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AI made coding more enjoyable

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Re: AI made coding more enjoyable

#61

Post by skydhash »

michaelrpeskin wrote: post #44
lsy wrote: post #18

At what point do LLMs enable bad engineering practices, if instead of working to abstract or encapsulate toilsome programming tasks we point an expensive slot machine at them and generate a bunch of verbose code and carry on? I'm not sure where the tradeoff leads if there's no longer a pain signal for things that need to be re-thought or re-architected. And when anyone does create a new framework or abstraction, it d…

How much of "good engineering practices" exist because we're trying to make it easy for humans to work with the code? Pick your favorite GoF design pattern. Is that they best way to do it for the computer or the best way to do it for the developer? I'm just making this up now, maybe it's not the greatest example; but, let's consider the "visitor" pattern. There's some framework that does a big loop and calls the visi…

Code is a design tool, just like lines on an engineering drawing. Most times you do not care if it was with a pen or a pencil, or if it was printed out. But you do care about the cross section of the thing depicted. The only time you care about whether it’s pen or pencil is for preservation.

So I don’t care about assembly because it does not matter usually in any metric. I design using code because that’s how I communicate intent.

If you learn how to draw, very quickly, you find that no one talks about lines (which is mostly all you do), you will hear about shapes, texture, edges, values, balance…. It’s in these higher abstractions intent resides.

Same with coding. No ones thinks in keywords, brackets, or lines of code. Instead, you quickly build higher abstractions and that’s where you live in. The pros is that those concepts habe no ambiguity.

Re: AI made coding more enjoyable

#62

Post by jayd16 »

contagiousflow wrote: post #35
empath75 wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you just have to give up ownership of the _code_ and focus on ownership of the _product_.

Do you think the product is not the code?

Honestly, it never was. Personal projects not withstanding, if there is a product that should always be the focus. Code is only a means to that.

Re: AI made coding more enjoyable

#63

Post by bitwize »

I'm glad you enjoy it. I fucking hate it. Working directly with code is part of how I approach solving software problems.

What's worse, the more I rely on the bot, the less my internal model of the code base is reinforced. Every problem the bot solves, no matter how small, doesn't feel like a problem I solved and understanding I'd gained, it feels like I used a cheat code to skip the level. And passively reviewing the bot's output is no substitute for actively engaging with the code yourself. I can feel the brainrot set in bit by bit. It's like I'm Bastian making wishes on AURYN and losing a memory with every wish. I might get a raw-numbers productivity boost now, but at what cost later?

I get the feeling that the people who go on about how much fun AI coding is either don't actually enjoy programming or are engaging in pick-me behavior for companies with AI-use KPIs.

Re: AI made coding more enjoyable

#64

Post by atonse »

Not just coding. everything else I do.

I hate writing proposals. It's the most mind numbing and repetitive work which also requires scrutinizing a lot of details.

But now I've built a full proposal pipeline, skills, etc that goes from "I want to create a proposal" (it collects all the info i need, creates a folder in google drive, I add all the supporting docs, and it generates a react page, uses code to calculate numbers in tables, and builds an absolutely beautiful react-to-pdf PDF file.

I have a comprehensive document outline all the work our company's ever done, made from analyzing all past proposals and past work in google drive, and the model references that when weaving in our past performance/clients.

It is wonderful. I can now just say things like "remove this module from the total cost" and without having to edit various parts of the document (like with hand-editing code). Claude (or anything else) will just update the "code" for the proposal (which is a JSON file) and the new proposal is ready, with perfect formatting, perfect numbers, perfect tables, everything.

So I can stay high level thinking about "analyze this module again, how much dev time would we need?" etc. and it just updates things.

If you'd like me to do something like this with your company, get in touch :) I'm starting to think (as of this week) others will benefit from this too and can be a good consulting engagement.

Re: AI made coding more enjoyable

#65

Post by onion2k »

zooi wrote: post #10

I used to share this sentiment but the more I used AI for programming, the less I enjoyed it. Even writing "boring" code (like tests or summaries) by hand increased my understanding of what I wrote and how it integrates into the rest of the codebase, which I think is fun. Letting a robot write code for me, however tedious it would be to write manually, made me feel like I was working in someone else's codebase. It re…

Why bother at all?

AI stops coding being about the journey, and makes it about the destination. That is the polar opposite of most people's coding experience as a professional. Most developers are not about the destination, and often don't really care about the 'product', preferring to care about the code itself. They derive satisfaction from how they got to the end product instead of the end product itself.

For those developers who just want to build a thing to drive business value, or because they want a tool that they need, or because they think the end result will be fun to have, AI coding is great. It enables them to skip over (parts of) the tedious coding bit and get straight to the result bit.

If you're coding because you love coding then obviously skipping the coding bit is going to be a bad time.

Re: AI made coding more enjoyable

#66

Post by sowbug »

munk-a wrote: post #32
mrwh wrote: post #11

Not to be that curmudgeon (who am I kidding), but it's made reviewing code very much less enjoyable, and I review more changes than I write. Engineers merrily sending fixes they barely understand (or, worse, don't think they need to understand) for the rest of us to handle, and somehow lines-of-code has become a positive metric again. How convenient!

It has always been my opinion (and born out by our statistics internally, when counting self-review in the form of manual testing and automated test writing) that reviewing code (to the level of catching defects) often takes more time than actually building the solution. So I have a pretty big concern that the majority of AI code generation ends up adding time to tasks than it saves because it's optimizing the cheap…

As the old saying goes, it's easier to write code than to read it.

Re: AI made coding more enjoyable

#67

Post by munk-a »

pjm331 wrote: post #48
munk-a wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It has always been my opinion (and born out by our statistics internally, when counting self-review in the form of manual testing and automated test writing) that reviewing code (to the level of catching defects) often takes more time than actually building the solution. So I have a pretty big concern that the majority of AI code generation ends up adding time to tasks than it saves because it's optimizing the cheap…

as much as you or i may be against it, inevitably AI coding will move away from human review and toward more automated means measuring program correctness this was already happening even before AI - human review is limited, linting is limited, type checking is limited, automated testing is limited if all of these things were perfect at catching errors then we would not need tracing and observability of production sys…

I'm actually all for automated measures of program correctness and I think that manual testing is the last resort of tight budgets outside of highly complex integration issues. Adding more automated test cases that are built in to the CI pipline from the unit level to the highest levels (as long as they're not useless fluff) usually ensures a much lower level of defects. AI can help with that process, but only if we're diligent in checking that it isn't just building pages and pages of fluff ineffective tests - so we still end up needing to check the code and the tests that AI has written and I am still concerned that that ends up being more expensive in the long run.

Re: AI made coding more enjoyable

#68

Post by jimbokun »

empath75 wrote: post #27
zooi wrote: post #10

I used to share this sentiment but the more I used AI for programming, the less I enjoyed it. Even writing "boring" code (like tests or summaries) by hand increased my understanding of what I wrote and how it integrates into the rest of the codebase, which I think is fun. Letting a robot write code for me, however tedious it would be to write manually, made me feel like I was working in someone else's codebase. It re…

I think you just have to give up ownership of the _code_ and focus on ownership of the _product_.

If the product is software the code is the product.

Re: AI made coding more enjoyable

#70

Post by nkassis »

some-guy wrote: post #16
zooi wrote: post #10

I used to share this sentiment but the more I used AI for programming, the less I enjoyed it. Even writing "boring" code (like tests or summaries) by hand increased my understanding of what I wrote and how it integrates into the rest of the codebase, which I think is fun. Letting a robot write code for me, however tedious it would be to write manually, made me feel like I was working in someone else's codebase. It re…

I generally agree with you. As a recent father with a toddler, and two parents with a full time job, I’ve found that the only way I can make time for those personal side projects is to use AI to do most of the bootstrapping, and then do the final tweaks on my own. Most of this is around home automation, managing my Linux ISO server, among other things. But it certainly would be more fun and rewarding if I did it all…

This feels like the same moment for me when I realized I couldn't keep using Gentoo and needed to move on to a Linux distribution that was ready to go without lots of manual effort. I have a family and kids I need those hours. I had the same feeling as OP of losing a fun learning activity. No longer progressing on Linux knowledge just maintaining. Granted it was good enough level to move on but it's still a loss.

I do the same as you with AI now, it's allowing me to build simple things quickly and revise later. Sometimes I never have to. I feel similarly that I'm no longer progressing as a dev just maintaining what I know. That might change I might adapt how I approach work and find the balance but for now it's a new activity entirely.

I've talked to many people over the years who saw coding as a get shit done activity. Stop when it's good enough. They never approached it really as a hobby and a learning experience. It wasn't about self progression to them. Mentioning that I read computer books resulted in a disgusted face "You can just google what you need when you need it".

Always felt odd to me, software development was my hobby something I loved not just a job. Now I think they will thrive in this world. It's pure results. No need to know a breath of things or what's out there to start on the right foot. AI has it all somewhere in it's matrix. Hopefully they develop enough taste to figure out what's good from bad when it's something that matters.

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