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I feel like I am taking crazy pills that other devs don't feel this way. How bad are the coders that they think these AI's are giving them super powers. The PR'

I feel like I am taking crazy pills that other devs don't feel this way. How bad are the coders that they think these AI's are giving them super powers. The PR's with AI code are so obvious and when you ask the devs why, they don't even know. They just say, well the AI picked this, as if that means something in and of itself.

trevor-e 2y ago
Because there are plenty of devs who take the output, actually read if it makes sense, do a code review, iterate back and forth with it a few times, and then finally check in the result. It's just a tool. Shitty devs will make shitty code regardless of the tool. And good devs are insanely productive with good tools. In your example what's the difference with that dev just copy/pasting from StackOverflow?
- eru 2y ago
  Agreed! To go off on a tangent: yes, good developers can produce good code faster. And bad developers can produce bad code faster (and perhaps slightly better than before, because the models are mostly a bit smarter than copy-and-paste is). Everyone potentially benefits, but it won't suddenly turn all bad programmers into great programmers.
- DustinBrett 2y ago
  Because on SO someone real wrote it with a real reason and logic. With AI we still need to double check that what we are giving ever made any sense. And SO also has votes to show the validty. I agree if devs iterated over the results it could be good, but that has not been what I have been seeing. It is not a traditional tool because tools we had in the past had expected results.
doix 2y ago
AI gives super powers because it saves you an insane amount of typing. I used to be a vim fanatic, I was very efficient but whenever I changed language there was a period where I had to spend getting efficient. Setup some new snippets for boilerplate, maybe tweak some LSP settings, save some new macros. Now in cursor I just write "extract this block of code into its own function and set up the unit tests" and it does it, with no configuration from my part. Before I'd have a snippet for the unit test boilerplate for that specific project, I'd have to figure out the mocks mysel, etc. Yes, if you use AI to just generate new code blindly and check it in without no understanding, you end up with garbage. But those people were most likely copy pasting from SO before AI, AI just made them faster.
- WalterBright 2y ago
  > AI gives super powers because it saves you an insane amount of typing. I must be very different, as very little of my coding time is spent typing.
  - girvo 2y ago
    That's certainly the case for myself, too, though I've got roughly two fewer decades in this than yourself! But typing throughput has never been my major bottleneck. Refactoring is basically never just straight code transforms, and most of my time is spent thinking, exploring or teaching these days
  - sampullman 2y ago
    It's the same for me if I'm working on something unique or interesting, or a new technology. Some kinds of coding require very little thinking, though. Converting a design to frontend interface or implementing a CRUD backend are mostly typing.
  - doix 2y ago
    For me, getting what's in my head out onto the screen as fast as possible increases my productivity immensely. Maybe it's because I'm used to working with constant interruptions, but until what I want is on the screen, I can't start thinking about the next thing. E.g. if I'm making a new class, I'm not thinking about the implementation of the inner functions until I've got the skeleton of the class in place. The faster I get each stage done, the faster I work. It's why I devoted a lot of time getting efficient at vim, setting up snippets for my languages, etc. AI is the next stage of that in my mind. Maybe you can keep thinking about next steps while stuff is "solved" in your head but not on the screen. It also depends on the type of work you're doing. I've spent many hours to delete a few lines and change one, obviously AI doesn't help there.
  - v20 2y ago
    I think that spending a lot of time typing is likely an architectural problem. But I do see how AI tools can be used for "oneshot" code where pondering maintainability and structure is wasted time.
eru 2y ago
Depending on what language you use and what domain your problem is in, current AIs can vary widely in how useful they are. I was amazed at how great ChatGPT and DeepSeek and Claude etc are at quickly throwing together some small visualisations in Python or JavaScript. But they struggled a lot with Bird-style literate Haskell. (And just that specific style. Plain Haskell code was much less of a problem.)
fenomas 2y ago
Devs who don't feel that way aren't talking about the stuff you're talking about. Look at it this way - a powerful debugger gives you superpowers. That doesn't mean it turns bad devs into good devs, or that devs with a powerful debugger never write bad code! If somebody says a powerful debugger gives them superpowers they're not claiming those things; they're claiming that it makes good devs even better.
- feoren 2y ago
  The best debugger in the world would make me about 5% more efficient. That's about the percentage of my development time I spend going "WTF? Why is that happening?" That's the best possible improvement from the best possible debugger: about 5%. The reason is that I almost always have a complete understanding of everything that is happening in all code that I write. Not because I have a mega-brain; only because "understanding everything that is happening all the time" becomes rather easy if all of your code is as simple as you can possibly make it, using clear interfaces, heavily leveraging the type system, keeping things immutable, dependency inversion, and aggressively attacking any unclear parts until you're satisfied with them. So debuggers are generally not involved. It's probably a couple times per week that I enter debug mode at all. It sounds a little like saying "imagine the driving superpowers you could have if your car could perfectly avoid obstacles for you!" Okay, sure, that'd be life-saving sometimes, but the vast majority of the time, I'm not just randomly dodging obstacles. Planning ahead and paying attention kinda makes that moot.
  - fenomas 2y ago
    Please read things in context - my comment was about what people mean when they talk about a thing giving developers superpowers. I was not making a claim about how much you, personally, benefit from debuggers. Also: I don't use debuggers much either. Is Superman's heat vision not a superpower because he rarely needs to melt things? :P
  - adrianN 2y ago
    It’s different if you work on a large legacy codebase where you have maybe a rough understanding of the high level architecture but nobody at the company has seen the code you’re working on in the last five years. There a debugger is often very helpful.
worthless-trash 2y ago
I understand exactly what you mean, feel like there are buckets of people who are just trying to gas light every reader.
steelframe 2y ago
> They just say, well the AI picked this, as if that means something in and of itself. In any other professional field that would be grounds for termination for incompetence. It's so weird that we seem to shrug off that kind of behavior so readily in tech.
- bluefirebrand 2y ago
  I think what you're saying is a bit idealistic. We like to think that people get terminated for incompetence but the reality is more complicated than that I suspect people get away with saying "I don't know why that didn't work, I did what the computer told me to do" a lot more frequently than they get fired for it. "I did what the AI said" will be the natural extension of this
- anonzzzies 2y ago
  Nah, already had multiple cases of that; one with a lawyer at a big corp and some others; the story is not straight up 'ai said so' but more like: 'we use different online and offline tools to aid us in our work, sometimes the results are less than satisfactory, and we try to correct those cases'. It is the same response, just showing vulnerability; we are only human, even with our tools.
randomNumber7 2y ago
You are. Only noobs do this, experts using a llm are way more efficient. (Unless you work like with the same language and libraries for years)
- bilekas 2y ago
  > (Unless you work like with the same language and libraries for years) I'm not sure what you mean here? Are you saying that if you work with the same language for years that you're some how not proficient with using LLMs?
  - rvba 2y ago
    Sounds like someone who switches jobs and technologies every year, so someone else has to clean up the mess
  - randomNumber7 2y ago
    The advantage of LLMs is smaller if you know everything by heart.
linsomniac 2y ago
>I feel like I am taking crazy pills that other devs don't feel this way. Don't take this the wrong way, but maybe you are. For example, this weekend I was working on something where I needed to decode a Rails v3 session cookie in Python. I know, roughly, nothing about Rails. In less than 5 minutes ChatGPT gave me some code that took me around 10 minutes to get working. Without ChatGPT I could have easily spent a couple hours putzing around with tracking down old Rails documentation, possibly involving reading old Rails code and grepping around to find where sessions were generated, hunting for helper libraries, some deadends while I tried to intuit a solution ("Ok, this looks like it's base64 encoded, but base64 decoding kind of works but produces an error. It looks like there's some garbage at the end. Oh, that's a signature, I wonder how it's signed...") Instead, I asked for an overview of Rails session cookies, a fairly simple question about decoding a Rails session cookie, guided it to Rails v3 when I realized it was producing the wrong code (it was encrypting the cookie, but my cookies were not encrypted). It gave me 75 lines of code that took me ~15 minutes to get working. This is a "spare time" project that I've wanted to do for over 5 years. Quite simply, if I had to spend hours fiddling around with it, I probably wouldn't have done it; it's not at the top of my todo list (hence, spare time project). I don't understand how people don't see that AI can give them "superpowers" by leveraging a developers least productive time into providing their highest value.
- jenscow 2y ago
  > took me ~15 minutes to get working You didn't blindly use it, you still used your expertise. You gave it a high quality prompt and you understood the reply enough to adjust it. In other words, you used it correctly. It complimented your expertise, rather than replace it.
  - linsomniac 2y ago
    I think you're making my point for me. Isn't it "taking crazy pills" if you use it incorrectly, and then stand on that experience as proof that other devs are insane? :-)
- ookdatnog 2y ago
  I agree with your assessment in the situation you describe: greenfielding a project with tools you are unfamiliar with. For me LLMs have worked best when my progress is hindered primarily by a lack of knowledge or familiarity. If I'm working on a project where I'm comfortable with my tools and APIs, they can still be useful from time to time but I wouldn't call it a "superpower", more like a regular productivity tool (less impactful than an IDE, I would say). Of course this comment could be outdated in a few months, but that's what it feels like to me in the here and now.
throwawayffffas 2y ago
In my experience the lack of correctness and accuracy (I have seen a lot of calls to hallucinated apis), is made up from the "eagerness" to fill out boilerplate. It's indeed like having a super junior, drunk intern working for you if we are using the gps analogy. Some work is done but you have to go over it and fix a bunch of things.
ransom1538 2y ago
I am x10 faster with gpt. No regex, no stackoverflow, no sql, no broiler plate, no text manipulations.
- grayhatter 2y ago
  > well the AI picked this hey look, we found him!

trevor-e 2y ago

Because there are plenty of devs who take the output, actually read if it makes sense, do a code review, iterate back and forth with it a few times, and then finally check in the result. It's just a tool. Shitty devs will make shitty code regardless of the tool. And good devs are insanely productive with good tools. In your example what's the difference with that dev just copy/pasting from StackOverflow?

eru 2y ago
Agreed! To go off on a tangent: yes, good developers can produce good code faster. And bad developers can produce bad code faster (and perhaps slightly better than before, because the models are mostly a bit smarter than copy-and-paste is). Everyone potentially benefits, but it won't suddenly turn all bad programmers into great programmers.
DustinBrett 2y ago
Because on SO someone real wrote it with a real reason and logic. With AI we still need to double check that what we are giving ever made any sense. And SO also has votes to show the validty. I agree if devs iterated over the results it could be good, but that has not been what I have been seeing. It is not a traditional tool because tools we had in the past had expected results.

doix 2y ago

AI gives super powers because it saves you an insane amount of typing. I used to be a vim fanatic, I was very efficient but whenever I changed language there was a period where I had to spend getting efficient. Setup some new snippets for boilerplate, maybe tweak some LSP settings, save some new macros. Now in cursor I just write "extract this block of code into its own function and set up the unit tests" and it does it, with no configuration from my part. Before I'd have a snippet for the unit test boilerplate for that specific project, I'd have to figure out the mocks mysel, etc. Yes, if you use AI to just generate new code blindly and check it in without no understanding, you end up with garbage. But those people were most likely copy pasting from SO before AI, AI just made them faster.

WalterBright 2y ago
> AI gives super powers because it saves you an insane amount of typing. I must be very different, as very little of my coding time is spent typing.
- girvo 2y ago
  That's certainly the case for myself, too, though I've got roughly two fewer decades in this than yourself! But typing throughput has never been my major bottleneck. Refactoring is basically never just straight code transforms, and most of my time is spent thinking, exploring or teaching these days
- sampullman 2y ago
  It's the same for me if I'm working on something unique or interesting, or a new technology. Some kinds of coding require very little thinking, though. Converting a design to frontend interface or implementing a CRUD backend are mostly typing.
- doix 2y ago
  For me, getting what's in my head out onto the screen as fast as possible increases my productivity immensely. Maybe it's because I'm used to working with constant interruptions, but until what I want is on the screen, I can't start thinking about the next thing. E.g. if I'm making a new class, I'm not thinking about the implementation of the inner functions until I've got the skeleton of the class in place. The faster I get each stage done, the faster I work. It's why I devoted a lot of time getting efficient at vim, setting up snippets for my languages, etc. AI is the next stage of that in my mind. Maybe you can keep thinking about next steps while stuff is "solved" in your head but not on the screen. It also depends on the type of work you're doing. I've spent many hours to delete a few lines and change one, obviously AI doesn't help there.
- v20 2y ago
  I think that spending a lot of time typing is likely an architectural problem. But I do see how AI tools can be used for "oneshot" code where pondering maintainability and structure is wasted time.

eru 2y ago

Depending on what language you use and what domain your problem is in, current AIs can vary widely in how useful they are. I was amazed at how great ChatGPT and DeepSeek and Claude etc are at quickly throwing together some small visualisations in Python or JavaScript. But they struggled a lot with Bird-style literate Haskell. (And just that specific style. Plain Haskell code was much less of a problem.)

fenomas 2y ago

Devs who don't feel that way aren't talking about the stuff you're talking about. Look at it this way - a powerful debugger gives you superpowers. That doesn't mean it turns bad devs into good devs, or that devs with a powerful debugger never write bad code! If somebody says a powerful debugger gives them superpowers they're not claiming those things; they're claiming that it makes good devs even better.

feoren 2y ago
The best debugger in the world would make me about 5% more efficient. That's about the percentage of my development time I spend going "WTF? Why is that happening?" That's the best possible improvement from the best possible debugger: about 5%. The reason is that I almost always have a complete understanding of everything that is happening in all code that I write. Not because I have a mega-brain; only because "understanding everything that is happening all the time" becomes rather easy if all of your code is as simple as you can possibly make it, using clear interfaces, heavily leveraging the type system, keeping things immutable, dependency inversion, and aggressively attacking any unclear parts until you're satisfied with them. So debuggers are generally not involved. It's probably a couple times per week that I enter debug mode at all. It sounds a little like saying "imagine the driving superpowers you could have if your car could perfectly avoid obstacles for you!" Okay, sure, that'd be life-saving sometimes, but the vast majority of the time, I'm not just randomly dodging obstacles. Planning ahead and paying attention kinda makes that moot.
- fenomas 2y ago
  Please read things in context - my comment was about what people mean when they talk about a thing giving developers superpowers. I was not making a claim about how much you, personally, benefit from debuggers. Also: I don't use debuggers much either. Is Superman's heat vision not a superpower because he rarely needs to melt things? :P
- adrianN 2y ago
  It’s different if you work on a large legacy codebase where you have maybe a rough understanding of the high level architecture but nobody at the company has seen the code you’re working on in the last five years. There a debugger is often very helpful.

worthless-trash 2y ago

I understand exactly what you mean, feel like there are buckets of people who are just trying to gas light every reader.

steelframe 2y ago

> They just say, well the AI picked this, as if that means something in and of itself. In any other professional field that would be grounds for termination for incompetence. It's so weird that we seem to shrug off that kind of behavior so readily in tech.

bluefirebrand 2y ago
I think what you're saying is a bit idealistic. We like to think that people get terminated for incompetence but the reality is more complicated than that I suspect people get away with saying "I don't know why that didn't work, I did what the computer told me to do" a lot more frequently than they get fired for it. "I did what the AI said" will be the natural extension of this
anonzzzies 2y ago
Nah, already had multiple cases of that; one with a lawyer at a big corp and some others; the story is not straight up 'ai said so' but more like: 'we use different online and offline tools to aid us in our work, sometimes the results are less than satisfactory, and we try to correct those cases'. It is the same response, just showing vulnerability; we are only human, even with our tools.

randomNumber7 2y ago

You are. Only noobs do this, experts using a llm are way more efficient. (Unless you work like with the same language and libraries for years)

bilekas 2y ago
> (Unless you work like with the same language and libraries for years) I'm not sure what you mean here? Are you saying that if you work with the same language for years that you're some how not proficient with using LLMs?
- rvba 2y ago
  Sounds like someone who switches jobs and technologies every year, so someone else has to clean up the mess
- randomNumber7 2y ago
  The advantage of LLMs is smaller if you know everything by heart.

linsomniac 2y ago

>I feel like I am taking crazy pills that other devs don't feel this way. Don't take this the wrong way, but maybe you are. For example, this weekend I was working on something where I needed to decode a Rails v3 session cookie in Python. I know, roughly, nothing about Rails. In less than 5 minutes ChatGPT gave me some code that took me around 10 minutes to get working. Without ChatGPT I could have easily spent a couple hours putzing around with tracking down old Rails documentation, possibly involving reading old Rails code and grepping around to find where sessions were generated, hunting for helper libraries, some deadends while I tried to intuit a solution ("Ok, this looks like it's base64 encoded, but base64 decoding kind of works but produces an error. It looks like there's some garbage at the end. Oh, that's a signature, I wonder how it's signed...") Instead, I asked for an overview of Rails session cookies, a fairly simple question about decoding a Rails session cookie, guided it to Rails v3 when I realized it was producing the wrong code (it was encrypting the cookie, but my cookies were not encrypted). It gave me 75 lines of code that took me ~15 minutes to get working. This is a "spare time" project that I've wanted to do for over 5 years. Quite simply, if I had to spend hours fiddling around with it, I probably wouldn't have done it; it's not at the top of my todo list (hence, spare time project). I don't understand how people don't see that AI can give them "superpowers" by leveraging a developers least productive time into providing their highest value.

jenscow 2y ago
> took me ~15 minutes to get working You didn't blindly use it, you still used your expertise. You gave it a high quality prompt and you understood the reply enough to adjust it. In other words, you used it correctly. It complimented your expertise, rather than replace it.
- linsomniac 2y ago
  I think you're making my point for me. Isn't it "taking crazy pills" if you use it incorrectly, and then stand on that experience as proof that other devs are insane? :-)
ookdatnog 2y ago
I agree with your assessment in the situation you describe: greenfielding a project with tools you are unfamiliar with. For me LLMs have worked best when my progress is hindered primarily by a lack of knowledge or familiarity. If I'm working on a project where I'm comfortable with my tools and APIs, they can still be useful from time to time but I wouldn't call it a "superpower", more like a regular productivity tool (less impactful than an IDE, I would say). Of course this comment could be outdated in a few months, but that's what it feels like to me in the here and now.

throwawayffffas 2y ago

In my experience the lack of correctness and accuracy (I have seen a lot of calls to hallucinated apis), is made up from the "eagerness" to fill out boilerplate. It's indeed like having a super junior, drunk intern working for you if we are using the gps analogy. Some work is done but you have to go over it and fix a bunch of things.

ransom1538 2y ago

I am x10 faster with gpt. No regex, no stackoverflow, no sql, no broiler plate, no text manipulations.

grayhatter 2y ago
> well the AI picked this hey look, we found him!