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Don't fall into the anti-AI hype

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

#661

Post by petesergeant »

kristofferR wrote: post #639
eru wrote: post #623

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. Have another model review the code, and use that review as automatic feedback?

That is actually a gold tip. Codex CLI is way less pleasant to use than Opus, but way better at finding bugs, so I combine them.

Codex is a sufficiently good reviewer I now let it review my hand-coded work too. It's a really, really good reviewer. I think I make this point often enough now that I suspect OpenAI should be paying me. Claude and Gemini will happily sign off work that just doesn't work, OpenAI is a beast at code-review.

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

#662

Post by inetknght »

okdood64 wrote: post #628
chrz wrote: post #26

> How do I feel, about all the code I wrote that was ingested by LLMs? I feel great to be part of that, because I see this as a continuation of what I tried to do all my life: democratizing code, systems, knowledge. LLMs are going to help us to write better software, faster, and will allow small teams to have a chance to compete with bigger companies. You might feel great, thats fine, but I dont. And software quality…

> software quality is going down Is there some metric for this?

Have you looked around you? Windows, macOS... there's terrible quality software everywhere and it's only getting worse.

To be fair, it's been getting worse since before LLMs were a thing.

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

#663

Post by smt88 »

staticshock wrote: post #656

Efficient markets route around bottlenecks. Technological revolutions accelerate the speed at which that re-routing happens. In software, we, the developers , have increasingly been a bottleneck. The world needs WAY more software than we can economically provide, and at long last a technology has arrived that will help route around us for the benefit of humanity. Here's an excellent Casey Handmer quote from a recent…

> In software, we, the developers, have increasingly been a bottleneck. The world needs WAY more software than we can economically provide, and at long last a technology has arrived that will help route around us for the benefit of humanity.

Everything you wrote here is directly contradicted by casual observation of reality.

Developers aren't a bottleneck. If they were, we wouldn't be in a historic period of layoffs. And before you say that AI is causing the layoffs -- it's not. They started before AI was widely used for production, and they're also being done at companies that aren't heavily using AI anyway. They're a result of massive over-hiring during periods of low interest rates.

Beyond that, who is demanding software developers? The things that make our lives better (like digital forms at the doctor's office) aren't complex software.

The majority of the demand is from enshittification companies making our lives worse with ads and surveillance. No one is demanding developers, but certainly individual humans aren't demanding them.

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

#664

Post by daxfohl »

The central equation is still marginal ROI. Will adding an engineer provide positive higher marginal ROI than some other investment? If so, hire; if not, fire. With the scale and size of the software industry about to explode even higher, one measly engineer can still drive some feature that's worth millions of dollars. AI will just allow us to also release features that are worth only thousands of dollars.

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

#665

Post by __MatrixMan__ »

oncallthrow wrote: post #48
systemf_omega wrote: post #8

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.

My take: learning how to do LLM-assisted coding at a basic level gets you 80% of the returns, and takes about 30 minutes. It's a complete no-brainer. Learning all of the advanced multi-agent worklows etc. etc... Maybe that gets you an extra 20%, but it costs a lot more time, and is more likely to change over time anyway. So maybe not very good ROI.

It seems like you're mostly focused on the tooling for actually directing the LLM but there's a whole host of other technology which becomes relevant re: building guardrails and handcuffs for your agent. For instance I've been doing a lot of contract testing lately. It's not new tech, not changing at a blistering pace, but now that generating mountains of code is cheap, techniques for dealing with those mountains are suddenly more necessary.

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

#666

Post by ajjahs »

atomicnumber3 wrote: post #583
hollowturtle wrote: post #439

> How do I feel, about all the code I wrote that was ingested by LLMs? I feel great to be part of that, because I see this as a continuation of what I tried to do all my life: democratizing code, systems, knowledge. LLMs are going to help us to write better software, faster, and will allow small teams to have a chance to compete with bigger companies. Every now and then I post the same exact comment here on HN, where…

This is how I feel too. Let me try to itemize it: how AI speeds me up: - no longer have to remember how to set up unit test boilerplate in each of the 6ish programming languages i commonly use - can often vaguely gesture at an existing pattern and have AI "copy-paste" it into new code. "do that read-through cache pattern like you see there and there but do it for this table and this proto msg type." - can quickly ans…

[dead]

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

#667

Post by khafra »

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…

> Non-trivial coding tasks

A coding agent just beat every human in the AtCoder Heuristic optimization contest. It also beat the solution that the production team for the contest put together. https://sakana.ai/ahc058/

It's not enterprise-grade software, but it's not a CRUD app with thousands of examples in github, either.

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

#668

Post by fragmede »

smt88 wrote: post #603
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 "…

There's no chance LLMs will be an engineering team replacement. The hallucination problem is unsolvable and catastrophic in some edge cases. Any company using such a team would be uninsurable and sued into oblivion.

I am but a lowly IC, with no notion of the business side of things. If I am an IC at, say, a FANG company, what insurance has been taken out on me writing code there?

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

#669

Post by saltyoutburst »

mvkel wrote: post #580
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…

> Other people are just less picky than I am I think this is part of it. When coding style has been established among a team, or within an app, there are a lot of extra hoops to jump through, just to get it to look The Right Way, with no detectable benefit to the user. If you put those choices aside and simply say: does it accomplish the goal per the spec (and is safe and scalable[0]), then you can get away with a lo…

Do you have any references for "vibe coded monoliths tend to collapse in on themselves at ~30,000 LOC"? I haven't personally vibed up anything with that many LOC, so I'm legitimately curious if we have solid numbers yet for when this starts to happen (and for which definitions of "collapse").

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

#670

Post by consp »

dmitrijbelikov wrote: post #653

AI doesn't do anything fundamentally new; you search for information the same way you used to through Google. The difference is that when you Googled, you understand that responsibility for the end result lies with you. Now, "users" shift responsibility to the "machine," even though they're essentially writing the program's configuration in their own language. Once you take responsibility for what your LLM writes, yo…

It absolves from responsibility because "the tool was wrong". No wonder it is being hyped.
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