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| ▲ | timacles a day ago | parent | next [-] | | I dont know how you can work in this discipline, use AI, and also ask that question. almost every developer i know is fully aware, we are degrading every aspect of our skills. The code writing, code reviewing, code understanding. The more "time" passes and the more the code base grows, the more disconnected we become. | | |
| ▲ | akerl_ a day ago | parent | next [-] | | I guess I'm an outlier then. AI has radically improved my ability to parse and understand new codebases, to validate my hypotheses, and to work in complex systems. I wish I knew what I was doing differently than almost every developer. | | |
| ▲ | munksbeer 5 hours ago | parent [-] | | You're not an outlier. The anti-AI stance is likely to be vocal online. They're quite incentivised to talk about it. Most programmers have adopted AI assisted programming (my own assertion) and most will feel like you and I, that it is useful. I know of a few programmers personally who hate it, but even they use it. There is no going back. It is pretty obvious that when you come into a large incomprehensible codebase (which most are), AI will be able to reason about it more quickly and guide you through it. I switched away from my work for a few minutes, but at the very moment I'm using AI to summarise some spaghetti code in a particular area in our codebase, so I can refactor it. And that is my style of working at the moment. AI coding is useful, sometimes amazing, but sometimes irritating, and from experience I think just telling it to refactor this area would result in something I'm not happy with. So instead I'm getting a handle on it, I'll form the design I want, then tell it to do it. I have a feeling a lot of complaints are from people who won't bother to do that. |
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| ▲ | jeremyjh a day ago | parent | prev [-] | | Our horse riding skills have degraded even more. | | |
| ▲ | akerl_ a day ago | parent [-] | | Jokes aside, I think this gets at the core of it. If you really loved horseback riding, or you really loved breeding and training horses, or you were really good at it, I'm sure that cars fucked up your day, and that it sucked to see cars replace horses. I'm sure there were plenty of people who said that cars were horrible and that we should stick with horses. I'm equally sure there have been C programmers looking derisively at Python programmers, Python programmers looking derisively at Node programmers, etc etc. But there's a pretty big gap between the feeling of unhappiness that something you liked is no longer as in-demand / profitable / common / whatever, and saying that cars aren't useful and we're all worse off for letting our horse-riding skills degrade. | | |
| ▲ | timacles 6 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | This does not get to the core of it, LLMs are not equivalent to cars. All of your analogies (in other posts) discount that:
- LLMs are not deterministic
- they do not produce high quality/expert level output.
- They are not easy to control consistently. Once again, and i mean this in the nicest way possible. You do not sound like you understand how things operate at an expert level of engineering. I do not know of any senior engineer who thinks LLMs can consistently produce quality output. You are way too invested in your argument and refusing to see other perspectives | | |
| ▲ | akerl_ 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | It seems really convenient for you to speculate about my level of expertise so that then you can make claims that no senior engineers think something. |
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| ▲ | vermilingua 19 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Lots more people die in car crashes than horse accidents. Good analogy! | | |
| ▲ | akerl_ 19 hours ago | parent [-] | | Do they? Horses aren't particularly safe, there's just way fewer of them and they don't travel as many miles. | | |
| ▲ | queenkjuul 4 hours ago | parent [-] | | Normal people didn't ride horses everywhere. They weren't used like cars. I'm so sick of this analogy. People walked places. If it was too far to walk you used a horse drawn bus/tram. If you had to much to carry you used a horse drawn truck. Every single person wasn't riding an individual horse ten minutes each way to buy groceries every day like that do now with cars. Cars unquestionably kill drastically more people than horses ever did or even could. Tens of thousands a year in this country alone! The leading cause of death for children and young adults! | | |
| ▲ | akerl_ 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | We're pretty off track given that ya'll are nitpicking the metaphor rather than the actual topic, but claiming that horses were never common doesn't really have any connection to the claim that per-mile-moved / per-human-carried, horses are also dangerous. | | |
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| ▲ | preg_match a day ago | parent | prev [-] | | Because AI removes you from analytical thinking, and the brain is a muscle. The less you think, the less you are able to think. Programming is inherently analytical and logic-driven. It’s a great brain exercise, even if the code has no value. When you use AI, you lose that exercise. What replaces it isn’t the same. I mean, consider. I can solve a crossword, or I can ask AI to solve the crossword. AI will do it perfectly, and faster too. But which one is better for my brain? What was my goal with solving the crossword, anyway? On the surface it was to find a solution to the crossword. But, maybe, deeper down, the goal was to improve myself in some way. People conflate the improvement of products with the improvement of self. Maybe it’s a result of our consumerist mindset. But the truth is the product can improve greatly, and you can be making it, while you yourself degrade. We write better and better code, at a faster rate, but are we better programmers than before? Maybe, maybe not. I’m leaning maybe not. It’s not new or unique. The assembly line is the same. Sure, I can build better furniture faster at the factory than by hand. But what is the goal here? Is it to make the best furniture, or to become the best carpenter? If it’s to make the best furniture, the best product, then I’ve won. If it’s to become the best carpenter, then I’ve lost heavily. | | |
| ▲ | akerl_ a day ago | parent | next [-] | | The best carpenter obviously doesn't use any power tools. Are they allowed to use hand tools, or do they need to split the wood with their bare hands? It's not clear to me why programming is inherently analytical and logic-driven but prompting and iterating with an AI is not. What about Applescript, where it's programming but in something closer to natural language? The core of this seems to be that there are people who assume that users of AI turn their brains off the moment they open a Claude prompt. There are surely some people who are doing that, but there were also plenty of people who were shipping sloppy code before. There are far more people for whom this another tool in their toolbox. | |
| ▲ | zahlman a day ago | parent | prev [-] | | > But, maybe, deeper down, the goal was to improve myself in some way. Or, you know, to pass some time in an enjoyable way. To have fun. |
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