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My AI skeptic friends are all nuts

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Re: My AI skeptic friends are all nuts

#811

Post by samyar »

ang_cire wrote: post #752

One thing that really bothered me that the author glossed over (perhaps they don't care, given the tone of the article) is where they said: > Does an intern cost $20/month? Because that’s what Cursor.ai costs. > Part of being a senior developer is making less-able coders productive, be they fleshly or algebraic. But do you know what another part of being a senior developer is? Not just making them more productive, bu…

Well i hope that happens, you go apply for a job already 10k applied. What kind of job market is this.

Re: My AI skeptic friends are all nuts

#812

Post by osigurdson »

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 arguments seem to come down to tooling. The article suggests that ChatGPT isn't a good way to interact with LLMs but I'm not so sure. If the greatest utility is "rubber ducking" and editing the code yourself is necessary then tools like Cursor go too far in a sense. In my own experience, Windsurf is good for true vibe coding where I just want to explore an idea and throw away the code. It is still annoying though as it takes so long to do things - ruining any kind of flow state you may have. I am conversing with ChatGPT directly much more often.

I haven't tried Claud code yet however. Maybe that approach is more on point.

Re: My AI skeptic friends are all nuts

#814

Post by dspillett »

> but the craft - Do you like fine Japanese woodworking? All hand tools and sashimono joinery? Me too. Do it on your own time.

That is not my objection, though some seem to think it is.

I got into coding because I found it interesting and fun. I've avoided managing others because I hate that sort of thing. Working with an LLM, prompting it to do work then assessing that work and adjusting the prompts or cleaning/completing the output myself, is far too much like outsourcing work to a 3rd party junior, and I don't want to do that whether said junior is a human in a far off land (or just down the street, for all I know!) or some LLM run by MegaCorp-ᴙ-Us.

I was already seriously disliking much of the modern programming industry (remote teams, the shit-show that client-side web work continues to devolve into, and much else) anyway. If it gets to the point where I can't do my job (or can't do it competitively enough) without using LLMs on top of dealing with the other things I don't care for, I'll be retraining for something else entirely. Heck, I've got the mortgage paid, I don't have or plan to have a family beyond the cats, I could just about survive on shelf-stacking…

I know it isn't a passing fad, though I'm convinced the current and near-future iterations aren't going to be quite as significant in the longer term as many believe. I don't object to others using it (aside from the matter of “MegaCorp-ᴙ-Us”s of the world suddenly deciding that piracy is just fine because they stand to benefit from it, in fact are already benefitting from it, in this case). But I don't plan to be nagged into using it myself.

> Do it on your own time.

If/when that career shift happens, or I survive as I am long enough to retire, I will probably do exactly that. As it stands I spend more than enough of my life on tech in DayJob, my own time is increasingly filled with unrelated hobbies and people.

Re: My AI skeptic friends are all nuts

#816

Post by James_K »

Use of LLMs to program really doesn't make much sense. The very nature of computer software is that it's a small effort from a small number of people that is multiplied out to massive productivity gains for a large number of people. Unless the LLM is producing better output than the people would, you are saving time for a small number of people in exchange for degrading the experience of a much larger number of people. If your AI-coded app goes down for a day and you have to vibe-debug it, that is probably gonna put you in the red from a time perspective.

With the amount of supervision you need to give this stuff, I can't see it being useful for much more than auto-completing the next few lines of code as you type. You've got to read and go over the whole output carefully anyway, so you might as well have finer grained control over it.

Re: My AI skeptic friends are all nuts

#817

Post by Cthulhu_ »

raxxorraxor wrote: post #767
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 better I am at solving a problem, the less I use AI assistants. I use them if I try a new language or framework. Busy code I need to generate is difficult to do with AI too. Because then you need to formalize the necessary context for an AI assistant, which is exhausting with an unsure result. So perhaps it is just simpler to write it yourself quickly. I understand comments being negative, because there is so muc…

> But often prompting is more complex than programming something.

I'd challenge this one; is it more complex, or is all the thinking and decision making concentrated into a single sentence or paragraph? For me, programming something is taking a big high over problem and breaking it down into smaller and smaller sections until it's a line of code; the lines of code are relatively low effort / cost little brain power. But in my experience, the problem itself and its nuances are only defined once all code is written. If you have to prompt an AI to write it, you need to define the problem beforehand.

It's more design and more thinking upfront, which is something the development community has moved away from in the past ~20 years with the rise of agile development and open source. Techniques like TDD have shifted more of the problem definition forwards as you have to think about your desired outcomes before writing code, but I'm pretty sure (I have no figures) it's only a minority of developers that have the self-discipline to practice test-driven development consistently.

(disclaimer: I don't use AI much, and my employer isn't yet looking into or paying for agentic coding, so it's chat style or inline code suggestions)

Re: My AI skeptic friends are all nuts

#818

Post by rxtexit »

kakadu wrote: post #56

A hammer hammers. It hammers 100% of the time, with no failure. It requires the same amount of labour from my part but it delivers the same outcome every time. That is what tools do, they act as an extension and allow you to do things not easily done otherwise. If the hammer sometimes hammers, sometimes squeaks and sometimes screws then it requires extra labour from my part just to make it do what purpose specific to…

IMO this is exactly the wrong mental model.

You can't hammer a nail a 1000 times and pick the best hammered nail.

You can have the hammer iterating over the structure 24/7, finding imperfections in previous hammered nails.

This is imposing arbitrary constraints on the model and that when you give a human just a hammer, they tend to start to view everything like a nail.

Re: My AI skeptic friends are all nuts

#820

Post by Ensorceled »

I've been using LLM's pretty regularly for just over a year (my PyCharm AI license just renewed). My experience before that was pretty mixed and fell into the "sort of worth it" category.

It's improved to the point where the summary that I would email a junior developer is a pretty good prompt that produces code pretty close to want I want.

I had a weird project recently where I needed a stand alone event handler that would send an email receipt to the customer, another email to customer service, log the event in an accounting system via an API. I wrote up a proposal for the rest of the management team and, once accepted, pasted the proposal into ChatGPT (and a few others, but ChatGPT gave the best results).

I basically got a full recipe for setting up AWS API Gateway, Lambda, and SES, the Python Lambda function with api calls to SES, suggestions on using AWS SAM, etc. etc. Tweaked the prompt a couple of times and then took over from there. I had this into the hands of the testing team in less than a day.

I'm pretty sure this would reduce my team size in ANY role I've had in my career. Maybe not halve the teams, but it would eliminate a lot of the junior or journeymen developers.

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