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These articles keep popping up, analyzing an hypothetical usage of AI (and guessing it won’t be useful) as if it wasn’t something already being used in practice

These articles keep popping up, analyzing an hypothetical usage of AI (and guessing it won’t be useful) as if it wasn’t something already being used in practice. It’s kinda weird to me. “It won’t deal with abstractions” -> try asking cursor for potential refactors or patterns that could be useful for a given text. “It doesn’t understand things beyond the code” -> try giving them an abstract jira ticket or asking what it things about certain naming, with enough context “Reading code and understanding whether it’s wrong will take more time than writing it yourself” -> ask any engineer that saves time with everything from test scaffolding to run-and-forget scripts. It’s as if I wrote an article today arguing that exercise won’t make you able to lift more weight - every gymgoer would raise an eyebrow, and it’s hard to imagine even the non-gymgoers would be sheltered enough to buy the argument either.

tyleo 2y ago
Agreed. It isn’t like crypto where the proponents proclaimed some use case that would prove value always on the verge of arriving. AI is useful right now. People are using these tools now and enjoying them.
- jdiff 2y ago
  I'm not sure that's a convincing argument given that crypto heads haven't just been enthusiastically chatting about the possibilities in the abstract. They do an awful lot of that, see Web3, but they have been using crypto.
- awesome_dude 2y ago
  I don't (use AI tools), I've tried them and found that they got in the way, made things more confusing, and did not get me to a point where the thing I was trying to create was working (let alone working well/safe to send to prod) I am /hoping/ that AI will improve, to the point that I can use it like Google or Wikipedia (that is, have some trust in what's being produced) I don't actually know anyone using AI right now. I know one person on Bluesky has found it helpful for prototyping things (and I'm kind of jealous of him because he's found how to get AI to "work" for him). Oh, I've also seen people pasting AI results into serious discussions to try and prove the experts wrong, but only to discover that the AI has produced flawed responses.
  - tptacek 2y ago
    I don't actually know anyone using AI right now. I believe you, but this to me is a wild claim.
    - awesome_dude 2y ago
      Ha! I think the same way when I see people saying that AI is in widespread use - I believe that it's possible, but it feels like an outlandish claim
      - LanceJones 2y ago
        I’d say 500M WAUs on chatGPT alone qualifies as widespread use.
        awesome_dude 2y ago
        Ok, how much of that is developers using it to help them code?
  - plsbenice34 2y ago
    Essentially the same for me, I had one incident where someone was arguing in favor of it and then immediately embarrassed themselves badly because they were misled by a chatgpt error. I have the feeling that this hype will collapse as this happens more and people see how bad the consequences are when there are errors
  - wglb 2y ago
    If you are interested, try the following experiment. Presuming you are logged onto a google account, log on to Gemini 2.5 then ask it “create a go program that connects one thread to a usb device and another thread to generate a GUI”. The results might surprise you.
- plsbenice34 2y ago
  Even in 2012 bitcoin could very concretely be used to order drugs. Many people have used it to transact and preserve value in hostile economic environments. Etc etc. Ridiculous comment. Personally i have still yet to find LLMs useful at all with programming.
  - tehjoker 2y ago
    bitcoin tracks the stock market
    - plsbenice34 2y ago
      Financial assets have some degree of correlation, of course. So? Most people dont even have access to the stock market
      - tehjoker 2y ago
        The idea is supposed to be that bitcoin is decorrelated from the stock market to be a store of value.
        plsbenice34 1y ago
        That doesnt make any sense and i never hear anybody else say that.
- d0liver 2y ago
  > Observer bias is the tendency of observers to not see what is there, but instead to see what they expect or want to see. Unfortunately, people enjoying a thing and thinking that it works well doesn't actually mean much on its own. But, more than that I suspect that AI is making more people realize that they don't need to write everything themselves, but they never needed to to begin with, and they'd be better off to do the code reuse thing in a different way.
- rsynnott 2y ago
  People are using divining rods now and enjoying them: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dowsing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dowsing
crispinb 2y ago
It's the barstool economist argument style, on long-expired loan from medieval theology. Responding to clear empirical evidence that X occurs: "X can't happen because [insert 'rational' theory recapitulation]"
Kapura 2y ago
weird metaphor, because a gym goer practices what they are doing by putting in the reps in order to increase personal capacity. it's more like you're laughing at people at the gym, saying "don't you know we have forklifts already lifting much more?"
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- asadotzler 2y ago
  "If you want to be good at lifting, just buy an exoskeleton like me and all my bros have. Never mind that your muscles will atrophy and you'll often get somersaulted down a flight of stairs while the exoskeleton makers all keep trying, and failing, to contain the exoskeleton propensity for tossing people down flights of stairs."
- cgriswald 2y ago
  I see it as almost the opposite. It’s like the pulley has been invented but some people refuse to acknowledge its usefulness and make claims that you’re weaker if you use it. But you can grow quite strong working a pulley all day.
- torben-friis 2y ago
  That’s a completely different argument, however, and a good one to have. I can buy “if you use the forklift you’ll eventually lose the ability to lift weight by yourself”, but the author is going for “the forklift is actually not able to lift anything” which can trivially be proven wrong.
  - d0liver 2y ago
    More like, "We had a nice forklift, but the boss got rid of it replaced it with a pack of rabid sled dogs which work sometimes? And sometimes they can also sniff out expiration dates on the food (although the boxes were already labeled?). And, I'm pretty sure one of them, George, understands me when I talk to him because the other day I asked him if he wanted a hotdog and he barked (of course, I was holding a hotdog at the time). But, anyway, we're using the dogs, so they must work? And I used to have to drive the forklift, but the dogs just do stuff without me needing to drive that old forklift"
deleted 2y ago
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jstummbillig 2y ago
Well said. It's not that there would not be much to seriously think about and discuss – so much is changing, so quickly – but the stuff that a lot of these articles focus is a strange exercise in denial.
amelius 2y ago
If AI gives a bad experience 20% of the time, and if there are 10M programmers using it, then about 3000 of them will have a bad experience 5 times in a row. You can't really blame them for giving up and writing about it.
charlie-83 2y ago
Out if interest, what kind of codebases are you able to get AI to do these things on. Everytime I have tried it with even simpler things than these it has failed spectacularly. Every example I see of people doing this kind of thing seems to be on some kind if web development so I have a hypothesis that AI might currently be much worse for the kinds of codebases I work on.
- idontwantthis 2y ago
  That’s my experience too. It also fails terribly with ElasticSearch probably because the documentation doesn’t have a lot of examples. ChatGPT, copilot and claude were all useless for that and gave completely plausible nonsense. I’ve used it with most success for writing unit tests and definitely shell scripts.
- torben-friis 2y ago
  I currently work for a finance-related scaleup. So backend systems, with significant challenges related to domain complexity and scalability, but nothing super low level either. It does take a bit to understand how to prompt in a way that the results are useful, can you share what you tried so far?
  - charlie-83 2y ago
    I have tried on a lot of different projects. I have a codebase in Zig and it doesn't understand Zig at all. I have another which is embedded C using zephyr RTOS. It doesn't understand zephyr at all and even if it could, it can't read the documentation for the different sensors nor can it plug in cables. I have a tui project in rust using ratatui. The core of the project is dealing with binary files and the time it takes to explain to it how specific bits of data are organised in the file and then check it got everything perfectly correct (it never has) is more than the time to just write the code. I expect I could have more success on the actual TUI side of things but haven't tried too much since I am trying to learn rust with this project. I just started an android app with flutter/dart. I get the feeling it will work well for this but I am yet to verify since I need to learn enough flutter to be able to judge it My dayjob is a big C++ codebase making a GUI app with Qt. The core of it is all dealing with USB devices and Bluetooth protocols which it doesn't understand at all. We also have lots of very complicated C++ data structures, I had hoped that the AI would be able to at least explain them to me but it just makes stuff up everytime. This also means that getting it to edit any part of the codebase touching this sort if thing doesn't work. It just rips up any thread safety or allocates memory incorrectly etc. It also doesn't understand the compiler errors at all, I had a circular dependency and tried to get it to solve it but I had to give so many clues I basically told it what the problem was. I really expected it to work very well for the Qt interface since building UI is what everyone seems to be doing with it. But the amount of hand holding it requires is insane. Each prompt feels like a monkey's paw. In every experiment I've done it would have been faster to just write it myself. I need to try getting it to write an entirely new pice of UI from scratch since I've only been editing existing UI so far. Some of this is clearly a skill issue since I do feel myself getting better at prompting it and getting better results. However, I really do get the feeling that it either doesn't work or doesn't work as well on my code bases as other ones.
thenaturalist 2y ago
While I tend to agree with your premise that the linked article seems to be reasoning to the extreme off the basis of a very small code snippet, I think the core critique the author wants to make stands: AI agents alone, unbounded, currently cannot provide huge value. > try asking cursor for potential refactors or patterns that could be useful for a given text. You, the developer, will be selecting this text. > try giving them an abstract jira ticket or asking what it things about certain naming, with enough context You still selected a JIRA ticket and provided context. > ask any engineer that saves time with everything from test scaffolding to run-and-forget scripts. Yes that is true, but again, what you are providing as a counterfactual are very bounded, aka easy contexts. In any case, the industry (both the LLM providers as well as tooling builders and devs) is clearly going into the direction of constantly etching out small imoprovements by refining which context is deemed relevant for a given problem and most efficient ways to feed it to LLMs. And let's not kid ourselves, Microsoft, OpenAI, hell Anthropic all have 2027-2029 plans where these things will be significantly more powerful.
- tptacek 2y ago
  Why does it matter that you're doing the thinking? Isn't that good news? What we're not doing any more is any the rote recitation that takes up most of the day when building stuff.
  - d0liver 2y ago
    I think "AI as a dumb agent for speeding up code editing" is kind of a different angle and not the one I wrote the article to address. But, if it's editing that's taking most of your time, what part of your workflow are you spending the most time in? If you're typing at 60WPM for an hour then that's over 300 lines of code in an hour without any copy and paste which is pretty solid output if it's all correct.
    - t1amat 2y ago
      But that’s just it: 300 good lines of reasonably complex working code in an hour vs o4-mini can churn out 600 lines of perfectly compilable code in less than 2 minutes, including the time it takes me to assemble the context with a tool such as repomix (run locally) or pulling markdown docs with Jina Reader. The reality is, we humans just moved one level up the chain. We will continue to move up until there isn’t anywhere for us to go.
verelo 2y ago
It’s all good to me - let these folks stay in the simple times while you and i arbitrage our efforts against theirs? I agree, there’s massive value in using these tools and it’s hilarious to me when others don’t see it. My reaction isn’t going to be convince them they’re wrong, it’s just to find ways to use it to get ahead while leaving them behind.
Glyptodon 2y ago
I don't know. Cursor is decent at refactoring. ("Look at x and ____ so that it ____." With some level of elaboration, where the change is code or code organization centric.) And it's okay at basic generation - "write a map or hash table wrapper where the input is a TZDB zone and the output is ______" will create something reasonable and get some of the TZDB zones wrong. But it hasn't been that great for me at really extensive conceptual coding so far. Though maybe I'm bad at prompting. Might be there's something I'm missing w/ my prompts.
- idontwantthis 2y ago
  For me, the hard part of programming is figuring out what I want to do. Sometimes talking with an AI helps with that, but with bugs like “1 out of 100 times a user follows this path, a message gets lost somewhere in our pipeline”, which are the type of bugs that really require knowledge and skill, AIs are completely worthless.
skydhash 2y ago
> “It won’t deal with abstractions” -> try asking cursor for potential refactors or patterns that could be useful for a given text. That is not what abstraction is about. Abstraction is having a simpler model to reason about, not simply code rearranging. > “It doesn’t understand things beyond the code” -> try giving them an abstract jira ticket or asking what it things about certain naming, with enough context Again, that is still pretty much coding. What matters is the overall design (or at least the current module). > “Reading code and understanding whether it’s wrong will take more time than writing it yourself” -> ask any engineer that saves time with everything from test scaffolding to run-and-forget scripts. Imagine having a script and not checking the man pages for expected behavior. I hope the backup games are strong.
tptacek 2y ago
There really is a category of these posts that are coming from some alternate dimension (or maybe we're in the alternate dimension and they're in the real one?) where this isn't one of the most important things ever to happen to software development. I'm a person who didn't even use autocomplete (I use LSPs almost entirely for cross-referencing --- oh wait that's another thing I'm apparently never going to need to do again because of LLMs), a sincere tooling skeptic. I do not understand how people expect to write convincingly that tools that reliably turn slapdash prose into median-grade idiomatic working code "provide little value".
- quesera 2y ago
  > tools that reliably turn slapdash prose into median-grade idiomatic working code This may be the crux of it. Turning slapdash prose into median-grade code is not a problem I can imagine needing to solve. I think I'm better at describing code in code than I am in prose. I Want to Believe. And I certainly don't want to be "that guy", but my honest assessment of LLMs for coding so far is that they are a frustrating Junior, who maybe I should help out because mentoring might be part of my job, but from whom I should not expect any near-term technical contribution.
  - tptacek 2y ago
    It is most of the problem of delivering professional software.
    - quesera 2y ago
      Not in my experience. The only slapdash prose in the cycle is in the immediate output of a product development discussion. And that is inevitably too sparse to inform, without the full context of the team, company, and industry.
      - akerl_ 2y ago
        Sorry, are you saying "the only place where there's slapdash prose is right before it would be super cool to have an alpha version of the code magically appear, that we can iterate on based on the full context of the team, company, and industry"?
agentultra 2y ago
I don’t think the argument from such a simple example does much for the authors point. The bigger risk is skill atrophy. Proponents say, it doesn’t matter. We shouldn’t have to care about memory allocation or dependencies. The AI system will eventually have all of the information it needs. We just have to tell it what we want. However, knowing what you want requires knowledge about the subject. If you’re not a security engineer you might not know what funny machines are. If someone finds an exploit using them you’ll have no idea what to ask for. AI may be useful for some but at the end of the day, knowledge is useful.
SoftTalker 2y ago
There are people at the gym I go to benching 95 lbs and asking what does it take to get to 135, or 225? The answer is "lift more weight" not "have someone help you lift more weight" If you already know how to code, yes AI/LLMs can speed you along at certain tasks, though be careful you don't let your skills atrophy. If you can bench 225 and then you stop doing it, you soon will not be able to do that anymore.
- CharlesW 2y ago
  > If you already know how to code, yes AI/LLMs can speed you along at certain tasks, though be careful you don't let your skills atrophy. This isn't a concern. Ice-cutting skills no longer have value, and cursive writing is mostly a 20th century memory. Not only have I let my assembly language skills atrophy, but I'll happily bid farewell to all of my useless CS-related skills. In 10 years, if "app developer" still involves manual coding by then, we'll talk about coding without an AI partner like we talk about coding with punch cards.
  - SoftTalker 2y ago
    Maybe. I've seen a lot of "in 10 years..." predictions come and go and I'm still writing code pretty much the same way I did 40 years ago: in a terminal, in a text editor.
d0liver 2y ago
I need some information/advice -> I feed that into an imprecise aggregator/generator of some kind -> I apply my engineering judgement to evaluate the result and save time by reusing someone's existing work This _is_ something that you can do with AI, but it's something that a search engine is better suited to because the search engine provides context that helps you do the evaluation, and it doesn't smash up results in weird and unpredictable ways. Y'all think that AI is "thinking" because it's right sometimes, but it ain't thinking. If I search for "refactor <something> to <something else>" and I get good results, that doesn't make the search engine capable of abstract thought.
- andybak 2y ago
  AI is usually a better search engine than a search engine.
  - dragonwriter 2y ago
    AI alone can't replace a search engine very well at all. AI with access to a search engine may be present a more useful solution to some problems than a bare search engine, but the AI isn't replacing a search engine it is using one.
    - theshrike79 2y ago
      The "Deep Research" modes in web-based LLMs are quite useful. They can take a days worth of reading forums and social media sites and compress into about 10 minutes. For example I found a perfect 4k120Hz capable HDMI switch by using ChatGPTs research mode. It did suggest the generic Chinese random-named ones off Amazon, but there was one brand with an actual website and a history - based in Germany. I hadn't seen it recommended anywhere on my attempts, but did find it by searching for the brand specifically and found only good reviews. Bought it, love it.
    - andybak 2y ago
      I did say "usually" and it was meant in reference to the use case you originally gave. Around 30% to 50% of things I used to google for, I now go to ChatGPT for. Often because the available context is better.

tyleo 2y ago

Agreed. It isn’t like crypto where the proponents proclaimed some use case that would prove value always on the verge of arriving. AI is useful right now. People are using these tools now and enjoying them.

jdiff 2y ago
I'm not sure that's a convincing argument given that crypto heads haven't just been enthusiastically chatting about the possibilities in the abstract. They do an awful lot of that, see Web3, but they have been using crypto.
awesome_dude 2y ago
I don't (use AI tools), I've tried them and found that they got in the way, made things more confusing, and did not get me to a point where the thing I was trying to create was working (let alone working well/safe to send to prod) I am /hoping/ that AI will improve, to the point that I can use it like Google or Wikipedia (that is, have some trust in what's being produced) I don't actually know anyone using AI right now. I know one person on Bluesky has found it helpful for prototyping things (and I'm kind of jealous of him because he's found how to get AI to "work" for him). Oh, I've also seen people pasting AI results into serious discussions to try and prove the experts wrong, but only to discover that the AI has produced flawed responses.
- tptacek 2y ago
  I don't actually know anyone using AI right now. I believe you, but this to me is a wild claim.
  - awesome_dude 2y ago
    Ha! I think the same way when I see people saying that AI is in widespread use - I believe that it's possible, but it feels like an outlandish claim
    - LanceJones 2y ago
      I’d say 500M WAUs on chatGPT alone qualifies as widespread use.
      - awesome_dude 2y ago
        Ok, how much of that is developers using it to help them code?
- plsbenice34 2y ago
  Essentially the same for me, I had one incident where someone was arguing in favor of it and then immediately embarrassed themselves badly because they were misled by a chatgpt error. I have the feeling that this hype will collapse as this happens more and people see how bad the consequences are when there are errors
- wglb 2y ago
  If you are interested, try the following experiment. Presuming you are logged onto a google account, log on to Gemini 2.5 then ask it “create a go program that connects one thread to a usb device and another thread to generate a GUI”. The results might surprise you.
plsbenice34 2y ago
Even in 2012 bitcoin could very concretely be used to order drugs. Many people have used it to transact and preserve value in hostile economic environments. Etc etc. Ridiculous comment. Personally i have still yet to find LLMs useful at all with programming.
- tehjoker 2y ago
  bitcoin tracks the stock market
  - plsbenice34 2y ago
    Financial assets have some degree of correlation, of course. So? Most people dont even have access to the stock market
    - tehjoker 2y ago
      The idea is supposed to be that bitcoin is decorrelated from the stock market to be a store of value.
      - plsbenice34 1y ago
        That doesnt make any sense and i never hear anybody else say that.
d0liver 2y ago
> Observer bias is the tendency of observers to not see what is there, but instead to see what they expect or want to see. Unfortunately, people enjoying a thing and thinking that it works well doesn't actually mean much on its own. But, more than that I suspect that AI is making more people realize that they don't need to write everything themselves, but they never needed to to begin with, and they'd be better off to do the code reuse thing in a different way.
rsynnott 2y ago
People are using divining rods now and enjoying them: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dowsing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dowsing

crispinb 2y ago

It's the barstool economist argument style, on long-expired loan from medieval theology. Responding to clear empirical evidence that X occurs: "X can't happen because [insert 'rational' theory recapitulation]"

Kapura 2y ago

weird metaphor, because a gym goer practices what they are doing by putting in the reps in order to increase personal capacity. it's more like you're laughing at people at the gym, saying "don't you know we have forklifts already lifting much more?"

deleted 2y ago
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asadotzler 2y ago
"If you want to be good at lifting, just buy an exoskeleton like me and all my bros have. Never mind that your muscles will atrophy and you'll often get somersaulted down a flight of stairs while the exoskeleton makers all keep trying, and failing, to contain the exoskeleton propensity for tossing people down flights of stairs."
cgriswald 2y ago
I see it as almost the opposite. It’s like the pulley has been invented but some people refuse to acknowledge its usefulness and make claims that you’re weaker if you use it. But you can grow quite strong working a pulley all day.
torben-friis 2y ago
That’s a completely different argument, however, and a good one to have. I can buy “if you use the forklift you’ll eventually lose the ability to lift weight by yourself”, but the author is going for “the forklift is actually not able to lift anything” which can trivially be proven wrong.
- d0liver 2y ago
  More like, "We had a nice forklift, but the boss got rid of it replaced it with a pack of rabid sled dogs which work sometimes? And sometimes they can also sniff out expiration dates on the food (although the boxes were already labeled?). And, I'm pretty sure one of them, George, understands me when I talk to him because the other day I asked him if he wanted a hotdog and he barked (of course, I was holding a hotdog at the time). But, anyway, we're using the dogs, so they must work? And I used to have to drive the forklift, but the dogs just do stuff without me needing to drive that old forklift"

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

jstummbillig 2y ago

Well said. It's not that there would not be much to seriously think about and discuss – so much is changing, so quickly – but the stuff that a lot of these articles focus is a strange exercise in denial.

amelius 2y ago

If AI gives a bad experience 20% of the time, and if there are 10M programmers using it, then about 3000 of them will have a bad experience 5 times in a row. You can't really blame them for giving up and writing about it.

charlie-83 2y ago

Out if interest, what kind of codebases are you able to get AI to do these things on. Everytime I have tried it with even simpler things than these it has failed spectacularly. Every example I see of people doing this kind of thing seems to be on some kind if web development so I have a hypothesis that AI might currently be much worse for the kinds of codebases I work on.

idontwantthis 2y ago
That’s my experience too. It also fails terribly with ElasticSearch probably because the documentation doesn’t have a lot of examples. ChatGPT, copilot and claude were all useless for that and gave completely plausible nonsense. I’ve used it with most success for writing unit tests and definitely shell scripts.
torben-friis 2y ago
I currently work for a finance-related scaleup. So backend systems, with significant challenges related to domain complexity and scalability, but nothing super low level either. It does take a bit to understand how to prompt in a way that the results are useful, can you share what you tried so far?
- charlie-83 2y ago
  I have tried on a lot of different projects. I have a codebase in Zig and it doesn't understand Zig at all. I have another which is embedded C using zephyr RTOS. It doesn't understand zephyr at all and even if it could, it can't read the documentation for the different sensors nor can it plug in cables. I have a tui project in rust using ratatui. The core of the project is dealing with binary files and the time it takes to explain to it how specific bits of data are organised in the file and then check it got everything perfectly correct (it never has) is more than the time to just write the code. I expect I could have more success on the actual TUI side of things but haven't tried too much since I am trying to learn rust with this project. I just started an android app with flutter/dart. I get the feeling it will work well for this but I am yet to verify since I need to learn enough flutter to be able to judge it My dayjob is a big C++ codebase making a GUI app with Qt. The core of it is all dealing with USB devices and Bluetooth protocols which it doesn't understand at all. We also have lots of very complicated C++ data structures, I had hoped that the AI would be able to at least explain them to me but it just makes stuff up everytime. This also means that getting it to edit any part of the codebase touching this sort if thing doesn't work. It just rips up any thread safety or allocates memory incorrectly etc. It also doesn't understand the compiler errors at all, I had a circular dependency and tried to get it to solve it but I had to give so many clues I basically told it what the problem was. I really expected it to work very well for the Qt interface since building UI is what everyone seems to be doing with it. But the amount of hand holding it requires is insane. Each prompt feels like a monkey's paw. In every experiment I've done it would have been faster to just write it myself. I need to try getting it to write an entirely new pice of UI from scratch since I've only been editing existing UI so far. Some of this is clearly a skill issue since I do feel myself getting better at prompting it and getting better results. However, I really do get the feeling that it either doesn't work or doesn't work as well on my code bases as other ones.

thenaturalist 2y ago

While I tend to agree with your premise that the linked article seems to be reasoning to the extreme off the basis of a very small code snippet, I think the core critique the author wants to make stands: AI agents alone, unbounded, currently cannot provide huge value. > try asking cursor for potential refactors or patterns that could be useful for a given text. You, the developer, will be selecting this text. > try giving them an abstract jira ticket or asking what it things about certain naming, with enough context You still selected a JIRA ticket and provided context. > ask any engineer that saves time with everything from test scaffolding to run-and-forget scripts. Yes that is true, but again, what you are providing as a counterfactual are very bounded, aka easy contexts. In any case, the industry (both the LLM providers as well as tooling builders and devs) is clearly going into the direction of constantly etching out small imoprovements by refining which context is deemed relevant for a given problem and most efficient ways to feed it to LLMs. And let's not kid ourselves, Microsoft, OpenAI, hell Anthropic all have 2027-2029 plans where these things will be significantly more powerful.

tptacek 2y ago
Why does it matter that you're doing the thinking? Isn't that good news? What we're not doing any more is any the rote recitation that takes up most of the day when building stuff.
- d0liver 2y ago
  I think "AI as a dumb agent for speeding up code editing" is kind of a different angle and not the one I wrote the article to address. But, if it's editing that's taking most of your time, what part of your workflow are you spending the most time in? If you're typing at 60WPM for an hour then that's over 300 lines of code in an hour without any copy and paste which is pretty solid output if it's all correct.
  - t1amat 2y ago
    But that’s just it: 300 good lines of reasonably complex working code in an hour vs o4-mini can churn out 600 lines of perfectly compilable code in less than 2 minutes, including the time it takes me to assemble the context with a tool such as repomix (run locally) or pulling markdown docs with Jina Reader. The reality is, we humans just moved one level up the chain. We will continue to move up until there isn’t anywhere for us to go.

verelo 2y ago

It’s all good to me - let these folks stay in the simple times while you and i arbitrage our efforts against theirs? I agree, there’s massive value in using these tools and it’s hilarious to me when others don’t see it. My reaction isn’t going to be convince them they’re wrong, it’s just to find ways to use it to get ahead while leaving them behind.

Glyptodon 2y ago

I don't know. Cursor is decent at refactoring. ("Look at x and ____ so that it ____." With some level of elaboration, where the change is code or code organization centric.) And it's okay at basic generation - "write a map or hash table wrapper where the input is a TZDB zone and the output is ______" will create something reasonable and get some of the TZDB zones wrong. But it hasn't been that great for me at really extensive conceptual coding so far. Though maybe I'm bad at prompting. Might be there's something I'm missing w/ my prompts.

idontwantthis 2y ago
For me, the hard part of programming is figuring out what I want to do. Sometimes talking with an AI helps with that, but with bugs like “1 out of 100 times a user follows this path, a message gets lost somewhere in our pipeline”, which are the type of bugs that really require knowledge and skill, AIs are completely worthless.

skydhash 2y ago

> “It won’t deal with abstractions” -> try asking cursor for potential refactors or patterns that could be useful for a given text. That is not what abstraction is about. Abstraction is having a simpler model to reason about, not simply code rearranging. > “It doesn’t understand things beyond the code” -> try giving them an abstract jira ticket or asking what it things about certain naming, with enough context Again, that is still pretty much coding. What matters is the overall design (or at least the current module). > “Reading code and understanding whether it’s wrong will take more time than writing it yourself” -> ask any engineer that saves time with everything from test scaffolding to run-and-forget scripts. Imagine having a script and not checking the man pages for expected behavior. I hope the backup games are strong.

tptacek 2y ago

There really is a category of these posts that are coming from some alternate dimension (or maybe we're in the alternate dimension and they're in the real one?) where this isn't one of the most important things ever to happen to software development. I'm a person who didn't even use autocomplete (I use LSPs almost entirely for cross-referencing --- oh wait that's another thing I'm apparently never going to need to do again because of LLMs), a sincere tooling skeptic. I do not understand how people expect to write convincingly that tools that reliably turn slapdash prose into median-grade idiomatic working code "provide little value".

quesera 2y ago
> tools that reliably turn slapdash prose into median-grade idiomatic working code This may be the crux of it. Turning slapdash prose into median-grade code is not a problem I can imagine needing to solve. I think I'm better at describing code in code than I am in prose. I Want to Believe. And I certainly don't want to be "that guy", but my honest assessment of LLMs for coding so far is that they are a frustrating Junior, who maybe I should help out because mentoring might be part of my job, but from whom I should not expect any near-term technical contribution.
- tptacek 2y ago
  It is most of the problem of delivering professional software.
  - quesera 2y ago
    Not in my experience. The only slapdash prose in the cycle is in the immediate output of a product development discussion. And that is inevitably too sparse to inform, without the full context of the team, company, and industry.
    - akerl_ 2y ago
      Sorry, are you saying "the only place where there's slapdash prose is right before it would be super cool to have an alpha version of the code magically appear, that we can iterate on based on the full context of the team, company, and industry"?

agentultra 2y ago

I don’t think the argument from such a simple example does much for the authors point. The bigger risk is skill atrophy. Proponents say, it doesn’t matter. We shouldn’t have to care about memory allocation or dependencies. The AI system will eventually have all of the information it needs. We just have to tell it what we want. However, knowing what you want requires knowledge about the subject. If you’re not a security engineer you might not know what funny machines are. If someone finds an exploit using them you’ll have no idea what to ask for. AI may be useful for some but at the end of the day, knowledge is useful.

SoftTalker 2y ago

There are people at the gym I go to benching 95 lbs and asking what does it take to get to 135, or 225? The answer is "lift more weight" not "have someone help you lift more weight" If you already know how to code, yes AI/LLMs can speed you along at certain tasks, though be careful you don't let your skills atrophy. If you can bench 225 and then you stop doing it, you soon will not be able to do that anymore.

CharlesW 2y ago
> If you already know how to code, yes AI/LLMs can speed you along at certain tasks, though be careful you don't let your skills atrophy. This isn't a concern. Ice-cutting skills no longer have value, and cursive writing is mostly a 20th century memory. Not only have I let my assembly language skills atrophy, but I'll happily bid farewell to all of my useless CS-related skills. In 10 years, if "app developer" still involves manual coding by then, we'll talk about coding without an AI partner like we talk about coding with punch cards.
- SoftTalker 2y ago
  Maybe. I've seen a lot of "in 10 years..." predictions come and go and I'm still writing code pretty much the same way I did 40 years ago: in a terminal, in a text editor.

d0liver 2y ago

I need some information/advice -> I feed that into an imprecise aggregator/generator of some kind -> I apply my engineering judgement to evaluate the result and save time by reusing someone's existing work This _is_ something that you can do with AI, but it's something that a search engine is better suited to because the search engine provides context that helps you do the evaluation, and it doesn't smash up results in weird and unpredictable ways. Y'all think that AI is "thinking" because it's right sometimes, but it ain't thinking. If I search for "refactor <something> to <something else>" and I get good results, that doesn't make the search engine capable of abstract thought.

andybak 2y ago
AI is usually a better search engine than a search engine.
- dragonwriter 2y ago
  AI alone can't replace a search engine very well at all. AI with access to a search engine may be present a more useful solution to some problems than a bare search engine, but the AI isn't replacing a search engine it is using one.
  - theshrike79 2y ago
    The "Deep Research" modes in web-based LLMs are quite useful. They can take a days worth of reading forums and social media sites and compress into about 10 minutes. For example I found a perfect 4k120Hz capable HDMI switch by using ChatGPTs research mode. It did suggest the generic Chinese random-named ones off Amazon, but there was one brand with an actual website and a history - based in Germany. I hadn't seen it recommended anywhere on my attempts, but did find it by searching for the brand specifically and found only good reviews. Bought it, love it.
  - andybak 2y ago
    I did say "usually" and it was meant in reference to the use case you originally gave. Around 30% to 50% of things I used to google for, I now go to ChatGPT for. Often because the available context is better.