Recently, even a tourist lost to OAI's model in competitive coding. To be honest, I haven't been able to beat AI at coding since around 5.2. People often say 'AI can't write good code,' but in reality, the quality of AI's output is layered depending on the level of the prompt input. The deeper the prompt, the better the code actually gets.

Usually, when people say AI code is terrible, it's because they either don't understand the theory well but have grown through hands-on experience and can't explain things properly to the AI, or they don't know what they don't know. Or there are the very few who are just far better coders than AI. Some people will say they're among the rare few who can write better code than AI, and for some that may be true. But in my experience, the vast majority are not. Even from my perspective as a beginner, I could see flaws when I looked at their git code. It's a metacognition problem.

Realistically speaking, at the script level, it's quite common to see AI surpass human programmers as you increase the input level. You might disagree, but that's probably because you're a specialist in that field, deeply immersed in a very narrow area—it only holds true in that limited scope. In the general domain, most people would agree that AI writes code well.

Human programmers don't know much outside their own domain. But AI, while it loses in very narrow specialist areas, writes better code than humans across the broader range. It loses in the 1% zone (the expert's domain), but wins in the other 99%. Usually, when that's the case, you have two choices: become the 1%, or learn how to use AI.

Since I'm a non-native English speaker, I'm already at a disadvantage compared to native speakers in programming skills, so I chose the latter. But I still code. Not for any other reason—if I don't maintain at least some typing muscle, I won't be able to review AI code properly.

That's why I think coding is essential. Even if I can't understand the entirety of AI's output, I still need to understand the core business logic. At the very least, the core logic requires human understanding, so coding is necessary.

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rossant 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I don't write code anymore, because AI writes better code than me. I could write code, but the next AI would find 10 ways to make it better and more consistent with the rest of the AI-generated codebase. So I just let it write all of it. However, I inspect it all carefully and I constantly asks it to reflect on the code quality, to refactor, to reorganize, to make the code as good as possible. The end result is code that is much better than anything I could have written myself.

And I should mention that I have 30+ years of programming experience.

	▲	nevertoolate 3 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Can you explain what you are working on? I’ve stopped using llms to generate architecture, which i design and write myself and let the machine pattern match the gaps. I also use it to review issues which I lot of the times push back against. I’m working on a stateful application sitting on top of a data warehouse and have to implement a stream of messy half defined feature requests and navigate on top of an ever changing infrastructure layer. LLMs rarely get the infra layer even if it is written as code and have hard time grasping how to deal with tech debt, when and how to re-architecture parts of the stack or even implement stuff based on a detailed openspec design.
	▲	jdw64 4 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		To be honest, as you know, background knowledge is extremely important in programming. As you move into complex domains, the specifications multiply. So as a domain gets more complex, there comes a point where it exceeds my cognitive capacity. And that's when AI surpasses me and writes code I can't keep up with. Usually, it produces code that would take three or four humans days to figure out—in just 20 minutes. Even the professors and PhDs who hire me all use AI. Honestly, they hold PhDs and professorships, which puts them in a league I can't even touch—and even they use it. AI just does it really well. Honestly, I learned from your book, 'rossant'—I never expected a programmer like you to say something like that. I thought my perspective was because I'm only an intermediate-level programmer. But you're in the 1% expert category I mentioned

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nmehner 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

"The deeper the prompt, the better the code actually gets."

.... and in the and you end up with a very deep prompt that exactly specifies the behavior. This is what a programming language is.

I'd rather describe a data structure in a language designed for this task, than a prompt the might be interpreted in many different ways.

	▲	jdw64 4 hours ago \| parent [-]
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