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AI makes the easy part easier and the hard part harder

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Re: AI makes the easy part easier and the hard part harder

#51

Post by blackcatsec »

isodev wrote: post #22
Trufa wrote: post #5

[flagged]

What we call AI at the heart of coding agents, is the averaged “echo” of what people have published on the web that has (often illegitimately) ended up in training data. Yes it probably can spit out some trivial snippets but nothing near what’s needed for genuine software engineering. Also, now that StackOverflow is no longer a thing, good luck meaningfully improving those code agents.

Exactly this. Everything I've seen online is generally "I had a problem that could be solved in a few dozen lines of code and I asked the AI do it for me and it worked great!"

But what they asked the AI to do is something people have done a hundred times over, on existing platform tech, and will likely have little to no capability to solve problems that come up 5-10 years from now.

The reason AI is so good at coding right now is due to the 2nd Dot Com tech bubble that occurred between the simultaneous release of mobile platforms and the massive expansion of cloud technology. But now that the platforms that existed during that time will no longer exist, because it's no longer profitable to put something out there--the AI platforms will be less and less relevant.

Sure, sites like reddit will probably still exist where people will begin to ask more and more information that the AI can't help with, and subsequently the AI will train off of that information; but the rate of that information is going to go down dramatically.

In short, at some point the AI models will be worthless and I suspect that'll be whenever the next big "tech revolution" happens.

Re: AI makes the easy part easier and the hard part harder

#52

Post by 0xbadcafebee »

I don't think it makes any part harder. What it does do is expose what people have ignored their whole career: the hard part. The last 15 years of software development has been 'human vibe coding'; copy+pasting snippets from SO without understanding them, no planning, constant rearchitecting, shipping code to prod as long as it runs on your laptop. Now that the AI is doing it, suddenly people want to plan their work and enforce tests? Seems like a win-win to me. Even if it slows down development, that would be a win, because the result is enforcement of better quality.

Re: AI makes the easy part easier and the hard part harder

#53

Post by zozbot234 »

anoncow wrote: post #31
le-mark wrote: post #9

I vibe coded a retro emulator and assembler with tests. Prompts were minimal and I got really great results (Gemini 3). I tried vibe coding the tricky proprietary part of an app I worked on a few years ago; highly technical domain (yes vague don’t care to dox myself). Lots of prompting and didn’t get close. There are literally thousands of retro emulators on github. What I was trying to do had zero examples on GitHub…

I tried to vibe code a technical not so popular niche and failed. Then I broke down the problem as much as I could and presented the problem in clearer terms and Gemini provided working code in just a few attempts. I know this is an anecdote, but try to break down the problem you have in simpler terms and it may work. Niche industry specific frameworks are a little difficult to work with in vibe code mode. But if you…

> I know this is an anecdote, but try to break down the problem you have in simpler terms

This should be the first thing you try. Something to keep in mind is that AI is just a tool for munging long strings of text. It's not really intelligent and it doesn't have a crystal ball.

Re: AI makes the easy part easier and the hard part harder

#54

Post by AuthAuth »

zjp wrote: post #24
le-mark wrote: post #9

I vibe coded a retro emulator and assembler with tests. Prompts were minimal and I got really great results (Gemini 3). I tried vibe coding the tricky proprietary part of an app I worked on a few years ago; highly technical domain (yes vague don’t care to dox myself). Lots of prompting and didn’t get close. There are literally thousands of retro emulators on github. What I was trying to do had zero examples on GitHub…

I call these "embarrassingly solved problems". There are plenty of examples of emulators on GitHub, therefore emulators exist in the latent spaces of LLMs. You can have them spit one out whenever you want. It's embarrassingly solved. There are no examples of what you tried to do.

Its license washing. The code is great because its already a problem solved by someone else. The AI can spit out the solution with no license and no attribution and somehow its legal. I hope American tech legislation holds that same energy once others start taking American IP and spitting it back out with no license or attribution.

Re: AI makes the easy part easier and the hard part harder

#55

Post by redox99 »

ekidd wrote: post #36
socketcluster wrote: post #27

I think AI is just a massive force multiplier. If your codebase has bad foundation and going in the wrong direction with lots of hacks, it will just write code which mirrors the existing style... And you get exactly was OP is suggesting. If however, your code foundations are good and highly consistent and never allow hacks, then the AI will maintain that clean style and it becomes shockingly good; in this case, the p…

The wrinkle is that the AI doesn't have a truly global view, and so it slowly degrades even good structure, especially if run without human feedback and review. But you're right that good structure really helps.

AGENTS.md is for that global view.

Re: AI makes the easy part easier and the hard part harder

#56

Post by jim180 »

socketcluster wrote: post #27

I think AI is just a massive force multiplier. If your codebase has bad foundation and going in the wrong direction with lots of hacks, it will just write code which mirrors the existing style... And you get exactly was OP is suggesting. If however, your code foundations are good and highly consistent and never allow hacks, then the AI will maintain that clean style and it becomes shockingly good; in this case, the p…

my exact experience, and AI is especially fragile when you are starting new project from scratch.

Right know I'm building NNTP client for macOS (with AppKit), because why not, and initially I had to very carefully plan and prompt what AI has to do, otherwise it would go insane (integration tests are must).

Right know I have read-only mode ready and its very easy to build stuff on top of it.

Also, I had to provide a lot of SKILLS to GPT5.3

Re: AI makes the easy part easier and the hard part harder

#57

Post by ctoth »

I'm working on a paper connecting articulatory phonology to soliton physics. Speech gestures survive coarticulatory overlap the same way solitons survive collision. The nonlinear dynamics already in the phonetics literature are structurally identical to soliton equations. Nobody noticed because these fields don't share conferences.

The article's easy/hard distinction is right but the ceiling for "hard" is too low. The actually hard thing AI enables isn't better timezone bug investigation LOL! It's working across disciplinary boundaries no single human can straddle.

Re: AI makes the easy part easier and the hard part harder

#58

Post by iugtmkbdfil834 »

Some time back, my manager at the time, who shall remain nameless told the group that having AI is like having 10 people work for you ( he actually had a slightly smaller number, but it was said almost word for word like in the article ) with the expectation being set as: 'you should now be able to do 10x as much'.

Needless to say, he was wrong and gently corrected over the course of time. In his defense, his use cases for LLMs at the time were summarizing emails in his email client.. so..eh.. not exactly much to draw realistic experience from.

I hate to say it, but maybe nvidia CEO is actually right for once. We have a 'new smart' coming to our world. The type of a person that can move between worlds of coding, management, projects and CEOing with relative ease and translate between those worlds.

Re: AI makes the easy part easier and the hard part harder

#59

Post by Nition »

zjp wrote: post #24
le-mark wrote: post #9

I vibe coded a retro emulator and assembler with tests. Prompts were minimal and I got really great results (Gemini 3). I tried vibe coding the tricky proprietary part of an app I worked on a few years ago; highly technical domain (yes vague don’t care to dox myself). Lots of prompting and didn’t get close. There are literally thousands of retro emulators on github. What I was trying to do had zero examples on GitHub…

I call these "embarrassingly solved problems". There are plenty of examples of emulators on GitHub, therefore emulators exist in the latent spaces of LLMs. You can have them spit one out whenever you want. It's embarrassingly solved. There are no examples of what you tried to do.

In a way it shows how poorly we have done over the years in general as programmers in making solved problems easily accessible instead of constantly reinventing the wheel. I don't know if AI is coming up with anything really novel (yet) but it's certainly a nice database of solved problems.

I just hope we don't all start relying on current[1] AI so much that we lose the ability to solve novel problems ourselves.

[1] (I say "current" AI because some new paradigm may well surpass us completely, but that's a whole different future to contemplate)

Re: AI makes the easy part easier and the hard part harder

#60

Post by habinero »

gamblor956 wrote: post #41

It seems like a big part of the divide is that people who learned software engineering find vibe coding to be unsuitable for any project intended to be in use for more than a few while those who learned coding think vibe coding is the next big thing because they never have to deal with the consequences of the bad code.

Yes. If you have some experience, you know that writing code is a small part of the job, and a much bigger chunk is anticipating and/or dealing with problems.

People seem to think engineers like "clean code" because we like to be fancy and show off.

Nah, it's clean like a construction site. I need to be able to get the cranes and the heavy machinery in and know where all the buried utilities are. I can't do that if people just build random sheds everywhere and dump their equipment and materials where they are.

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