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My AI skeptic friends are all nuts

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Re: My AI skeptic friends are all nuts

#731

Post by PokerFacowaty »

This is a great article and I think I agree with most of it, not being an agent user myself.

One point the author might be missing is:

> If you were trying and failing to use an LLM for code 6 months ago †, you’re not doing what most serious LLM-assisted coders are doing

The tech giants and AI bros alike have been bombarding us with "but look what it can do NOW", "the new shiny model is revolutionary, now buy tokens", "look what's around the corner" and whatever else for over 2 years now. Can you really blame a typical "skeptic" for not being interested in putting their time to veryfing these claims themselves after seeing mediocre results so many times? You start to develop a filter for these things.

Re: My AI skeptic friends are all nuts

#732

Post by alex_suzuki »

beej71 wrote: post #308

> I like moving the code around and chuckling to myself while I delete all the stupid comments. I have to read the code line-by-line anyways. I'm glad I got out when I did. :) This simply isn't something I want to do for a living. I'm glad there are people who do, though.

Judging from your username, you are 10 years older than I am. What are you doing now? Early retirement? Or career change?

Re: My AI skeptic friends are all nuts

#733

Post by einpoklum »

> LLMs can write a large fraction of all the tedious code you’ll ever need to write.

For most software projections, they cannot even remotely do that - at least not today and as far as I can tell.

And that is to say, it's not that they can write a not-so-large fraction. They cannot write any significant fraction of it. They can often write you a draft that helps you get there faster, though. They can also facilitate web search result consolidation etc. which can also help. But - they can also lead you down wrong paths and dead-ends, on occasion.

Re: My AI skeptic friends are all nuts

#735

Post by Leo-thorne »

At first I didn’t think LLMs were that impressive, but ever since I started using them, I’ve pretty much stopped writing for loops by hand. It’s not that I forgot how. I just don’t feel like doing it anymore. The time it saves me on boilerplate lets me focus on other things. Sometimes the code isn’t perfect and I need to fix it, but it’s still way easier than starting from scratch.

Re: My AI skeptic friends are all nuts

#736

Post by whazor »

matthewsinclair wrote: post #691

I think this article is pretty spot on — it articulates something I’ve come to appreciate about LLM-assisted coding over the past few months. I started out very sceptical. When Claude Code landed, I got completely seduced — borderline addicted, slot machine-style — by what initially felt like a superpower. Then I actually read the code. It was shockingly bad. I swung back hard to my earlier scepticism, probably even…

The key is that manual coding for a normal task takes a one/two weeks, where-as if you configure all your prompts/agents correctly you could do it in a couple of hours. As you highlighted, it brings many new issues (code quality, lack of tests, tech debt) and you need to carefully create prompts and review the code to tackle those. But in the end, you can save significant time.

Re: My AI skeptic friends are all nuts

#737

Post by thedevilslawyer »

fifticon wrote: post #707

By the reply count it appears this post was excellent at trolling HN's core audience :-). The author may be right, but his preface "look I'm one of you" was in a very different tone to the rest of his "now shut up and get to work" rant. I do use the AI tools to some extent, if for no other reason than that they are currently the path of least resistance, and google+friends have lately played themselves out of the gam…

The article is chefs_kiss.jpg. the author is core-hn, in spirit and in karma.

imo that tone is exactly what's needed to set right the entitlement that we SWEs have developed over the last decade. The key line in the article gets to the heart of the actual concern developers have imo.

  > LLMs really might displace many software developers. That’s not a high horse we get to ride. Our jobs are just as much in tech’s line of fire as everybody else’s have been for the last 3 decades.

Re: My AI skeptic friends are all nuts

#738

Post by nmeofthestate »

This sounds very cool - almost science-fiction in parts. I want to know more details about the specific technology, whether it could handle a 30k C++ codebase, how much work you would need to do to make it learn how to run your tests, analyse their output, interface with all your internal software development services etc.

Re: My AI skeptic friends are all nuts

#739

Post by teaearlgraycold »

fsloth wrote: post #697
matthewsinclair wrote: post #691

I think this article is pretty spot on — it articulates something I’ve come to appreciate about LLM-assisted coding over the past few months. I started out very sceptical. When Claude Code landed, I got completely seduced — borderline addicted, slot machine-style — by what initially felt like a superpower. Then I actually read the code. It was shockingly bad. I swung back hard to my earlier scepticism, probably even…

I totally agree. The ”hard to control mech suit” is an excellent analogy. When it works it’s brilliant. There is a threshold point as part of the learning curve where you realize you are in a pile of spaghetti code and think it actually saves no time to use LLM assistant. But then you learn to avoid the bad parts - thus they don’t take your time anymore - and the good parts start paying back in heaps of the time spen…

The issue is we’re too early in the process to even have a solid education program for using LLMs. I use them all the time and continue to struggle finding an approach that works well. It’s easy to use them for documentation look up. Or filling in boilerplate. Sometimes they nail a transformation/translation task, other times they’re more trouble than they’re worth.

We need to understand what kind of guard rails to put these models on for optimal results.

Re: My AI skeptic friends are all nuts

#740

Post by v3xro »

Another one, here we go :) I think I'm going to keep it short because I am not here to convince people they're wrong, just to voice my dissent from uh almost every viewpoint this article comes from.

> Professional software developers are in the business of solving practical problems for people with code. We are not, in our day jobs, artisans.

Well that's just wrong - we have failed to capture tremendous value through knowledge of our craft and to reduce it down to min-maxing effort/profit is not a pursuit that I can get behind. Nobody is talking about building Ivory towers, but we can do a lot better than most of the common denominator technologies in use today. We're failing our users most of the time (and of course people like the author say it doesn't matter because it doesn't show up in the quarterly results).

> Nobody cares if the logic board traces are pleasingly routed.

Speak for yourself.

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