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My AI skeptic friends are all nuts
891–900 of 1001 posts
Re: My AI skeptic friends are all nuts
#892[flagged]
I think you missed the part that's not exciting. When you write your 50th webapp and start integrating auth flows once again that just work slightly differently in this new app than your older one. That's what boils the blood, not writing new business logic.
Re: My AI skeptic friends are all nuts
#893[flagged]
To your first point, I think it’s just a distinction our industry hasn’t figured out yet. There are some stages in projects that some people just don’t like. Similar to how you have rough carpentry vs finish. Some like building the structure, others like the details and polish.
Re: My AI skeptic friends are all nuts
#894[flagged]
> Interestingly, I've noticed that a lot of the people I meet that both find coding tedious and are extremely excited by AI coding, are generally over 40.
I don't think it's the coding that they find tedious.
Re: My AI skeptic friends are all nuts
#895It's fascinating how over the past year we have had almost daily posts like this one, yet from the outside everything looks exactly the same, isn't that very weird? Why haven't we seen an explosion of new start-ups, products or features? Why do we still see hundreds of bug tickets on every issue tracking page? Have you noticed anything different on any changelog? I invite tptacek, or any other chatbot enthusiast arou…
This is an important question. The skepticism tracks with my personal experience - I feel 10-20% more productive but certainly not 5x when measured over a long period of time (say, the last 6 months or more)
I’m nonetheless willing to be patient and see how it plays out. If I’m skeptical about some grandiose claims I must also be equally skeptical and accepting about the possibility of large scale effects happening but not being apparent to me yet.
Re: My AI skeptic friends are all nuts
#896[flagged]
Anecdatum, but I'm over 40 and do not find coding tedious and am not excited by AI coding per se.
Re: My AI skeptic friends are all nuts
#897I 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 think also the key is - don't call it AI, because it's not. It's LLM assist query parsing and code generation. Semantically, if you call it AI, the public expects a cognitive equivalent to a human which this is not, and from what @tptacek describes, is not meant to be - the reasoning and other code bits to create agents and such seem to be developed specifically for code generation and programming assist and other tasks thereof. Viewed in that lens, the article is correct - it is by all means a major step forward.
Re: My AI skeptic friends are all nuts
#898[flagged]
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Re: My AI skeptic friends are all nuts
#899My main concern is not even mentioned in this article and there are hardly any comments here addressing it: Privacy / allowing 3rd parties to read and potentially train on your proprietary source code. I've used LLMs to crank out code for tedious things (like generating C-APIs and calling into poorly documented libraries) but I'm not letting them touch my code until I can run it 100% locally offline. Would love to us…
So would you be interested in a simple serverless service that lets you run LLM’s and is focused on privacy and security first instead of trying to run it on an expensive workstation with a single 4080?
Re: My AI skeptic friends are all nuts
#900The reason that I personally don't use LLMs was not addressed by the article:
I haven't found a way to use it that makes me develop faster.
The articles talks about "tedious code." If you need to generate a large static value table or something, then OK an LLM might give you a really fast result and cut through the tedium. Most of us were already writing short scripts to do that. I'm open to the possibility that an LLM can do it faster. But it's such a rare requirement that the productivity gains are truly negligible here even if they can. And in those cases, it's obvious what the repetitive task needs to be. I often find myself writing the code by hand to be quicker than coming up with a prompt to get it to write the code that I then need to review for correctness.
The article then mentions scaffolding. Things like "bookkeeping" when it comes to creating and setting up a new repo (whatever he means by that). This is why I have, historically, been a big fan of frameworks and generators. Point being, this is already a solved problem and I haven't found a way to further improve the state of this world with LLMs. LLMs might be an alternate tool that work just as well. But they haven't made my existing daily workflow any faster. Setting up new repos is also something that is done so rarely that even if an LLM netted a 100% increase in efficiency, it wouldn't really impact much.
I am an AI "skeptic" but I'm not a naysayer. I do use LLMs regularly. I just don't use them for developing code because I have yet to find a problem that they solve for me. Don't get me wrong, there are problems that they can solve... I just haven't come across any solutions to previously-unsolved problems. Meaning I can swap an existing solution for an LLM-based one... and it is a valid solution... but I don't observe any increase in productivity from doing so. The existing solution was already working fine.
I am genuinely looking forward to the day when this changes. When I identify a single existing problem without an existing solution that LLMs solve for me when developing software. I just have yet to come across one.