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Nobody knows how to build with AI yet

worksonmymachine.substack.com

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Re: Nobody knows how to build with AI yet

#81

Post by xyst »

"You’re using it wrong" arguments/hype articles showing up. Speculators love it. But in reality if you need to extol the benefits of AI, then is it really the user or the technology?

Honestly reminds me of the digital currency mania that busted a couple of years ago. Same types of articles popping up too.

Look I understand the benefits of AI but it’s clear ai is limited by the compute power of today. Maybe the dream this author has will be realized some day. But it won’t be today or in current generations lifespan.

Re: Nobody knows how to build with AI yet

#82

Post by closewith »

prinny_ wrote: post #61
mnky9800n wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the agent stuff is impressive because we are giving the AI scaffold and tools and things to do. And that is why it is impressive because it has some directive. But it is obvious if you don't give it good directives it doesn't know what to do. So for me, I think a lot of jobs will be making agents do things, but a lot won't. i think its really strange that people are all so against all this stuff. it's cool ne…

A lot of people join this profession because they like building stuff. They enjoy thinking about a problem and coming up with a solution and then implementing and testing it. Prompting is not the same thing and it doesn't scratch the same itch and at the end of the day it's important to enjoy your job, not only be efficient at it. I have heard the take that "writing code is not what makes you an engineer, solving pro…

Most people don't enjoy their jobs and go to work for one reason only - to support themselves and their families. The itch is to get paid. This is as true in software as it is in other fields.

That's not to say there aren't vocations, or people in software who feel the way you do, but it's a tiny minority.

Re: Nobody knows how to build with AI yet

#83

Post by therein »

>I've been coding for long enough to remember when we carved HTML tables by hand. When CSS was a suggestion, not a lifestyle. When JavaScript was for mouseover effects and nothing else.

Cringe. The tech is half baked and the author is already fully committed to this is the future, I am living in the future, I bake cookies while Claude codes.

Pure cringe. This confirms my earlier theories that everyone just wants to be a manager. You don't need to manage humans. You just want to be a manager.

The whole article could be summed down to I always wanted to be a manager and now I am a manager of bots.

Re: Nobody knows how to build with AI yet

#84

Post by weitendorf »

karel-3d wrote: post #24

Reading articles like this feels like being in a different reality. I don't work like this, I don't want to work like this and maybe most importantly I don't want to work with somebody who works like this. Also I am scared that any library that I am using through the myriad of dependencies is written like this. On the other hand... if I look at this as some alternate universe where I don't need to directly or indirec…

I've been working on AI dev tools for a bit over a year and I don't love using AI this way either. I mostly use it for boilerplate, ideas, or to ask questions about error messages. But I've had a very open mind about it ever since I saw it oneshotting what I saw as typical Google Cloud Functions tasks (glue together some APIs, light http stuff) a year ago.

I think in the last month we've entered an inflection point with terminal "agents" and new generations of LLMs trained on their previously spotty ability to actually do the thing. It's not "there" yet and results depend on so many factors like the size of your codebase, how well-represented that kinda stuff is in its training data, etc but you really can feed these things junior-sized tickets and send them off expecting a PR to hit your tray pretty quickly.

Do I want the parts of my codebase with the tricky, important secret sauce to be written that way? Of course not, but I wouldn't give them to most other engineers either. A 5-20 person army of ~interns-newgrads is something I can leverage for a lot of the other work I do. And of course I still have to review the generated code, because it's ultimately my responsibility, but I prefer that over having to think about http response codes for my CRUD APIs. It gives me more time to focus on L7 load balancing and cluster discovery and orchestration engines.

Re: Nobody knows how to build with AI yet

#85

Post by goalieca »

Benjammer wrote: post #80
bloppe wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

An I the only one who has to constantly tell Claude and Gemini to stop making edits to my codebase because they keep messing things up and breaking the build like ten times in a row, duplicating logic everywhere, etc? I keep hearing about how impressive agents are. I wish they could automate me out of my job faster

Are you paying for the higher end models? Do you have proper system prompts and guidance in place for proper prompt engineering? Have you started to practice any auxiliary forms of context engineering? This isn't a magic code genie, it's a very complicated and very powerful new tool that you need to practice using over time in order to get good results from.

It ain’t a magic code genie. And developers don’t spend most of their day typing lines of code. Lots of it is designing, figuring out what to build, understanding the code, maintenance considerations, and adhering to the style of whatever file you’re in. All these agents needing local context and still spit junk.

Re: Nobody knows how to build with AI yet

#86

Post by verisimilidude »

lordnacho wrote: post #33
karel-3d wrote: post #24

Reading articles like this feels like being in a different reality. I don't work like this, I don't want to work like this and maybe most importantly I don't want to work with somebody who works like this. Also I am scared that any library that I am using through the myriad of dependencies is written like this. On the other hand... if I look at this as some alternate universe where I don't need to directly or indirec…

But you also can't not swim with the tide. If you drove a horse-buggy 100 years ago, it was probably worth your while to keep your eye on whether motor-cars went anywhere. I was super skeptical about a year ago. Copilot was making nice predictions, that was it. This agent stuff is truly impressive.

AI's superpower is doing mediocre work at high speed. That's okay. Great, even. There's lots of mediocre work to do. And mediocre still clears below average.

But! There's still room for expertise. And this is where I disagree about swimming with the tide. There will be those who are uninterested in using the AI. They will struggle. They will hone their craft. They will have muscle memory for the tasks everyone else forgot how to do. And they will be able to perform work that the AI users cannot.

The future needs both types.

Re: Nobody knows how to build with AI yet

#87

Post by theferret »

prinny_ wrote: post #61
mnky9800n wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the agent stuff is impressive because we are giving the AI scaffold and tools and things to do. And that is why it is impressive because it has some directive. But it is obvious if you don't give it good directives it doesn't know what to do. So for me, I think a lot of jobs will be making agents do things, but a lot won't. i think its really strange that people are all so against all this stuff. it's cool ne…

A lot of people join this profession because they like building stuff. They enjoy thinking about a problem and coming up with a solution and then implementing and testing it. Prompting is not the same thing and it doesn't scratch the same itch and at the end of the day it's important to enjoy your job, not only be efficient at it. I have heard the take that "writing code is not what makes you an engineer, solving pro…

That's an interesting take - that you like the act of writing code. I think a lot of builders across a variety of areas feel this way. I like writing code too.

I've been experimenting with a toolchain in which I speak to text to agents, navigate the files with vim and autocomplete, and have Grok think through some math for me. It's pretty fun. I wonder if that will change to tuning agents to write code that go through that process in a semi-supervised manner will be fun? I don't know, but I'm open to the idea that as we progress I will find toolchains that bring me into flow as I build.

Re: Nobody knows how to build with AI yet

#88

Post by nlawalker »

lubujackson wrote: post #25
zwnow wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So you are relaxing and the AI is coding? Neat! Way to replace yourself, hope you won't cry after your job once it is gone.

What you miss is the constant need to refine and understand the bigger picture. AI makes everyone a lead architect. A non-coder can't do this or will definitely get lost in the weeds eventually.

Right, but a lead architect can be a lead architect on multiple projects at the same time, and the world doesn't need as many lead architects as it has programmers.

This kind of working is relaxing and enjoyable until capitalism discovers that it is, and then you have to do it on five projects simultaneously.

Re: Nobody knows how to build with AI yet

#89

Post by [deleted] »

bloppe wrote: post #62
lordnacho wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But you also can't not swim with the tide. If you drove a horse-buggy 100 years ago, it was probably worth your while to keep your eye on whether motor-cars went anywhere. I was super skeptical about a year ago. Copilot was making nice predictions, that was it. This agent stuff is truly impressive.

An I the only one who has to constantly tell Claude and Gemini to stop making edits to my codebase because they keep messing things up and breaking the build like ten times in a row, duplicating logic everywhere, etc? I keep hearing about how impressive agents are. I wish they could automate me out of my job faster

[deleted]

Re: Nobody knows how to build with AI yet

#90

Post by lvl155 »

Based on how easy it is to trigger cool-down or throttle on Claude Code, I think people know how to build with AI. Or they’re trying really hard to figure it out. The race is on and it’s wide open.

There are a lot gotchas with these new models. They get incredibly lazy if you let them. For example, I asked it to do a simple tally by year. I just assumed it’s simple enough I don’t need to ask to write a code. It counted first couple of years and just “guessed” the rest based on pattern it noticed.

Sometimes, it feels like having a lazy coworker that you have to double check constantly and email with repeated details. Other times, I just sit there in awe of how smart it is in my weekly AGI moment and how it’s going to replace me soon.

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