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Building better AI tools

hazelweakly.me

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Re: Building better AI tools

#61

Post by giancarlostoro »

ethan_smith wrote: post #23
taylorallred wrote: post #14

One thing that has always worried me about AI coding is the loss of practice. To me, writing the code by hand (including the boilerplate and things I've done hundreds of times) is the equivalent of Mr. Miyagi's paint-the-fence. Each iteration gets it deeper into your brain and having these patterns as a part of you makes you much more effective at making higher-level design decisions.

The "paint-the-fence" analogy is spot-on, but AI can be the spotter rather than replacement - use it for scaffolding while deliberately practicing core patterns that strengthen your mental models.

As long as you understand the scaffolding and its implications, I think this is fine. Using AI for scaffolding has been the key thing for me. If I have some obscure idea I want to build up using Django, I braindump to the model what I want to build, and it spits out models, and what not.

Course, then there's lovable, which spits out the front-end I describe, which it is very impressively good at. I just want a starting point, then I get going, if I get stuck I'll ask clarifying questions. For side projects where I have limited time, LLMs are perfect for me.

Re: Building better AI tools

#62

Post by taylorallred »

lupire wrote: post #34
taylorallred wrote: post #14

One thing that has always worried me about AI coding is the loss of practice. To me, writing the code by hand (including the boilerplate and things I've done hundreds of times) is the equivalent of Mr. Miyagi's paint-the-fence. Each iteration gets it deeper into your brain and having these patterns as a part of you makes you much more effective at making higher-level design decisions.

Do you write a lot assembler, to make your note effective at higher level design?

Writing a lot of assembler would certainly make me more effective at designing systems such as compilers and operating systems. As it stands, I do not work on those things currently. They say you should become familiar with at least one layer of abstraction lower than where you are currently working.

Re: Building better AI tools

#63

Post by miltonlost »

tptacek wrote: post #54

This is a confusing piece. A lot of it would make sense if Weakly was talking about a coding agent (a particular flavor of agent that worked more like how antirez just said he prefers coding with AI in 2025 --- more manual, more advisory, less do-ing). But she's not: she's talking about agents that assist in investigating and resolving operations incidents. The fulcrum of Weakly's argument is that agents should stay…

It's not a confusing piece if you don't skip/ignore the first part. You're using her one example and removing the portion about how human beings learn and how AI is actively removing that process. The incident resolution is an example of her general point.

Re: Building better AI tools

#64

Post by sim7c00 »

i very much agree with this article.

i do wonder if you could make a prompt to force your LLM to always respond like this and if that would already be a sort of dirty fix... im not so clever at prompting yet :')

Re: Building better AI tools

#65

Post by lucianbr »

okr wrote: post #45
taylorallred wrote: post #14

One thing that has always worried me about AI coding is the loss of practice. To me, writing the code by hand (including the boilerplate and things I've done hundreds of times) is the equivalent of Mr. Miyagi's paint-the-fence. Each iteration gets it deeper into your brain and having these patterns as a part of you makes you much more effective at making higher-level design decisions.

Soldering transistors by hand was a thing too, once. But these days, i am not sure, if people wanna keep up anymore. Many trillions of transistors later. :) I like this zooming in and zooming out, mentally. At some point i can zoom out another level. I miss coding. While i still code a lot.

There are definitely people who solder transistors by hand still. Though most not for a living. I wonder how the venn diagram looks together with the set of people designing circuits that eventually get built by machines. Maybe not as disjoint as you first imagine.

Re: Building better AI tools

#66

Post by danielvaughn »

ozten wrote: post #53
taylorallred wrote: post #14

One thing that has always worried me about AI coding is the loss of practice. To me, writing the code by hand (including the boilerplate and things I've done hundreds of times) is the equivalent of Mr. Miyagi's paint-the-fence. Each iteration gets it deeper into your brain and having these patterns as a part of you makes you much more effective at making higher-level design decisions.

"Every augmentation is an amputation" -- Marshall McLuhan

Well there goes a quote that will be stuck in my head for the rest of my life.

Re: Building better AI tools

#67

Post by sim7c00 »

add-sub-mul-div wrote: post #30
taylorallred wrote: post #14

One thing that has always worried me about AI coding is the loss of practice. To me, writing the code by hand (including the boilerplate and things I've done hundreds of times) is the equivalent of Mr. Miyagi's paint-the-fence. Each iteration gets it deeper into your brain and having these patterns as a part of you makes you much more effective at making higher-level design decisions.

Generalize this to: what's it going to look like in ten years when the majority of our society has outsourced general thinking and creativity rather than practicing it?

i already see only electric bikes and chatGPT answers from ppl perpetually glued to their phone screens... soon no one can walk and everyone has a red and green button on their toilet-tv-lounge-chair watching the latest episode of Ow my b**! ;D

Re: Building better AI tools

#68

Post by lucianbr »

tjr wrote: post #39
taylorallred wrote: post #14

One thing that has always worried me about AI coding is the loss of practice. To me, writing the code by hand (including the boilerplate and things I've done hundreds of times) is the equivalent of Mr. Miyagi's paint-the-fence. Each iteration gets it deeper into your brain and having these patterns as a part of you makes you much more effective at making higher-level design decisions.

I'm concerned about this also. Even just reading about AI coding, I can almost feel my programming skills start to atrophy. If AI tools continue to improve, there will be less and less need for humans to write code. But -- perhaps depending on the application -- I think there will still be need to review code, and thus still need to understand how to write code, even if you aren't doing the writing yourself. I imagin…

How could advances in programming languages still happen when nobody is writing code anymore? You think we will just ask the AI to propose improvements, then evaluate them, and if they are good ask the AI to make training samples for the next AI?

Maybe, but I don't think it's that easy.

Re: Building better AI tools

#70

Post by cmiles74 »

okr wrote: post #45
taylorallred wrote: post #14

One thing that has always worried me about AI coding is the loss of practice. To me, writing the code by hand (including the boilerplate and things I've done hundreds of times) is the equivalent of Mr. Miyagi's paint-the-fence. Each iteration gets it deeper into your brain and having these patterns as a part of you makes you much more effective at making higher-level design decisions.

Soldering transistors by hand was a thing too, once. But these days, i am not sure, if people wanna keep up anymore. Many trillions of transistors later. :) I like this zooming in and zooming out, mentally. At some point i can zoom out another level. I miss coding. While i still code a lot.

I think this is a fundamentally different pursuit. The intellectual part was figuring out where the transistors would go, that's the part that took the thinking. Letting a machine do it just let's you test quicker and move onto the next step. Although, of course, if you only solder your transistors by hand once a year you aren't likely to be very good at it. ;-)

People say the same thing about code but there's been a big conflation between "writing code" and "thinking about the problem". Way too often people are trying to get AI to "think about the problem" instead of simply writing the code.

For me, personally, the writing the code part goes pretty quick. I'm not convinced that's my bottleneck.

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