81–90 of 103 posts
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From a user perspective, yes. The product is what it does, not how it does it.
But for the person building the product it very much is how it does it.
I suppose, in exactly the same way instant / frozen food makes cooking more enjoyable. If it was just a chore that you had to do, and now it's faster, sure, grab that cup-o-noodles. Knock yourself out. Just don't expect to run a successful restaurant based on it.
A decade or two ago I remember an experiment where canned food was presented in a restaurant setting and people couldn't tell it apart from the hand-hooked. The presentation was what mattered, as long as it didn't look like it was canned/frozen then they thought it tasted like restaurant quality.
In any case, those are ingredients (analogous to...libraries I guess?) and not to the whole application. If you served someone a canned sandwich or canned sushi or some such, they'd notice.
AI takes the craft out of being an IC. IMO less enjoyable.
AI takes the human management out of being an EM. IMO way more enjoyable.
Now I can direct large-scope endeavors and 100% of my time is spent on product vision and making executive decisions. No sob stories. No performance reviews. Just pure creative execution.
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But for the person building the product it very much is how it does it.
I think we (developers) need to get over that. Code was always the means to an end, which is providing a product to solve a problem, not the end itself.
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I don't care about the product as much as I care about the code.
Well, that's the thing. You have to shut your programmer brain off and turn on your business brain. The code never really was that important. Delivering value to end users is the important thing, at least to the people that count. Tim Bryce, one of the foremost experts on software methodology, hated programmers and considered them deeply sad individuals who had to compensate for their mediocre intelligence and narrow…
I used to share this sentiment but the more I used AI for programming, the less I enjoyed it. Even writing "boring" code (like tests or summaries) by hand increased my understanding of what I wrote and how it integrates into the rest of the codebase, which I think is fun. Letting a robot write code for me, however tedious it would be to write manually, made me feel like I was working in someone else's codebase. It re…
Why bother at all? AI stops coding being about the journey, and makes it about the destination. That is the polar opposite of most people's coding experience as a professional. Most developers are not about the destination, and often don't really care about the 'product', preferring to care about the code itself. They derive satisfaction from how they got to the end product instead of the end product itself. For thos…
Then they aren't programmers anymore, are they? We don't call people using no-code platforms "programmers" and we wouldn't trust them one bit to review actual code.
AI is simply the new no-code platform, except that the scope of what it can do is much larger while the reliability of what it produces is much lower.
This is too low level. You’d be better off describing the things that need testing and asking for it to do red/green test-driven development (TDD). Then you’ll know all the tests are needed, and it’ll decide what tests to write without your intervention, and make them pass while you sip coffee :)
> I don’t trust it yet is when code must be copy pasted.
Ask it to perform the copy-paste using code - have it write and execute a quick script. You can review the script before it runs and that will make sure it can’t alter details on the way through.
That's it? That post shouldn't be on HackerNews tbh...
Please don't complain that a submission is inappropriate. If a story is spam or off-topic, flag it.
If a story hangs around on the front page even after you've flagged it, you can always email us (hn@ycombinator.com) and we'll take a look. That will get our attention much more quickly than a comment.
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Why bother at all? AI stops coding being about the journey, and makes it about the destination. That is the polar opposite of most people's coding experience as a professional. Most developers are not about the destination, and often don't really care about the 'product', preferring to care about the code itself. They derive satisfaction from how they got to the end product instead of the end product itself. For thos…
> For those developers who just want to build a thing to drive business value, or because they want a tool that they need, or because they think the end result will be fun to have, AI coding is great. It enables them to skip over (parts of) the tedious coding bit and get straight to the result bit. Then they aren't programmers anymore, are they? We don't call people using no-code platforms "programmers" and we wouldn…
In the future though, sure,it'll be possible to build a decent app without ever seeing or understanding the code.