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My article on why AI is great (or terrible) or how to use it

matthewrocklin.com

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Re: My article on why AI is great (or terrible) or how to use it

#81

Post by rileymichael »

aspenmartin wrote: post #59
rileymichael wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I also can’t stop myself from using Claude Code and the like. just.. uninstall it? i've removed all ai tooling from both personal+work devices and highly recommend it. there's no temptation to 'quickly pull up $app just to see' if it doesn't exist

Is this coming from the hypothesis / prior that coding agents are a net negative and those who use them really are akin to gambling addicts that are just fooling themselves? The OP is right and I feel this a lot: when Claude pulls me into a rabbit hole, convinces me it knows where to go, and then just constantly falls flat on its face and we waste like several hours together, with a lot of all caps prompts from me to…

no, this is coming from the fact OP states they are miserable. that is unsustainable. at the end of the day the more productive setup is the one that keeps you happy and in your chair long term, as you'll produce nothing if you are burnt out.

Re: My article on why AI is great (or terrible) or how to use it

#82

Post by bob1029 »

linkregister wrote: post #64

Rather than spending iterations crafting precise permissions, why not just run with --dangerously-skip-permissions If run in a devcontainer[1][2], the worst thing that can happen is it deletes everything in the filesystem below the mounted repo. Recovery would entail checking out the repo again. 1. (conventional usage) https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/devcontainers/containers 2. (actual spec) https://containers.dev…

On windows I create a new locked down user with NTFS permissions denied everywhere except the target project path. I then run the agent app as that user with otherwise unrestricted powershell access.

Re: My article on why AI is great (or terrible) or how to use it

#83

Post by lunar_mycroft »

aspenmartin wrote: post #45
deergomoo wrote: post #2

I will never as long as I live understand the argument that AI development is more fun. If you want to argue that you’re more capable or whatever, fine. I disagree but I don’t have any data to disprove you. But saying that AI development is more fun because you don’t have to “wrestle the computer” is, to me, the same as saying you’re really into painting but you’re not really into the brush aspect so you pay someone…

I understand this sentiment but, it is a lot of fun for me. Because I want to make a real thing to do something, and I didn't get into programming for the love of it, I got into it as a means to an end. It's like the articles point: we don't do assembly anymore and no one considers gcc to be controversial and no one today says "if you think gcc is fun I will never understand you, real programming is assembly, that's…

> It's like the articles point: we don't do assembly anymore and no one considers gcc to be controversial and no one today says "if you think gcc is fun I will never understand you, real programming is assembly, that's the fun part"

The compiler reliably and deterministically produces code that does exactly what you specified in the source code. In most cases, the code it produces is also as fast/faster than hand written assembly. The same can't be said for LLMs, for the simple reason that English (and other natural languages) is not a programming language. You can't compile English (and shouldn't want to, as Dijkstra correctly pointed out) because it's ambiguous. All you can do is "commission" another

> Do you resent folks like us that do find it fun?

For enjoying it on your own time? No. But for hyping up the technology well beyond it's actual merits, antagonizing people who point out it's shortcomings, and subjecting the rest of us to worse code? Yeah, I hold that against the LLM fans.

Re: My article on why AI is great (or terrible) or how to use it

#84

Post by rileymichael »

harles wrote: post #61
rileymichael wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I also can’t stop myself from using Claude Code and the like. just.. uninstall it? i've removed all ai tooling from both personal+work devices and highly recommend it. there's no temptation to 'quickly pull up $app just to see' if it doesn't exist

It’s become a core expectation at work now (Meta). If I’m not actively using it, then I’ll be significantly dinged in performance reviews. Honestly, it’s forced me to consider going to work elsewhere. It does _feel_ like the value and happiness will come some versions down the road when I can actually focus on orchestration, and not just bang my head on the table. That’s the main thing that keeps me from just removin…

sorry to hear. perhaps you could goodhart's law it and setup some background cron that simulates usage

Re: My article on why AI is great (or terrible) or how to use it

#85

Post by aidos »

The linked Claude generated script for giving more control over permissions in tool use is… typically Claude.

The code interleaves rules and control flow, drops side effects like “exit” in functions and hinges on a stack of regex for parsing bash.

This isn’t something I’ve attempted before but it looks like a library like bashlex would give you a much cleaner and safer starting point.

For a “throwaway” script like this maybe it’s fine, but this is typical of the sort of thing I’m seeing spurted out and I’m fascinated to see what people’s codebases look like these days.

Don’t get me wrong, I use CC every day, but man, you do need to fight it to get something clean and terse.

https://gist.github.com/mrocklin/30099bcc5d02a6e7df373b4c259...

Re: My article on why AI is great (or terrible) or how to use it

#86

Post by somekyle2 »

harles wrote: post #47
awfulneutral wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It feels like this to me too, whenever I give it a try. It's like a button you can push to spend 20 minutes and have a 50/50 chance of either solving the problem with effortless magic, or painfully wasting your time and learning nothing. But it feels like we all need to try and use it anyway just in case we're going to be obsolete without it somehow.

> But it feels like we all need to try and use it anyway just in case we're going to be obsolete without it somehow. I feel this exactly. I’ve been one of the biggest champions of the tech in my org in spite of the frequent pain I feel from it.

If it doesn't work, it's an annoyance and you have to argue with it. If it does work, it's one more case where maybe with the right MCP plumbing and/or a slightly better model you might not be needed as part of this process. Feels a bit lose-lose.

Re: My article on why AI is great (or terrible) or how to use it

#87

Post by aspenmartin »

rileymichael wrote: post #81
aspenmartin wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is this coming from the hypothesis / prior that coding agents are a net negative and those who use them really are akin to gambling addicts that are just fooling themselves? The OP is right and I feel this a lot: when Claude pulls me into a rabbit hole, convinces me it knows where to go, and then just constantly falls flat on its face and we waste like several hours together, with a lot of all caps prompts from me to…

no, this is coming from the fact OP states they are miserable. that is unsustainable. at the end of the day the more productive setup is the one that keeps you happy and in your chair long term, as you'll produce nothing if you are burnt out.

Oh sure of course, I missed that part!

Re: My article on why AI is great (or terrible) or how to use it

#88

Post by vanviegen »

tsukikage wrote: post #78
9dev wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you're looking at it from the wrong angle. Wrestling the computer is stuff like figuring out how to recite the right incantation so Gradle will do a multi-platform fat bundle, and then migrate to the next major Gradle version. Unless you have a very specific set of kinks, tasks like these will make you want to quit your career in computers and pick up trash on the highway instead. You very likely have some of…

The hard part of software engineering, and indeed many other pursuits, is working out what it is you actually need to happen and articulating that clearly enough for another entity to follow your instructions. Using English, with all its inherent ambiguity, to attempt to communicate with an alien (charitably) mind very much does /not/ make this task any easier if the thing you need to accomplish is of any complexity…

You've clearly never had to work with Gradle. :-)

Re: My article on why AI is great (or terrible) or how to use it

#89

Post by jaggederest »

linkregister wrote: post #64

Rather than spending iterations crafting precise permissions, why not just run with --dangerously-skip-permissions If run in a devcontainer[1][2], the worst thing that can happen is it deletes everything in the filesystem below the mounted repo. Recovery would entail checking out the repo again. 1. (conventional usage) https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/devcontainers/containers 2. (actual spec) https://containers.dev…

Be careful running claude in a devcontainer with no other restrictions - it at least nominally knows how to jailbreak out of containers, even though it appears heavily moralized not to. If you (for example) feed it arbitrary web data that contains a prompt sufficiently persuasive to get to try, it's pretty capable of doing it.

Re: My article on why AI is great (or terrible) or how to use it

#90

Post by BeetleB »

deergomoo wrote: post #2

I will never as long as I live understand the argument that AI development is more fun. If you want to argue that you’re more capable or whatever, fine. I disagree but I don’t have any data to disprove you. But saying that AI development is more fun because you don’t have to “wrestle the computer” is, to me, the same as saying you’re really into painting but you’re not really into the brush aspect so you pay someone…

People have given most of the answers, but here's another one: At work, when I write code, I spend a lot of time designing it, making good interfaces, good tests, etc. It gave me joy to carefully craft it.

At home, I never had the time/will to be as thorough. Too many other things to do in life. Pre-LLMs, most of my personal scripts are just - messy.

One of the nice things with LLM assisted coding is that it almost always:

1. Gives my program a nice interface/UI

2. Puts good print/log statements

3. Writes tests (although this is a hit or miss).

Most of the time it does it without being asked.

And it turns out, these are motivation multipliers. When developing something, if it gives me good logs, and has a good UI, I'm more likely to spend time developing it further. Hence, coding is now more joyful.

And it turns out, these tend to

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