8 ms·

To some degree, traditional coding and AI coding are not the same thing, so it's not surprising that some people are better at one than the other. The author is

• dingnuts 1y ago
  > You might prefer manual coding, but you might just be bad at AI coding and you might prefer it if you improved at it. ok but how much am I supposed to spend before I supposedly just "get good"? Because based on the free trials and the pocket change I've spent, I don't consider the ROI worth it.
  • goalieca 1y ago
    And how often do your prompting skills change as the models evolve.
  • stray 1y ago
    You're going to spend a little over $1k to ramp up your skills with AI-aided coding. It's dirt cheap in the grand scheme of things.
    • dingnuts 1y ago
      do I get a refund if I spend a grand and I'm still not convinced? at some point I'm going to start lying to myself to justify the cost and I don't know how much y'all earn but $1k is getting close
      • HDThoreaun 1y ago
        No one is forcing you to improve. If you don’t want to invest in yourself that is fine, you’ll just be left behind.
      • theoreticalmal 1y ago
        Would you ask for a refund from a university class if you didn’t get a job or skill from it? Investing in a potential skill is a risk and carries an opportunity cost, that’s part of what makes it a risk
    • asciimov 1y ago
      How are those without that kind of scratch supposed to keep up with those that do?
      • theoreticalmal 1y ago
        This kind of seems like asking “how are poor people supposed to keep up with rich people” which we seem to not have a long term viable answer for right now
      • throwawaysleep 1y ago
        If you lack "that kind of scratch", you are at the learning stage for software development, not the keeping up stage. Either that or horribly underpaid.
        • 15123123 1y ago
          $100 per month for a SaaS is quite a lot outside of Western countries. People are not even spending that much on VPN or Password Manager.
          • deleted 1y ago
            [deleted]
        • bevr1337 1y ago
          I recently had a coworker tell me he liked his last workplace because "we all spoke the same language." It was incredible how much he revealed about himself with what he thought was a simple fact about engineer culture. Your comment reminds me of that exchange. - Employers, not employees, should provide workplace equipment or compensation for equipment. Don't buy bits for the shop, nails for the foreman, or Cursor for the tech lead. - the workplace is not a meritocracy. People are not defined by their wealth. - If $1,000 does not represent an appreciable amount of someone's assets, they are doing well in life. Approximately half of US citizens cannot afford rent if they lose a paycheck. - Sometimes the money needs to go somewhere else. Got kids? Sick and in the hospital? Loan sharks? A pool full of sharks and they need a lot of food? - Folks can have different priorities and it's as simple as that We're (my employer) still unsure if new dev tooling is improving productivity. If we find out it was unhelpful, I'll be very glad I didn't lose my own money.
    • viraptor 1y ago
      Not even close. I'm still under $100, creating full apps. Stick to reasonable models and you can achieve and learn a lot. You don't need latest and greatest in max mode (or whatever the new one calls it) for majority of the tasks. You can have to throw the whole project at the service every time either.
      • viraptor 1y ago
        Typo: ...you don't have to throw the whole project context...
  • grogenaut 1y ago
    how much time did you spend learning your last language to become comfortable with it?
  • qinsig 1y ago
    Avoid using agents that can just blow through money (cline, roocode, claudecode with API key, etc). Instead you can get comfortable prompting and managing context with aider. Or you can use claude code with a pro subscription for a fair amount of usage. I agree that seeing the tools just waste several dollars to just make a mess you need to discard is frustrating.
  • badsectoracula 1y ago
    It wont be the hippest of solutions, but you can use something like Devstral Small with a full open source setup to get experimenting with local LLMs and a bunch of tools - or just chat with it with a chat interface. I did pingponged between Devstral running as a chat interface and my regular text editor some time ago to make a toy project of a raytracer [0] (output) [1] (code). While it wasn't the fanciest integration (nor the best of codegen), it was good enough to "get going" (the loop was to ask the LLM do something, then me do something else in the background, then fix and merge the changed it did - even though i often had to fix stuff[2], sometimes it was less of a hassle than if i had to start from scratch[3]). It can give you a vague idea that with more dedicated tooling (i.e. something that does automatically what you'd do by hand[4]) you could do more interesting things (combining with some sort of LSP functionality to pass function bodies to the LLM would also help), though personally i'm not a fan of the "dedicated editor" that seems to be used and i think something more LSP-like (especially if it can also work with existing LSPs) would be neat. IMO it can be useful for a bunch of boilerplate-y or boring work. The biggest issue i can see is that the context is too small to include everything (imagine, e.g., throwing the entire Blender source code in an LLM which i don't think even the largest of cloud-hosted LLMs can handle) so there needs to be some external way to store stuff dynamically but also the LLM to know that external stuff are available, look them up and store stuff if needed. Not sure how exactly that'd work though to the extent where you could -say- open up a random Blender source code file, point to a function, ask the LLM to make a modification, have it reuse any existing functions in the codebase where appropriate (without you pointing them out) and then, if needed, have the LLM also update the code where the function you modified is used (e.g. if you added/removed some argument or changed the semantics of its use). [0] https://i.imgur.com/FevOm0o.png https://i.imgur.com/FevOm0o.png [1] https://app.filen.io/#/d/e05ae468-6741-453c-a18d-e83dcc3de926%23AXr8MxEAEuwpwsC0HVMJlzvP3fawUfl4 https://app.filen.io/#/d/e05ae468-6741-453c-a18d-e83dcc3de92... [2] e.g. when i asked it to implement a BVH to speed up things it made something that wasn't hierarchical and actually slowed down things [3] the code it produced for [2] was fixable to do a simple BVH [4] i tried a larger project and wrote a script that `cat`ed and `xclip`ed a bunch of header files to pass to the LLM so it knows the available functions and each function had a single line comment about what it does - when the LLM wrote new functions it also added that comment. 99% of these oneliner comments were written by the LLM actually.
• skydhash 1y ago
  > But it's important to realize that AI coding is itself a skill that you can develop. It's not just , pick the best tool and let it go. Managing prompts and managing context has a much higher skill ceiling than many people realize No, it's not. It's something you can pick in a few minutes (or an hour if you're using more advanced tooling, mostly spending it setting things up). But it's not like GDB or using UNIX as a IDE where you need a whole book to just get started. > It's a tiny bit like drawing vs photography and if you look through that lens it's obvious that many drawers might not like photography. While they share a lot of principles (around composition, poses,...), they are different activities with different output. No one conflates the two. You don't draw and think you're going to capture a moment in time. The intent is to share an observation with the world.
  • oxidant 1y ago
    I do not agree it is something you can pick up in an hour. You have to learn what AI is good at, how different models code, how to prompt to get the results you want. If anything, prompting well is akin to learning a new programming language. What words do you use to explain what you want to achieve? How do you reference files/sections so you don't waste context on meaningless things? I've been using AI tools to code for the past year and a half (Github Copilot, Cursor, Claude Code, OpenAI APIs) and they all need slightly different things to be successful and they're all better at different things. AI isn't a panacea, but it can be the right tool for the job.
    • 15123123 1y ago
      I am also interested in how much of these skills are at the mercy of OpenAI ? Like IIRC 1 or 2 years ago there was an uproar of AI "artists" saying that their art is ruined because of model changes ( or maybe the system prompt changed ). >I do not agree it is something you can pick up in an hour. But it's also interesting that the industry is selling the opposite ( with AI anyone can code / write / draw / make music ). >You have to learn what AI is good at. More often than not I find it you need to learn what the AI is bad at, and this is not a fun experience.
• mitthrowaway2 1y ago
  The skill ceiling might be "high" but it's not like investing years of practice to become a great pianist. The most experienced AI coder in the world has about three years of practice working this way, much of which is obsoleted because the models have changed to the point where some lessons learned on GPT 3.5 don't transfer. There aren't teachers with decades of experience to learn from, either.
  • dr_dshiv 1y ago
    It’s mostly attitude that you are learning. Playfulness, persistence and a willingness to start from scratch again and again.
    • suddenlybananas 1y ago
      >persistence and a willingness to start from scratch again and again. i.e. continually gambling and praying the model spits something out that works instead of thinking.
      • HPsquared 1y ago
        Most things in life are like that.
      • tsurba 1y ago
        Gambling is where I end up if I’m tired and try to get an LLM to build my hobby project for me from scratch in one go, not really bothering to read the code properly. It’s stupid and a waste of time. Sometimes it’s easier to get started this way though. But more seriously, in the ideal case refining a prompt based on a misunderstanding of an LLM due to ambiguity in your task description is actually doing the meaningful part of the work in software development. It is exactly about defining the edge cases, and converting into language what is it that you need for a task. Iterating on that is not gambling. But of course if you are not doing that, but just trying to get a ”smarter” LLM with (hopefully deprecated study of) ”prompt engineering” tricks, then that is about building yourself a skill that can become useless tomorrow.
      • 1y ago
• notnullorvoid 1y ago
  Is it a skill worth learning though? How much does the output quality improve? How transferable is it across models and tools of today, and of the future? From what I see of AI programming tools today, I highly doubt the skills developed are going to transfer to tools we'll see even a year from now.
  • serpix 1y ago
    Regarding using AI tools for programming it is not a one-for-all choice. You can pick a grunt work task such as "Tag every such and such terraform resource with a uuid" and let it do just that. Nothing to do with quality but everything to do with a simple task and not having to bother with the tedium.
    • autobodie 1y ago
      Why use AI to do something so simple? You're only increasing the possibility that it gets done wrong. Multi-cursor editing wil be faster anyway.
      • barsonme 1y ago
        Why not? I regularly have a couple Claude instances running in the background chewing through simple yet time consuming tasks. It’s saved me many hours of work and given me more time to focus on the important parts.
        • dotancohen 1y ago
          > a couple Claude instances running in the background chewing through simple yet time consuming tasks. If you don't mind, I'd love to hear more about this. How exactly are they running the background? What are they doing? How do you interact with them? Do they have access to your file system? Thank you!
          • barsonme 1y ago
            Yeah, Claude Code. I have the $100/month Max plan. I run 3-5 instances “in the background” (just another terminal) while I work. It really helps work through the backlog of “easy-ish things that I eventually need to do, but are relatively low priority.”
• dspillett 1y ago
  > To some degree, traditional coding and AI coding are not the same thing LLM-based¹ coding, at least beyond simple auto-complete enhancements (using it directly & interactively as what it is: Glorified Predictive Text) is more akin to managing a junior or outsourcing your work. You give a definition/prompt, some work is done, you refine the prompt and repeat (or fix any issues yourself), much like you would with an external human. The key differences are turnaround time (in favour of LLMs), reliability (in favour of humans, though that is mitigated largely by the quick turnaround), and (though I suspect this is a limit that will go away with time, possibly not much time) lack of usefulness for "bigger picture" work. This is one of my (several) objections to using it: I want to deal with and understand the minutia of what I am doing, I got into programming, database bothering, and infrastructure kicking, because I enjoyed it, enjoyed learning it, and wanted to do it. For years I've avoided managing people at all, at the known expense of reduced salary potential, for similar reasons: I want to be a tinkerer, not a manager of tinkerers. Perhaps call me back when you have an AGI that I can work alongside. -------- [1] Yes, I'm a bit of a stick-in-the-mud about calling these things AI. Next decade they won't generally be considered AI like many things previously called AI are not now. I'll call something AI when it is, or very closely approaches, AGI.
  • rwmj 1y ago
    Another difference if your junior will, over time, learn, and you'll also get a sense of whether you can trust them. If after a while they aren't learning and you can't trust them, you get rid of them. GenAI doesn't gain knowledge in the same way, and you're always going to have the same level of trust in it (which in my experience is limited). Also if my junior argued back and was wrong repeatedly, that's be bad. Lucky that has never happened with AIs ...
    • averageRoyalty 1y ago
      Cline, Roocode etc have the concept of rules that can be added to over time. There are heaps of memory bank and orchestration methods for AI. LLMs absolutely can improve over time.
  • danielbln 1y ago