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Revenge of the Junior Developer

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Re: Revenge of the Junior Developer

#71

Post by DonHopkins »

LightHugger wrote: post #19
tyleo wrote: post #5

I love how new technology becomes like religion. It develops both cult followers and critics. In that lens think the AI cult is more right than the Crypto cult. At least I can use it to do something tangible right now while crypto is still pretty useless after many years. In some sense I think these technologies need the cults and the critics though. It’s good to have people push new things forwards even if everyone…

Cryptocurrency allows people who are otherwise limited by draconian payment platform limitations, puritanical moralists who own credit card companies and such to buy and sell things online without being stopped. It's obviously not a good system but it provides a high effort release valve, a fallback mechanism that hopefully will undermine some of these draconian measures. Lots of people have been helped by the existe…

A lot of bad actors control most Crypto platforms. Some of them are even justly rotting in jail (until Trump pardons them), and a hell of a lot more of them deserve to be in jail, while most AI users aren't actively committing crimes, laundering and embezzling money, dodging taxes, pumping and dumping rug pulls and pyramid schemes, and committing fraud.

It's been such a relief since the Crypto scammers finally shut the fuck up with their incessant ShitCoin and NFT shilling and get-rich-quick pyramid schemes, so please don't any of you start up again, for the love of God.

AI is NOT like Crypto in any way shape or form, and this is an AI discussion, not a Crypto discussion. And I'm sick and tired of hearing from Crypto shills yapping HODL and FUD while I'm actually getting productive work done and making real money while creating tangible value and delivering useful products with AI, without even having to continuously recruit greater fools and rip off senior citizens and naive suckers of their life savings by incessantly shilling and pumping and dumping and pulling rugs out from under people.

Re: Revenge of the Junior Developer

#72

Post by DonHopkins »

bluefirebrand wrote: post #54
hombre_fatal wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A good example of this at the extreme is game design. When you're making a game, it's really expensive to try out different ideas, like a few different implementations of a mechanic. It could be hours of work to make a change. You tend to have to do a lot of thinking to tweak a mechanic in a fundamental way just to see what it feels like, knowing that you're probably going to throw it away. LLMs are really good at th…

> LLMs are really good at this. Make a git branch, ask Claude Code to tweak the physics so that it does X, see what it feels like How do you verify that Claude did what you wanted? Maybe more importantly, how do you verify that Claude didn't make a change that you didn't want? Trying to verify the code changes just by testing the running project seems incredibly careless

You READ what it did and REVIEW every change and ASK it to explain and LEARN from it so you can do it yourself too: the OPPOSITE of "vibe coding", whose goal is to avoid learning and reading and reviewing and understanding at all costs, to live a careless effortless TLDR life of self imposed ignorance.

There's a responsible enlightened self enriching way to use AI tools, and there's "vibe coding".

Re: Revenge of the Junior Developer

#73

Post by DonHopkins »

Is it just me, or has anyone else noticed that:

1) Cursor has been crashing several times an hour for me recently.

2) Cursor seems to ignore .cursorrules files. I'm using the json format that's supposed to let you filter on file name patterns (although how that works for cross-cutting agent stuff I don't know).

3) Cursor is obsessed with making sketchy iffy defensive code checking for the most recent symptom and trying to guess and shart its way out of it instead of addressing the real problem? And it's extremely hard to talk it out of doing that, I have to keep reminding it and admonishing it to cut it the fuck out, fail instead of mitigate, address the root cause not the symptoms, and stop trying to close the barn door after all the horses have escaped. It's as of it was only trained on Stack Overflow and PHP manual page discussions.

Re: Revenge of the Junior Developer

#74

Post by jcgrillo »

fragmede wrote: post #64
jcgrillo wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't get it. What is the dead body thing about?

There are people building things and making money using these new techniques, but because they haven't stopped to produce research studies and white papers about their work, you want to presume it doesn't exist.

Yes, without evidence there's no effect. It's telling that nowhere on cursor.ai's website do they appear to claim using their tool will actually make you, or crucially your team, more efficient.

Re: Revenge of the Junior Developer

#75

Post by fragmede »

jcgrillo wrote: post #74
fragmede wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are people building things and making money using these new techniques, but because they haven't stopped to produce research studies and white papers about their work, you want to presume it doesn't exist.

Yes, without evidence there's no effect. It's telling that nowhere on cursor.ai's website do they appear to claim using their tool will actually make you, or crucially your team, more efficient.

evidencthe absence of evidence doesn't mean there's no effect

Re: Revenge of the Junior Developer

#76

Post by bluefirebrand »

DonHopkins wrote: post #72
bluefirebrand wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> LLMs are really good at this. Make a git branch, ask Claude Code to tweak the physics so that it does X, see what it feels like How do you verify that Claude did what you wanted? Maybe more importantly, how do you verify that Claude didn't make a change that you didn't want? Trying to verify the code changes just by testing the running project seems incredibly careless

You READ what it did and REVIEW every change and ASK it to explain and LEARN from it so you can do it yourself too: the OPPOSITE of "vibe coding", whose goal is to avoid learning and reading and reviewing and understanding at all costs, to live a careless effortless TLDR life of self imposed ignorance. There's a responsible enlightened self enriching way to use AI tools, and there's "vibe coding".

> You READ what it did and REVIEW every change and ASK it to explain and LEARN from it so you can do it yourself too

I don't believe anyone will actually use AI this way long-term

Even if we start out this way, eventually people will trust it enough that they get complacent and mistakes will start to slip through

Besides which, this doesn't actually sound faster than just writing the code yourself

Re: Revenge of the Junior Developer

#77

Post by jcgrillo »

fragmede wrote: post #75
jcgrillo wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, without evidence there's no effect. It's telling that nowhere on cursor.ai's website do they appear to claim using their tool will actually make you, or crucially your team, more efficient.

evidencthe absence of evidence doesn't mean there's no effect

There is no trustworthy evidence that I'm aware of to support the claim that "using an LLM IDE makes developers 5x more effective". Do you disagree? Testimonials don't cut it, because individuals are prone to hysteria, delusions, and just making stuff up.

All I'm asking for is a few trustworthy case studies showing unambiguously that it's worth my time and money to pay attention to this genai stuff. That shouldn't be hard for a trillion dollar industry, right? Like show me this isn't just hysterical hype. Don't tell me, show me.

Re: Revenge of the Junior Developer

#78

Post by DonHopkins »

bluefirebrand wrote: post #76
DonHopkins wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You READ what it did and REVIEW every change and ASK it to explain and LEARN from it so you can do it yourself too: the OPPOSITE of "vibe coding", whose goal is to avoid learning and reading and reviewing and understanding at all costs, to live a careless effortless TLDR life of self imposed ignorance. There's a responsible enlightened self enriching way to use AI tools, and there's "vibe coding".

> You READ what it did and REVIEW every change and ASK it to explain and LEARN from it so you can do it yourself too I don't believe anyone will actually use AI this way long-term Even if we start out this way, eventually people will trust it enough that they get complacent and mistakes will start to slip through Besides which, this doesn't actually sound faster than just writing the code yourself

Speak for yourself. That's the way I use it, so I get a lot more out of it and get a lot more done than a "vibe coder" who's lazy and doesn't want to put in any effort or learn anything new.

You simply can't learn nearly as fast with vi or Emacs or VSCode, and they can't explain unknown code and APIs and algorithms and bug fixes to you, suggest best practices, review code, write documentation for existing code, check and align code with updated documentation, or automatically update existing documentation and comments to reflect the actual code.

Right now I'm using Cursor to refactor and overhaul a huge complex multi-repo codebase of Python, TypeScript, Bash, SQL, JSON, YAML, Markdown, and ML models, from multiple repos with Google Cloud Build to a monorepo with GitHub actions, and it's no cake walk, a huge amount of work, I'm learning and applying a whole lot of new stuff, meticulously documenting every part of the system, making it rock solid, DRY, with extensive logging and error handling, and there's no way I would have been able to do 5% of this work in the same amount of time without using AI. You don't HAVE to be lazy, instead you can work as hard as you've ever worked without AI and get a hell of a lot more done while learning new things, if you so choose to. It's all up to you.

If you insist on going into it refusing to use it as a learning tool, and don't want to work hard, then you be you, and I'm going to have a huge advantage over you or any "vibe coder".

You asked "How do you verify that Claude did what you wanted?" and I told you. Just because you're too lazy and incurious to drink the water I led you to doesn't mean I or anyone else can't.

Re: Revenge of the Junior Developer

#79

Post by 6510 »

I had this rather comical picture where developers finally get to experience what it is like to have someone write software for you. You get sort of what you asked for but it is obviously wrong to even the most novice user. You then change the requirements and get something entirely different but equally wrong or worse... and a new invoice. hahaha It gets more funny the more I think about it.

Re: Revenge of the Junior Developer

#80

Post by disgruntledphd2 »

bluefirebrand wrote: post #76
DonHopkins wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You READ what it did and REVIEW every change and ASK it to explain and LEARN from it so you can do it yourself too: the OPPOSITE of "vibe coding", whose goal is to avoid learning and reading and reviewing and understanding at all costs, to live a careless effortless TLDR life of self imposed ignorance. There's a responsible enlightened self enriching way to use AI tools, and there's "vibe coding".

> You READ what it did and REVIEW every change and ASK it to explain and LEARN from it so you can do it yourself too I don't believe anyone will actually use AI this way long-term Even if we start out this way, eventually people will trust it enough that they get complacent and mistakes will start to slip through Besides which, this doesn't actually sound faster than just writing the code yourself

Yup, this is gonna be like autopilots and aeroplanes all over again.

It's a shame that we'll invest so much money and compute into this, and continue to ignore all the ergonomics research that could help.

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