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Don't fall into the anti-AI hype

antirez.com

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Re: Don't fall into the anti-AI hype

#971

Post by momojo »

This doesn't match my own experience. I dream of the day the stuff I don't find interesting can get automated but again and again I find myself having to do things by hand.

I wonder if this is similar to Chess and Go getting 'solved'. Hard problem spaces that only the biggest brains could tackle. Maybe it turns out creating highly performant, distributed systems with a plethora of unittests is a cakewalk for LLMs, while trying to make a 'simple web app' for a niche microscopy application is like trying to drive around San Francisco.

Re: Don't fall into the anti-AI hype

#972

Post by jauntywundrkind »

zeroonetwothree wrote: post #311
embedding-shape wrote: post #95

> But what was the fire inside you, when you coded till night to see your project working? It was building. I feel like this is not the same for everyone. For some people, the "fire" is literally about "I control a computer", for others "I'm solving a problem for others", and yet for others "I made something that made others smile/cry/feel emotions" and so on. I think there is a section of programmer who actually do…

You’re right of course. For me there’s no flow state possible with LLM “coding”. That makes it feel miserable instead of joyous. Sitting around waiting while it spits out tokens that I then have to carefully look over and tweak feels like very hard work. Compared to entering flow and churning out those tokens myself, which feels effortless once I get going. Probably other people feel differently.

You could try Cerebras. It's still vastly vastly vastly cheaper than what many people and all companies pay for Opus. And it's absurdly ridiculously stupendously fast. And GLM-4.7 is quite capable! https://www.cerebras.ai/blog/glm-4-7 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46544047

You can definitely keep tweaking. It's also helpful just to ask it about what your possible concerns are and it will tell you and explain what it did.

I spent a good chunk of 2025 long time being super super careful & specific, using mostly very very cheap DeepSeek and just leading it by the leash at every moment and studying the output. It still felt like a huge win. But with more recent models, I have trust that they are doing ok, and I'm better at asking some questions once the code is written to hone my understanding. And mostly I just trust it now! I don't have to look carefully and tweak to exacting standards, because I've seen it do a ton of good work & am careful in what I ask.

There's other tactics that help. Rather than stare carefully at the code, making sure you and the AI are both running the program frequently, have a rig to test what's under development (ideally I'm an integration test type of way, which it can help set-up!). And then having what good programmers have long had, good observability tools at their back. Be that great logging or ideally sweet tracing. We have such better tools to see the high level behavior of systems now. AI with some prompts to go there can be extremely good about helping enhance that view.

It is going to feel different. But there's a lot you can do to get much better loops.

Re: Don't fall into the anti-AI hype

#973

Post by cirelli94 »

deltarholamda wrote: post #901
antirez wrote: post #759

Thanks for reading / commenting this post. Initially it seemed like I received a bunch of very negative comments, now I read most of the thread, and there are very good points, articulated with sensibility. Thank you. I wanted to provide some more context that is not part of the blog post. Since somebody may believe I don't enjoy / love the act of writing code. 1. I care a lot about programming, I love creating somet…

I think there is a danger in the enthusiasm for AI inside of these excellent points, namely that the skills that make a good programmer are not inherent, they are learned. The comparison would be a guy who is an excellent journeyman electrician. This guy has visual-spatial skills that makes bending and installing conduit a kind of art. He has a deep and intuitive understanding of how circuits are balanced in a panel,…

Maybe solving more trivial problems with AI will left novice programmer to do more depth problems and will make them better faster, because they will spend time solving problems that matter.

Re: Don't fall into the anti-AI hype

#974

Post by p0w3n3d »

MonkeyClub wrote: post #822
krautburglar wrote: post #707

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"democratizing" as in " I steal everybody's shit, make most content creators go bankrupt, then put it all in an LLM behind a paywall. " Privatization of all human knowledge--past, present, & future. They own both parties, so it's not like anyone is going to vote their way out of this one--unless one considers guillotines a form of voting.

Yeah I'm also with GP saying >> I don't see it as democratic or democratising. TBH the knowledge is stored in three giga companies It can appear democratic while access is allowed, but if it can be revoked at any moment for any reason (it is private companies, after all, that own the AI playgrounds), then the illusion will shatter. What is more, excessive reliance on AI creates skill deficit rather than skill surplus…

I already notice that my brains tends to resist thinking on hard things, defaulting to gpt-ing or perplex-ing things. Similar feeling I had when I bought a car with parking sensors - I almost immediately lost skills of parking my older car which doesn't have those. I had to re-learn it.

Re: Don't fall into the anti-AI hype

#975

Post by endymion-light »

antirez wrote: post #759

Thanks for reading / commenting this post. Initially it seemed like I received a bunch of very negative comments, now I read most of the thread, and there are very good points, articulated with sensibility. Thank you. I wanted to provide some more context that is not part of the blog post. Since somebody may believe I don't enjoy / love the act of writing code. 1. I care a lot about programming, I love creating somet…

Really enjoyed your article, and it reflects a lot of the pain-points I experience with models. I tend to still write and review LLM code after creation, but there is definitely a shift within how much code I create "artisinally" and how much is reviewd in terms of scale.

If I need to implement a brand new feature for the project, I will find myself needing to force a view into a LLM because it will help me achieve 80% of the feature in 1% of the time, even if the end result requires a scale of refactoring, it's rarely the time that the original feature would've taken me.

But, I think that's also because I have solid refactoring foundations, I know what makes good code, and I think if I had access to these tools 5 years ago, I would not be able to achieve that same result, as LLMs typically steer towards junior level coding as a consequence of their architecture.

Re: Don't fall into the anti-AI hype

#977

Post by deltarholamda »

cirelli94 wrote: post #973
deltarholamda wrote: post #901

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think there is a danger in the enthusiasm for AI inside of these excellent points, namely that the skills that make a good programmer are not inherent, they are learned. The comparison would be a guy who is an excellent journeyman electrician. This guy has visual-spatial skills that makes bending and installing conduit a kind of art. He has a deep and intuitive understanding of how circuits are balanced in a panel,…

Maybe solving more trivial problems with AI will left novice programmer to do more depth problems and will make them better faster, because they will spend time solving problems that matter.

That is possible, for sure. But think of it like a person learning the piano. You could practice your arpeggios on a Steinway, or you can buy a Casio with an arpeggiator button.

At a certain point, the professional piano player can make much better use of the arpeggiator button. But the novice piano player benefits greatly from all the slogging arpeggio practice. It's certainly possible that skipping all that grunt work will improve and/or advance music, but it's hardly a sure thing. That's the experiment we're running right now with AI programming. I suppose we'll see soon enough, and I hope I'm utterly wrong about the concerns I have.

Re: Don't fall into the anti-AI hype

#978

Post by camdenreslink »

cm2187 wrote: post #808
totallykvothe wrote: post #569

I don't understand the stance that AI currently is able to automate away non-trivial coding tasks. I've tried this consistently since GPT 3.5 came out, with every single SOTA model up to GPT 5.1 Codex Max and Opus 4.5. Every single time, I get something that works, yes, but then when I start self-reviewing the code, preparing to submit it to coworkers, I end up rewriting about 70% of the thing. So many important deta…

Not trying to back the AI hype, but most pre-AI auto generated code is garbage (like winform auto generated code or entity framework SQL in the .net world). But that’s fine, it’s not meant to be read by humans. If you want to change it you can regenerate it. It may be that AI just moves the line between what developers should care and look at vs the boring boiler plate code that has little value added.

But those code generators were deterministic (and indeed caused huge headaches if the generated code changed between versions). Seems like a totally different thing.

Re: Don't fall into the anti-AI hype

#979

Post by dizlexic »

roncesvalles wrote: post #116
adityaathalye wrote: post #27

Don't fall into the "Look ma, no hands" hype. Antirez + LLM + CFO = Billion Dollar Redis company, quite plausibly. /However/ ... As for the delta provided by an LLM to Antirez, outside of Redis (and outside of any problem space he is already intimately familiar with), an Apples to Apples comparison would be he trying this on an equally complex codebase he has no idea about. I'll bet... what Antirez can do with Redis…

Exactly. AI is minimally useful for coding something that you couldn't have been able to code yourself, given enough time, without explicitly investing time in generic learning not specific to that codebase or particular task. Although calling AI "just autocomplete" is almost a slur now, it really is just that in the sense that you need to A) have a decent mental picture of what you want, and, B) recognize a correct…

While you're correct. I truly believe the velocity offered outweighs this consideration for 90% of the application teams and startups. I've personally never worked in a clean codebase, and I've been convinced long ago that they're mythical. I don't see an issue with an LLM spitting out bad / barely maintainable code because that's basically every codebase I've ever seen in production.

Re: Don't fall into the anti-AI hype

#980

Post by dizlexic »

I really want to know other's opinion on this, but the critique that Ai pushes spaghetti / barely maintainable code doesn't carry a lot of weight because that's all I've ever seen in production anywhere.

If I can spin up in a week what used to take me 6 months and it kind of works. That's absolutely insane. I really wish we could all step back and acknowledge that. Instead, I only hear people talking about how bad the code is.

Honest question, so what? If I can monetize a bad product in a miniscule fraction of the time it used to take. Then optimize it while funded, what's the issue? I get this may upset purists but for product companies it's always been about the MVP.

Make it work

Make it pretty

Make it work well

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