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Don't fall into the anti-AI hype

antirez.com

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641–650 of 1001 posts

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

#641

Post by tayo42 »

epolanski wrote: post #503
burgerone wrote: post #416

There's this infinite war between the two opposing sides. "It's going to change programming forever" vs "Why not just use your brain". I much prefer option two for all the good reasons. Saying that AI is awesome doesn't actually adress all its issues.

There's no war, it's just that the internet pushes the more controversial narratives up. The overwhelming majority of users use and see the benefits of AI and at the same time are fully aware that you won't move software by copy pasting a jira task and lots of thinking is involved into planning and reviewing the changes.

Do you work in the software industry? Low effort stuff like that is happening everyday.

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

#642

Post by tomjen3 »

vignesh37 wrote: post #627
totallykvothe wrote: post #569

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…

The biggest frustration with LLMs for me is people telling me I'm not promoting it in a good way. Just think about any product where they are selling a half baked product, and repeatedly telling the user you are not using it properly.

If my mum buys a copy of Visual Studio, is it their fault if she cannot code?

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

#643

Post by catlifeonmars »

daxfohl wrote: post #599
totallykvothe wrote: post #569

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…

Agreed, but: There's been a notable jump over the course of the last few months, to where I'd say it's inevitable. For a while I was holding out for them to hit a ceiling where we'd look back and laugh at the idea they'd ever replace human coders. Now, it seems much more like a matter of time. Ultimately I think over the next two years or so, Anthropic and OpenAI will evolve their product from "coding assistant" to "…

I actually think it’s the opposite. We’ll see fewer monorepos because small, scoped repos are the easiest way to keep an agent focused and reduce the blast radius of their changes. Monorepos exist to help teams of humans keep track of things.

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

#644

Post by Aeolun »

totallykvothe wrote: post #569

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…

Maybe if your coding style is already close to what an LLM like Claude outputs, you’ll never have these issues? At least it generally seems to be doing what I would do myself.

Most of the architectural failures come from it still not having the whole codebase in mind when changing stuff.

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

#645

Post by fatata123 »

antirez wrote: post #126
vmaurin wrote: post #85

> facts are facts, and AI is going to change programming forever Show me these "facts"

If you can't see this by working with Claude Code for a few weeks, I don't want to go into bigger efforts than writing a blog post to convince you. It's not a mission, mine. I just want to communicate with the part of people that are open enough to challenge their ideas and are willing to touch with their hands what is happening. Also, if you tried and failed, it means that either for your domain AI is not good enoug…

[dead]

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

#646

Post by catlifeonmars »

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’m better at code than prose, so coding via an agent is frustrating. Rather than multiple attempts to achieve the desired results, I’d rather just write in once, with the precision and nuance that I want. I’d be interested to try a “dueling pianos” style approach where I can cooperate with an agent indirectly through the code, rather than a lower fidelity option.

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

#647

Post by zbentley »

virgildotcodes wrote: post #577
totallykvothe wrote: post #569

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…

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.

> I don't care how elegantly my toaster was crafted as long as it toasts the bread and doesn't break.

A consumer or junior engineer cares whether the toaster toasts the bread and doesn’t break.

Someone who cares about their craft also cares about:

- If I turn the toaster on and leave, can it burn my house down, or just set off the smoke alarm?

- Can it toast more than sliced uniform-thickness bread?

- What if I stick a fork in the toaster? What happens if I drop it in the bathtub while on? Have I made the risks of doing that clear in such a way that my company cannot be sued into oblivion when someone inevitably electrocutes themselves?

- Does it work sideways?

- When it fills up with crumbs after a few months of use, is it obvious (without knowing that this needs to be done or reading the manual) that this should be addressed, and how?

- When should the toaster be replaced? After a certain amount of time? When a certain misbehavior starts happening?

Those aren’t contrived questions in service to a tortured metaphor. They’re things that I would expect every company selling toasters to have dedicated extensive expertise to answering.

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

#648

Post by catlifeonmars »

kaffekaka wrote: post #383
irthomasthomas wrote: post #366

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my feed 'AI hype' outnumbers 'anti-AI hype' 5-1. And anti-hype moderates like antirez and simonw are rare. To be a radical in ai is to believe that ai tools offer a modest but growing net positive utility to a modest but growing subset of hackers and professionals

Well put. AI obviously brings big benefits into the profession. We just have not seen exactly what they are just yet. How it will unfold. But personally I feel that a future of not having to churn out yet another crud app is attractive.

In theory “not having to churn out yet another crud app” doesn’t require AI, any ol code generator will do. AI is a really expensive way (in terms of gpus/tpus) to generate boilerplate, but as long as that cost is massively subsidized by investors, you may as well use it.

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

#649

Post by chongli »

sublinear wrote: post #635
daxfohl wrote: post #599

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed, but: There's been a notable jump over the course of the last few months, to where I'd say it's inevitable. For a while I was holding out for them to hit a ceiling where we'd look back and laugh at the idea they'd ever replace human coders. Now, it seems much more like a matter of time. Ultimately I think over the next two years or so, Anthropic and OpenAI will evolve their product from "coding assistant" to "…

This doesn't make any sense. If the business can get rid of their engineers, then why can't the user get rid of the business providing the software? Why can't the user use AI to write it themselves? I think instead the value is in getting a computer to execute domain-specific knowledge organized in a way that makes sense for the business, and in the context of those private computing resources. It's not about the abi…

If the business can get rid of their engineers, then why can't the user get rid of the business providing the software?

A lot of businesses are the only users of their own software. They write and use software in-house in order to accomplish business tasks. If they could get rid of their engineers, they would, since then they'd only have to pay the other employees who use the software.

They're much less likely to get rid of the user employees because those folks don't command engineer salaries.

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

#650

Post by luckilydiscrete »

totallykvothe wrote: post #569

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…

It's a combination of being bad at prompting and different expectations from the tool. You expect it to be one shot, and then rewrite things that don't match up to what you want.

Instead I recommend that you use LLMs to fix the problems that they introduced as well, and over time you'll get better at figuring out the parts that the LLM will get confused by. My hunch is that you'll find your descriptions of what to implement were more vague than you thought, and as you iterate, you'll learn to be a lot more specific. Basically, you'll find that your taste was more subjective than you thought and you'll rid yourself of the expectation that the LLM magically understands your taste.

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