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

matthewrocklin.com

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

#61

Post by harles »

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

It’s become a core expectation at work now (Meta). If I’m not actively using it, then I’ll be significantly dinged in performance reviews. Honestly, it’s forced me to consider going to work elsewhere.

It does _feel_ like the value and happiness will come some versions down the road when I can actually focus on orchestration, and not just bang my head on the table. That’s the main thing that keeps me from just removing it all in personal projects.

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

#62

Post by xnx »

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…

What part of making a movie is fun? Acting, costumes, sets, camerawork, story, dialogue, script, sound effects, lighting, editing, directing, producing, marketing?

Creating software has a similar number of steps. AI tools now make some of them much (much) easier/optional.

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

#63

Post by lynx97 »

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…

My small-program success story with genAI coding is pretty much the opposite of your claim. I used to use a bash script with a few sox instances piped into each other to beat-match and mix a few tracks. Couldn't use a GUI... Then came gpt-5, and I wanted to test it anyway. So I had it write a single-file C++ program that does the track database, offline mixing, limiter and a small REPL-based "UI" to control the thing. I basically had results before my partner was finished preparing breakfast. Then I had a lot of fun bikeshedding the resulting code until it felt like something I'd like to read. Some back and forth, pretending to have an intern and just reviewing/fixing their code. During the whole experience, it basically never generated code which wouldn't compile. Had a single segfault which was due to unclear interface to a C library. Got that fixed quickly.

And now, I have a tool to do a (shuffled if I want) beat-matched mix of all the tracks in my db which match a certain tag expression. "(dnb | jungle) & vocals", wait a few minutes, and play a 2 hour beat-matched mix, finally replacing mpd's "crossfade" feature. I have a lot of joy using that tool, and it was definitely fun having it made. clmix[1] is now something I almost use daily to generate club-style mixes to listen to at home.

[1] https://github.com/mlang/clmix

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

#64

Post by linkregister »

Rather than spending iterations crafting precise permissions, why not just run with

    --dangerously-skip-permissions
If run in a devcontainer[1][2], the worst thing that can happen is it deletes everything in the filesystem below the mounted repo. Recovery would entail checking out the repo again.

1. (conventional usage) https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/devcontainers/containers

2. (actual spec) https://containers.dev/

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

#65

Post by falloutx »

rajangdavis wrote: post #44

The more I use AI, the more I think about the book Fooled By Randomness. AI can take you down a rabbit hole that makes you feel like you are being productive but the generated code can be a dead end because of how you framed the problem to the AI. Engineers need enough discipline to understand the problems they are trying to solve before delegating a solution to a stochastic text generator. I don’t always like using…

AI can also make you invest useful time in things that are not useful or not needed. It also deincentivizes collaboration. If everyone builds thier own version of say Beebook with 5 features, thats worthless compared to BeeBook opensource or even corporate Beebook with thousands of features and complex workflows. And everyone who worked on thier own version of BeeBook wasted thier time.

With AI you have to be careful to know what is important, you dont want to waste your time doing random stuff that may not even get a single user. If its for fun, thats fine but if you want to build a business or improve your output, I would advise people to choose well.

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

#66

Post by sodapopcan »

rileymichael wrote: post #49
sodapopcan wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seems some people I know who really like AI aren't particularly good with their editors. Lots of AI zealots use the "learn your tools" when they are very slow with their editors. I'm sure that's not true across the board, but the sentiment that it's not worth it to get really advanced with your editor has been pretty prevalent for a very long time. I don't care if you use AI but leave me alone. I'm plenty fast withou…

yep.. learning vim or all of the keybinds/tools at ones disposal in $jetbrains_editor would _actually_ make some peers 2x faster but alas..

Agreed but it's not even that. I worked with someone who was insanely fast with RubyMine. All the shortcuts were second-nature and shit just flew onto the screen. So generally, the argument would be to be really good with whatever editor you have. It also goes outside of that, like snippets are still very viable for lots of boilerplate.

At the same time, one of the best developers I worked with was a two-finger typist who had to look at the keyboard. But again, I don't care if you're going to use AI (well, that's not entirely true but not going to get into it) but the tone of this article that "You should learn it, " I take issue with.

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

#67

Post by falloutx »

linkregister wrote: post #64

Rather than spending iterations crafting precise permissions, why not just run with --dangerously-skip-permissions If run in a devcontainer[1][2], the worst thing that can happen is it deletes everything in the filesystem below the mounted repo. Recovery would entail checking out the repo again. 1. (conventional usage) https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/devcontainers/containers 2. (actual spec) https://containers.dev…

Still leaves you open for data exfil. Your AI goes to a site to check documentation, but oh no that site wants it to make an API call with a very specific token.

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

#68

Post by somekyle2 »

somebehemoth wrote: post #42
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…

You are essentially making a character attack on anyone who disagrees with this article. You dismiss outright reasonable objections you have not heard and instead you presume fear and loathing are the only possible motivations to disagree.

Certainly not my intention. Some of my post is projection: I don't like the implications of the AI enthusiast stance, and I know I want "actually, AI can't fully take over the task of programming" to be true even though my recent experience with uses it to handle even moderately complex implementation has been quite successful. I've also seen the opposition narrow in scope but not firmness over the last year from some coworkers while watching others outsource nearly all of their actual code interaction, and I think some of the difference is how invested they are in the craft of programming vs being able to ship something. So, if you like the part AI is expected to take over and see it as part of your value, it makes sense that your threshold are higher for accepting that outcome as accurate. Seems like typical psychology rather than an attack.

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

#69

Post by falloutx »

llmslave2 wrote: post #34
NoraCodes wrote: post #23

I don't care that AI development is more fun for the author. I wouldn't care if all the evidence pointed toward AI development being easier, faster, and less perilous. The externalities, at present, are unacceptable. We are restructuring our society in a way that makes individuals even less free and a few large companies even more powerful and wealthy, just to save time writing code, and I don't understand why people…

Good news: the evidence points to it being slower than non-ai workflows. So we're destroying our economy, society, and planet to make worse software, more slowly! :)

we are also making all software much worse at the same time. I dont think every app needs AI but apparently they do. Notion used to be a Zen writing app back in the day, canva used to an app where you can do simple graphics without a complicated tools panel.

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

#70

Post by 9dev »

tsukikage wrote: post #11
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…

> is more fun because you don’t have to “wrestle the computer” Indeed, of all the possible things to say! AI "development" /is/ wrestling the computer. It is the opposite of the old-fashioned kind of development where the computer does exactly what you told it to. To get an AI to actually do what I want and nothing else is an incredibly painful, repetitive, confrontational process.

I think you're looking at it from the wrong angle. Wrestling the computer is stuff like figuring out how to recite the right incantation so Gradle will do a multi-platform fat bundle, and then migrate to the next major Gradle version. Unless you have a very specific set of kinks, tasks like these will make you want to quit your career in computers and pick up trash on the highway instead.

You very likely have some of these toil problems in your own corner of software engineering, and it can absolutely be liberating to stop having to think about the ape and the jungle when all you care about is the banana.

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