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The AI coding trap

chrisloy.dev

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Re: The AI coding trap

#51

Post by didibus »

_fat_santa wrote: post #40
reb wrote: post #7

I would love to see an anti-AI take that doesn't hinge on the idea that technology forces people to be lazy/careless/thoughtless. The plan-build-test-reflect loop is equally important when using an LLM to generate code, as anyone who's seriously used the tech knows: if you yolo your way through a build without thought, it will collapse in on itself quickly. But if you DO apply that loop, you get to spend much more ti…

> I would love to see an anti-AI take that doesn't hinge on the idea that technology forces people to be lazy/careless/thoughtless. Here's mine, I use Cline occasionally to help me code but more and more I find myself just coding by hand. The reason is pretty simple which is with these AI tools you for the most part replace writing code with writing a prompt. I look at it like this, if writing the prompt, and the inf…

> The reason is pretty simple which is with these AI tools you for the most part replace writing code with writing a prompt

I'm convinced I spend more time typing and end up typing more letters and words when AI coding than when not.

My hands are hurting me more from the extra typing I have to do now lol.

I'm actually annoyed they haven't integrated their voice to text models inside their coding agents yet.

Re: The AI coding trap

#52

Post by itsnowandnever »

the flaw in the article is acting like engineers always have a choice. the writers presents the contrasts of "fair delegation vs mollycoddling" mirroring "ai-driven development vs vibe coding"... but that sacrifice for short-term gain at the expense of scale is often draconically enforced.

obviously good and experienced engineers aren't going to be vibe coders/mollycoddlers by nature. but many good and experienced engineers will be pressured to make poor decisions by impatient business leaders. and that's the root of most AI anxiety: we all know it's going to be used as irresponsibly and recklessly as possible. it's not about the tech. it's about a system with broken incentives.

Re: The AI coding trap

#53

Post by dpflan »

Has anyone read up on the recent paper from Meta/FAIR -- CWM: An Open-Weights LLM for Research on Code Generation with World Models

Which looks to attempt to give better "coding" understanding to the model instead of mere tokens and positioning and hence improve the coding capabilities of these "brilliant but unpredictable junior engineer" coding agents:

- https://ai.meta.com/research/publications/cwm-an-open-weight...

Re: The AI coding trap

#54

Post by rapind »

_fat_santa wrote: post #40
reb wrote: post #7

I would love to see an anti-AI take that doesn't hinge on the idea that technology forces people to be lazy/careless/thoughtless. The plan-build-test-reflect loop is equally important when using an LLM to generate code, as anyone who's seriously used the tech knows: if you yolo your way through a build without thought, it will collapse in on itself quickly. But if you DO apply that loop, you get to spend much more ti…

> I would love to see an anti-AI take that doesn't hinge on the idea that technology forces people to be lazy/careless/thoughtless. Here's mine, I use Cline occasionally to help me code but more and more I find myself just coding by hand. The reason is pretty simple which is with these AI tools you for the most part replace writing code with writing a prompt. I look at it like this, if writing the prompt, and the inf…

I find myself often writing pseudo code (CLI) to express some ideas to the agent. Code can be a very powerful and expressive means of communication. You don't have to stop using it when it's the best / easiest tool for a specific case.

That being said, these agents may still just YOLO and ignore your instructions on occasion, which can be a time suck, so sometimes I still get my hands dirty too :)

Re: The AI coding trap

#55

Post by EGreg »

add-sub-mul-div wrote: post #27
EGreg wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most of my anti-AI takes are either: 1) Bad actors using AI at scale to do bad things 2) AI just commodifying everything and making humans into zoo animals

More specifically for (1), the combined set of predators, advertisers, businesses, and lazy people using it to either prey or enshittify or cheat will make up the vast majority of use cases.

But notice how I got automatically heavily downvoted by merely mentioning legitimate downsides of AI

Re: The AI coding trap

#56

Post by rapind »

didibus wrote: post #51
_fat_santa wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I would love to see an anti-AI take that doesn't hinge on the idea that technology forces people to be lazy/careless/thoughtless. Here's mine, I use Cline occasionally to help me code but more and more I find myself just coding by hand. The reason is pretty simple which is with these AI tools you for the most part replace writing code with writing a prompt. I look at it like this, if writing the prompt, and the inf…

> The reason is pretty simple which is with these AI tools you for the most part replace writing code with writing a prompt I'm convinced I spend more time typing and end up typing more letters and words when AI coding than when not. My hands are hurting me more from the extra typing I have to do now lol. I'm actually annoyed they haven't integrated their voice to text models inside their coding agents yet.

On a mac you can just use a hotkey to talk to an agentic CLI. It needs to be a bit more polished still IMO, like removing the hotkey requirement, with a voice command to break the agents current task.

Re: The AI coding trap

#57

Post by mmaunder »

If you know, understand that you are in possession of a massive and temporary information asymmetry advantage, and you should run with it as hard and fast as you can to gain the biggest lead possible, before the author and the rest of the world gain that advantage too. Go, go now, go fast, do it in parallel, and don’t stop until you win. Opportunities like this are extremely rare not just in your life, but in the history of our society. Best of luck.

Re: The AI coding trap

#58

Post by visarga »

closeparen wrote: post #36
reb wrote: post #7

I would love to see an anti-AI take that doesn't hinge on the idea that technology forces people to be lazy/careless/thoughtless. The plan-build-test-reflect loop is equally important when using an LLM to generate code, as anyone who's seriously used the tech knows: if you yolo your way through a build without thought, it will collapse in on itself quickly. But if you DO apply that loop, you get to spend much more ti…

It's "anti-AI" from the perspective of an investor or engineering manager who assumes that 10x coding speed should 10x productivity in their organization. As a staff IC, I find it a realistic take on where AI actually sits in my workflow and how it relates to juniors.

> assumes that 10x coding speed should 10x productivity

This same error in thinking happens in relation to AI agents too. Even if the agent is perfect (not really possible) but other links in the chain are slower, the overall speed of the loop still does not increase. To increase productivity with AI you need to think of the complete loop, reorganize and optimize every link in the chain. In other words a business has to redesign itself for AI, not just apply AI on top.

Same is true for coding with AI, you can't just do your old style manual coding but with AI, you need a new style of work. Maybe you start with constraint design, requirements, tests, and then you let the agent loose and not check the code, you need to automate that part, it needs comprehensive automated testing. The LLM is like a blind force, you need to channel it to make it useful. LLM+Constraints == accountable LLM, but LLM without constraints == unaccountable.

Re: The AI coding trap

#59

Post by surgical_fire »

tptacek wrote: post #2

It's a fine post, but two canards in here: First, skilled engineers using LLMs to code also think and discuss and stare off into space before the source code starts getting laid down. In fact: I do a lot, lot more thinking and balancing different designs and getting a macro sense of where I'm going, because that's usually what it takes to get an LLM agent to build something decent. But now that pondering and planning…

> Most of my initial prompts to agents start with "DO NOT WRITE ANY CODE YET."

I really like that on IntelliJ I have to approve all changes, so this prompt is unnecessary.

There's a YOLO mode that just changes shit without approval, that I never use. I wonder if anyone does.

Re: The AI coding trap

#60

Post by erichocean »

jayd16 wrote: post #24
reb wrote: post #7

I would love to see an anti-AI take that doesn't hinge on the idea that technology forces people to be lazy/careless/thoughtless. The plan-build-test-reflect loop is equally important when using an LLM to generate code, as anyone who's seriously used the tech knows: if you yolo your way through a build without thought, it will collapse in on itself quickly. But if you DO apply that loop, you get to spend much more ti…

My take is just that debugging is harder than writing so I'd rather just write it instead of debugging code I didn't write.

Are people really not using LLMs to debug code?
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