines of Python agent code can capture and replicate most of the rote work, freeing all that time back up.

Another thing I think people are missing is that serious LLM-using coders aren't expecting 100% success on prompts, or anything close to it. One of the skills you (rapidly) develop is the intuition for when to stop a runaway agent.

If an intern spun off hopelessly on a task, it'd be somewhat problematic, because there are finite intern hours and they're expensive. But failed agent prompts are nickel-denominated.

We had a post on the front page last week about someone doing vulnerability research with an LLM. They isolated some target code and wrote a prompt. Then they ran it one hundred times (preemptively!) and sifted the output. That approach finds new kernel vulnerabilities!

Ordinary developers won't do anything like that, but they will get used to the idea of only 2/3 of prompts ending up with something they merge.

Another problem I think a lot of skeptics are running into: stop sitting there staring at the chain of thought logs.

Re: My AI skeptic friends are all nuts

#467

Post by bccdee »

To quote an excellent article from last week:

> The AI has suggested a solution, but the added code is arguably useless or wrong. There is a huge decision space to consider, but the AI tool has picked one set of decisions, without any rationale for this decision.

> [...]

> Programming is about lots of decisions, large and small. Architecture decisions. Data validation decisions. Button color decisions.

> Some decisions are inconsequential and can be safely outsourced. There is indeed a ton of boilerplate involved in software development, and writing boilerplate-heavy code involves near zero decisions.

> But other decisions do matter.

(from https://lukasatkinson.de/2025/net-negative-cursor/)

Proponents of AI coding often talk about boilerplate as if that's what we spend most of our time on, but boilerplate is a cinch. You copy/paste, change a few fields, and maybe run a macro on it. Or you abstract it away entirely. As for the "agent" thing, typing git fetch, git commit, git rebase takes up even less of my time than boilerplate.

Most of what we write is not highly creative, but it is load-bearing, and it's full of choices. Most of our time is spent making those choices, not typing out the words. The problem isn't hallucination, it's the plain bad code that I'm going to have to rewrite. Why not just write it right myself the first time? People say "it's like a junior developer," but do they have any idea how much time I've spent trying to coax junior developers into doing things the right way rather than just doing them myself? I don't want to waste time mentoring my tools.

Re: My AI skeptic friends are all nuts

#468

Post by allcentury »

cookiengineer wrote: post #427

Seeing everything these days being about vibe coding, I feel a little old with my VIM setup and my LSP servers who I already thought were a nice productivity increase. The problems I have with the stuff relating to MCP is that the tech around it is developing so fast that it's hard for outsiders to catch up with what the best working setup is, for example. What would you do, for example, if you want to selfhost this?…

You should add Claude code to your setup and be amazed. Tmux with vim, Claude code and git work trees is amazing - now the choke point is… me.

Re: My AI skeptic friends are all nuts

#469

Post by TheAlchemist »

His arguments are mostly right I would say. I tend to use a bit of LLMs for coding - just Copilot though - and I do like how it quite often saves me time with autocomplete spanning entire lines.

ChatGPT is also pretty usefull - especially for naming things.

However, on a global scale, I would compare the shift towards 'vibe coding' and massive LLMs use to the one we got when people doing the coding don't even know what Assembly even is. Current state of software is that it's incredibly bloated and slow (and I do love python). Doesn't matter that much since we've got massive improvements in hardware, but still. In 5 years, instead of not really realizing that we're writing slow and bloated code, we will not really realize we're writing incorrect code.

I don't know anything about web developement, but in the environements I've seen during my career - where most code is quite critical and a stupid mistake, one that an LLM could easily hallucinate, can cost a lot - I don't see it replacing humans anytime soon. It's a pretty good and usefull tool though.

Re: My AI skeptic friends are all nuts

#470

Post by hatthew »

paradox242 wrote: post #392

I like Thomas, but I find his arguments include the same fundamental mistake I see made elsewhere. He acknowledged that the tools need an expert to use properly, and as he illustrated, he refined his expertise over many years. He is of the first and last generation of experienced programmers who learned without LLM assistance. How is someone just coming out of school going to get the encouragement and space to indepe…

I think the main difference between shortcuts like "compilers" and shortcuts like "LLMs" is determinism. I don't need to know assembly because I use a compiler that is very well specified, often mathematically proven to introduce no errors, and errs on the side of caution unless specifically told otherwise.

On the other hand, LLMs are highly nondeterministic. They often produce correct output for simple things, but that's because those things are simple enough that we trust the probability of it being incorrect is implausibly low. But there's no guarantee that they won't get them wrong. For more complicated things, LLMs are terrible and need very well specified guardrails. They will bounce around inside those guardrails until they make something correct, but that's more of a happy accident than a mathematical guarantee.

LLMs aren't a level of abstraction, they are an independent entity. They're the equivalent of a junior coder who has no long term memory and thus needs to write everything down and you just have to hope that they don't forget to write something down and hope that some deterministic automated test will catch them if they do forget.

If you could hire an unpaid intern with long term memory loss, would you?

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