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Don't fall into the anti-AI hype

antirez.com

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Re: Don't fall into the anti-AI hype

#561

Post by anileated »

tokioyoyo wrote: post #460
silcoon wrote: post #445

I perfectly agree with antirez about the importance of AI and the benefit for coders. In the last month we saw a big jump and we all are in the middle of the biggest technological revolution since the internet. He summarised the benefits, but omitted the rest. Why we don't have to be anti-AI? Why in his opinion is just "HYPE"? I didn't find any answer in his post. He doesn't analyse the cons of AI and explain why som…

From purely business and career perspective, being anti-AI will be a self-own unless you work for niche companies that have the anti-AI stance. Yes, they exist. But if a company is building, supporting, or consulting any product, where timing matters and there’s competition (which is super majority), it’ll be in their best interest to nudge their employees to speed up via AI. I do think at least being proficient righ…

> From purely business and career perspective, being anti-AI will be a self-own

From purely business and career perspective being anti-blockchain/NFT/online gambling/adtech/fascism (at least for now in US)/etc. is a self-own, too.

I'm sure everybody making a choice against that knows it.

Thankfully purely business and career perspectives don't dictate everything.

Re: Don't fall into the anti-AI hype

#562

Post by kristofferR »

afavour wrote: post #551
zeroonetwothree wrote: post #311

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You’re right of course. For me there’s no flow state possible with LLM “coding”. That makes it feel miserable instead of joyous. Sitting around waiting while it spits out tokens that I then have to carefully look over and tweak feels like very hard work. Compared to entering flow and churning out those tokens myself, which feels effortless once I get going. Probably other people feel differently.

The incredible thing (to me) is that this isn’t even remotely a new thing: it’s reviewing pull requests vs writing your own code. We all know how different that feels!

Correct, provided you were the one who wrote an incredibly specific feature request that the pull request solved for you.

Re: Don't fall into the anti-AI hype

#563

Post by [deleted] »

jstummbillig wrote: post #453
silcoon wrote: post #445

I perfectly agree with antirez about the importance of AI and the benefit for coders. In the last month we saw a big jump and we all are in the middle of the biggest technological revolution since the internet. He summarised the benefits, but omitted the rest. Why we don't have to be anti-AI? Why in his opinion is just "HYPE"? I didn't find any answer in his post. He doesn't analyse the cons of AI and explain why som…

There is no hard part. The anti-AI position has simply become trite. The idea is that agentic coding does not work. Today, it does work.

[deleted]

Re: Don't fall into the anti-AI hype

#564

Post by godelski »

afavour wrote: post #551
zeroonetwothree wrote: post #311

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You’re right of course. For me there’s no flow state possible with LLM “coding”. That makes it feel miserable instead of joyous. Sitting around waiting while it spits out tokens that I then have to carefully look over and tweak feels like very hard work. Compared to entering flow and churning out those tokens myself, which feels effortless once I get going. Probably other people feel differently.

The incredible thing (to me) is that this isn’t even remotely a new thing: it’s reviewing pull requests vs writing your own code. We all know how different that feels!

For me it feels like print statement debugging in a compiled language

Re: Don't fall into the anti-AI hype

#565

Post by yeasku »

simonw wrote: post #160
systemf_omega wrote: post #8

What I don't understand about this whole "get on board the AI train or get left behind" narrative, what advantage does an early adopter have for AI tools? The way I see it, I can just start using AI once they get good enough for my type of work. Until then I'm continuing to learn instead of letting my brain atrophy.

This is a pretty common position: "I don't worry about getting left behind - it will only take a few weeks to catch up again". I don't think that's true. I'm really good at getting great results out of coding agents and LLMs. I've also been using LLMs for code on an almost daily basis since ChatGPT's release on November 30th 2022. That's more than three years ago now. Meanwhile I see a constant flow of complaints fro…

[dead]

Re: Don't fall into the anti-AI hype

#566

Post by abustamam »

embedding-shape wrote: post #95

> But what was the fire inside you, when you coded till night to see your project working? It was building. I feel like this is not the same for everyone. For some people, the "fire" is literally about "I control a computer", for others "I'm solving a problem for others", and yet for others "I made something that made others smile/cry/feel emotions" and so on. I think there is a section of programmer who actually do…

I think all programmers are like LEGO builders. But different programmers will see each brick as a different kind of abstraction. A hacker kind of programmer may see each line of code as a brick. An architect kind of programmer may see different services as a brick. An entrepreneur kind of programmer may see entire applications as a brick. These aren't mutually exclusive, of course. But we all just like to build things, the abstractions we use to build them just differ.

Re: Don't fall into the anti-AI hype

#567

Post by lotu »

zeroonetwothree wrote: post #311
embedding-shape wrote: post #95

> But what was the fire inside you, when you coded till night to see your project working? It was building. I feel like this is not the same for everyone. For some people, the "fire" is literally about "I control a computer", for others "I'm solving a problem for others", and yet for others "I made something that made others smile/cry/feel emotions" and so on. I think there is a section of programmer who actually do…

You’re right of course. For me there’s no flow state possible with LLM “coding”. That makes it feel miserable instead of joyous. Sitting around waiting while it spits out tokens that I then have to carefully look over and tweak feels like very hard work. Compared to entering flow and churning out those tokens myself, which feels effortless once I get going. Probably other people feel differently.

Yes this is exactly what I feel. I disconnect enough that if it’s really taking its time I will pull up Reddit and now that single prompt cost me half an hour.

Re: Don't fall into the anti-AI hype

#568

Post by [deleted] »

visarga wrote: post #501
phicoh wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem I see is not so much in how you generate the code. It is about how to maintain the code. If you check in the AI generated code unchanged then do you start changing that code by hand later? Do you trust that in the future AI can fix bugs in your code. Or do you clean up the AI generated code first?

You don't just code with AI, you provide 2 things 1. a detailed spec, result of your discussions with the agent about work, when it gets it you ask the agent to formalize it into docs 2. an extensive suite of tests to cover every angle; the tests are generated, but your have to ensure their quality, coverage and depth I think, to make a metaphor, that specs are like the skeleton of the agent, tests are like the skin,…

[deleted]

Re: Don't fall into the anti-AI hype

#569

Post by totallykvothe »

I don't understand the stance that AI currently is able to automate away non-trivial coding tasks. I've tried this consistently since GPT 3.5 came out, with every single SOTA model up to GPT 5.1 Codex Max and Opus 4.5. Every single time, I get something that works, yes, but then when I start self-reviewing the code, preparing to submit it to coworkers, I end up rewriting about 70% of the thing. So many important details are subpar about the AI solution, and many times fundamental architectural issues cripple any attempt at prompting my way out of it, even though I've been quite involved step-by-step through the whole prototyping phase.

I just have to conclude 1 of 2 things:

1) I'm not good at prompting, even though I am one of the earliest AI in coding adopters I know, and have been consistent for years. So I find this hard to accept.

2) Other people are just less picky than I am, or they have a less thorough review culture that lets subpar code slide more often.

I'm not sure what else I can take from the situation. For context, I work on a 15 year old Java Spring + React (with some old pages still in Thymeleaf) web application. There are many sub-services, two separate databases,and this application needs to also 2-way interface with customer hardware. So, not a simple project, but still. I can't imagine it's way more complicated than most enterprise/legacy projects...

Re: Don't fall into the anti-AI hype

#570

Post by yomismoaqui »

lotu wrote: post #567
zeroonetwothree wrote: post #311

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You’re right of course. For me there’s no flow state possible with LLM “coding”. That makes it feel miserable instead of joyous. Sitting around waiting while it spits out tokens that I then have to carefully look over and tweak feels like very hard work. Compared to entering flow and churning out those tokens myself, which feels effortless once I get going. Probably other people feel differently.

Yes this is exactly what I feel. I disconnect enough that if it’s really taking its time I will pull up Reddit and now that single prompt cost me half an hour.

Maybe this will interest you

https://x.com/Hesamation/status/2009707596954186168

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