Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

My article on why AI is great (or terrible) or how to use it

matthewrocklin.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 241 posts

Re: My article on why AI is great (or terrible) or how to use it

#51

Post by eikenberry »

nancyminusone wrote: post #33
somekyle2 wrote: post #8

I suspect that lots of developers who are sour on relying on AI significantly _would_ agree with most of this, but see the result of that logic leading to (as the article notes) "the skill of writing and reading code is obsolete, and it's our job to make software engineering increasingly entirely automated" and really don't like that outcome so they try to find a way to reject it. "The skillset you've spend decades d…

Remains to be seen if that pill needs swallowing at all. At least for reading code.

If one is not writing code your ability to read code will degrade quickly and be reduced to a basic sanity check as to whether you need to add more constraints (prompts, tests, etc.). Anyone who thinks they can read code without writing code at a level needed to understand what is going on (for anything non-trivial) is fooling themselves.

Re: My article on why AI is great (or terrible) or how to use it

#52

Post by llmslave2 »

somekyle2 wrote: post #8

I suspect that lots of developers who are sour on relying on AI significantly _would_ agree with most of this, but see the result of that logic leading to (as the article notes) "the skill of writing and reading code is obsolete, and it's our job to make software engineering increasingly entirely automated" and really don't like that outcome so they try to find a way to reject it. "The skillset you've spend decades d…

I actually don't think they would agree with most of this. Why would you think that?

Re: My article on why AI is great (or terrible) or how to use it

#53

Post by llmslave2 »

eikenberry wrote: post #51
nancyminusone wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Remains to be seen if that pill needs swallowing at all. At least for reading code.

If one is not writing code your ability to read code will degrade quickly and be reduced to a basic sanity check as to whether you need to add more constraints (prompts, tests, etc.). Anyone who thinks they can read code without writing code at a level needed to understand what is going on (for anything non-trivial) is fooling themselves.

Yep. I'd say it's an order of magnitude more effort to read code you haven't written too, compared to reading code you wrote. So there is approximately zero chance the people using AI to generate code are reading it at a level where they actually understand it, or else they would lose all of their supposed productivity gains.

Re: My article on why AI is great (or terrible) or how to use it

#54

Post by lacy_tinpot »

deergomoo wrote: post #2

I will never as long as I live understand the argument that AI development is more fun. If you want to argue that you’re more capable or whatever, fine. I disagree but I don’t have any data to disprove you. But saying that AI development is more fun because you don’t have to “wrestle the computer” is, to me, the same as saying you’re really into painting but you’re not really into the brush aspect so you pay someone…

Who's actually coding?

You're never really wrestling the computer. You're typically wrestling with the design choices and technological debt of decisions that were in hindsight bad ones. And it's always in hindsight, at the time those decision always seem smart.

Like with the rise of frameworks, and abstractions who is actually doing anything with actual computation?

Most of the time it's wasting time learning some bs framework or implementing some other poorly designed system that some engineer that no longer works at the company created. In fact the entire industry is basically just one poorly designed system with technological debt that grows increasingly burdensome year by year.

It's very rarely about actual programming or actual computation or even "engineering". But usually just one giant kludge pile.

Re: My article on why AI is great (or terrible) or how to use it

#55

Post by raw_anon_1111 »

deergomoo wrote: post #2

I will never as long as I live understand the argument that AI development is more fun. If you want to argue that you’re more capable or whatever, fine. I disagree but I don’t have any data to disprove you. But saying that AI development is more fun because you don’t have to “wrestle the computer” is, to me, the same as saying you’re really into painting but you’re not really into the brush aspect so you pay someone…

I have been developing for 30 years professionally and 10 years before that as a hobbyist or in school

Development is solely to exchange labor for money.

I haven’t written a single line of code “for fun” since 1992. I did it for my degree between 1992-1996 while having fun in college and after that depending on my stage in life, dating, hanging out with friends, teaching fitness classes and doing monthly charity races with friends, spending time with my wife and (step)kids, and now enjoying traveling with my wife and friends, and still exercising

Re: My article on why AI is great (or terrible) or how to use it

#56

Post by danielmarkbruce »

emseetech wrote: post #15
CharlesW wrote: post #5

I get vibe-coders not having a good experience once the honeymoon is over. But I'm fascinated that a professional software developer could have such a different experience than I do. • LLMs generate junk • LLMs generate a lot of junk

My question is why use AI to output javascript or python? Why not output everything in C and ASM for 500x performance? Why use high level languages meant to be easier for humans? Why not go right to the metal? If anyone's ever tried this, it's clear why: AI is terrible at C and ASM. But that cuts into what AI is at its core: It's not actual programming, it's mechanical reproduction. Which means its incapabilities in…

It cuts to training data and effort. A lot of effort has been put in to optimize for python, even down to tokenization.

Re: My article on why AI is great (or terrible) or how to use it

#57

Post by bflesch »

emseetech wrote: post #15
CharlesW wrote: post #5

I get vibe-coders not having a good experience once the honeymoon is over. But I'm fascinated that a professional software developer could have such a different experience than I do. • LLMs generate junk • LLMs generate a lot of junk

My question is why use AI to output javascript or python? Why not output everything in C and ASM for 500x performance? Why use high level languages meant to be easier for humans? Why not go right to the metal? If anyone's ever tried this, it's clear why: AI is terrible at C and ASM. But that cuts into what AI is at its core: It's not actual programming, it's mechanical reproduction. Which means its incapabilities in…

That's a very good example.

Re: My article on why AI is great (or terrible) or how to use it

#58

Post by forgetfulness »

deergomoo wrote: post #2

I will never as long as I live understand the argument that AI development is more fun. If you want to argue that you’re more capable or whatever, fine. I disagree but I don’t have any data to disprove you. But saying that AI development is more fun because you don’t have to “wrestle the computer” is, to me, the same as saying you’re really into painting but you’re not really into the brush aspect so you pay someone…

Plenty of people will tell you that they enjoy solving business problems.

Well, I'll have to take their word for it that they're passionate about maximizing shareholder value by improving key performance indicators, I know I personally didn't sign up for being in meetings all day to leverage cross functional synergies with the goal of increasing user retention in sales funnels, or something along those lines.

I'm not passionate about either that or mandatory HR training videos.

Re: My article on why AI is great (or terrible) or how to use it

#59

Post by aspenmartin »

rileymichael wrote: post #36
harles wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

~20 years working in tech for me, mostly big companies, and I’ve never been more miserable. I also can’t stop myself from using Claude Code and the like. I think it’s a bit like a gambling addiction. I’m riding high the few times it pays off, but most of the time it feels like it’s just on the edge of paying off (working) and surely the next prompt will push it over the edge.

> I also can’t stop myself from using Claude Code and the like. just.. uninstall it? i've removed all ai tooling from both personal+work devices and highly recommend it. there's no temptation to 'quickly pull up $app just to see' if it doesn't exist

Is this coming from the hypothesis / prior that coding agents are a net negative and those who use them really are akin to gambling addicts that are just fooling themselves?

The OP is right and I feel this a lot: when Claude pulls me into a rabbit hole, convinces me it knows where to go, and then just constantly falls flat on its face and we waste like several hours together, with a lot of all caps prompts from me towards the end. These sessions last in a way that he mentions: "maybe its just a prompt away from working"

But I would never delete CC because there are plenty of other instances where it works excellent and accelerates things quite a lot. And additionally, I know we see a lot of "coding agents are getting worse!" and "METR study proves all you AI sycophants are deluding yourselves!" and I again understand where these come from, agree with some of the points they raise, but honestly: my own personal perception (which I argue is pretty well backed up by benchmarks and by Claude's own product data which we don't see -- I doubt they would roll out a launch without at least one or more A/B tests) is that coding agents are getting much better, and that as a verifiable domain these "we're running out of data!" problems just aren't relevant here. The same way alphago gets superhuman, so will these coding agents, it's just a matter of when, and I use them today because they are already useful to me.

Re: My article on why AI is great (or terrible) or how to use it

#60

Post by pixl97 »

lacy_tinpot wrote: post #54
deergomoo wrote: post #2

I will never as long as I live understand the argument that AI development is more fun. If you want to argue that you’re more capable or whatever, fine. I disagree but I don’t have any data to disprove you. But saying that AI development is more fun because you don’t have to “wrestle the computer” is, to me, the same as saying you’re really into painting but you’re not really into the brush aspect so you pay someone…

Who's actually coding? You're never really wrestling the computer. You're typically wrestling with the design choices and technological debt of decisions that were in hindsight bad ones. And it's always in hindsight, at the time those decision always seem smart. Like with the rise of frameworks, and abstractions who is actually doing anything with actual computation? Most of the time it's wasting time learning some b…

Computers are one big kludge pile because they can do anything.
Post reply on HN