611–620 of 1001 posts
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Have you tried asking one of your peers who claims to get good results to run a test with you? Where you both try to create the same project, and share your results?
I and one or two others are _the_ AI use experts at my org, and I was by far the earliest adopter here. So I don't really have anyone else with significantly different experiences than me that I could ask.
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 deta…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
On the subpar code, would the code work, albeit suboptimally? I think part of the problem a lot of senior devs are having is that they see what they do as an artisanal craft. The rest of the world just sees the code as a means to an end. I don't care how elegantly my toaster was crafted as long as it toasts the bread and doesn't break.
There is some truth to your point but you might want to consider that often seniors concerned with code quality aren't being pedantic about artisanal craft they are worried about the consequences of bad code... - it becomes brittle and rigid (can't change it, can't add to it) - it becomes buggy and impossible to fix one bug without creating another - it becomes harder to tell what it's doing - plus it can be ineffici…
Think of all the awful cheapest android phones and Windows PCs and laptops that are slow, buggy, have not had a security update in however long and are thus insecure, become virtually unusable within a couple years. The majority of the people in the world live on such devices either because they don't know better or have no better option. The world continues to turn.
People are fine with imperfection in their products, we're all used to it in various aspects of our lives.
Code being buggy, brittle, hard to extend, inefficient, slow, insecure. None of those are actual deal breakers to the end user, or the owners of the companies, and that's all that really matters at the end of the day in determining whether or not the product will sell and continue to exist.
If we think of it in terms of evolution, the selection pressure of all the things you listed is actually very weak in determining whether or not the thing survives and proliferates.
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…
Maybe AI gets good enough at writing code that it's users' knowledge of computer science and software development becomes irrelevant. In that case, approximately everyone on this site is just screwed. We're all in the business of selling that specialized knowledge, and if it's no longer required then companies aren't going to pay us to operate the AI, they're going to pay PMs, middle managers, executives, etc. But even that won't be particularly workable long term, because all their customers will realize they no longer need to pay the companies for software either. In this world, the price of software goes to zero (and hosting likely gets significantly more commoditized than it is now). Any time you put into learning to use LLMs for software development doesn't help you keep making money selling software, and actually stops you from picking up a new career.
If, on the other hand, CS and software engineering knowledge is still needed, companies will have to keep/restart hiring or training new developers. In terms of experience using AI, it is impossible for anyone to have less experience than these new developers. We will, however, have much more experience and knowledge of the aforementioned non-LLM skills that we're assuming (in this scenario) are still necessary for the job. In this scenario you might be better off if you'd started learning to prompt a bit earlier, but you'll still be fine if you didn't.
I'm not sure what to make of these technologies. I read about people doing all these things with them and it sounds impressive. Then when I use it, it feels like the tool produces junior level code unless I babysit it, then it really can produce what I want. If I have to do all this babysitting, is it really saving me anything other than typing the code? It hasn't felt like it yet and if anything it's scary because I…
Also add the huge security gap of letting a probabilistic tool with blurry boundaries execute shell commands. Add the fact that AI is currently not being profitable, and that all major players most likely train on your code (Anthropic does).
AI tools in their current form or another will definitely change software engineering, I personally think for the best However I can’t help but notice some things that look weird/amusing: - The exact time that many programmers were enlightened about the AI capabilities and the frequency of their posts. - The uniform language they use in these posts. Grandiose adjectives, standard phrases like ‘it seems to me’ - And m…
Mind-boggling amount of investment needing a return or the promise of a return
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 deta…
> non-trivial coding tasks I’ve come back to the idea LLMs are super search engines. If you ask it a narrow, specific question, with one answer, you may well get the answer. For the “non-trivial” questions, there always will be multiple answers, and you’ll get from the LLM all of these depending on the precise words you use to prompt it. You won’t get the best answer, and in a complex scenario requiring highly recurs…
Yes! This is exactly what it is. A search engine with a lossy-compressed dataset of most public human knowledge, which can return the results in natural language. This is the realization that will pop the AI bubble if the public could ever bring themselves to ponder it en masse. Is such a thing useful? Hell yes! Is such a thing intellegent? Certainly NO!
> 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.
I've hit flow state setting it up to fly. When it flys is when the human gets out of the loop so the AI can look at the thing itself and figure out why centering the div isn't working to center the div, or why the kernel isn't booting. Like, getting to a point, pre-AI, where git bisect running in a loop is the flow state. Now, with ai, setting that up is the flow.
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 deta…
You will not find such a government. They're here for a different purpose