5 ms·

I am uninstalling AI coding assistants from my personal computer

75 points by ssutch3 1y ago

cryptos 1y ago
Letting AI generate code instead of writing it yourself as a software developer is basically the same as if a painter would generate a painting instead of doing the art himself.
- senko 1y ago
  > generate a painting You mean have a handheld device with a button they can press, which would instantly generate a painting of what it was pointed at? Agreed, that could never be art.
  - thunderfork 1y ago
    [dead]
breckenedge 1y ago
> As I have kept up conversation with my developer friends, it has become essentially the norm, and everyone is being pressed to find greater productivity using AI coding tools. What a weird alternate universe it is that I live in. My managers are somewhat skeptical of AI workflows and keep throwing up roadblocks to deeper and more coordinated use among my colleagues. Probably because there is so much churn, and it’s difficult to replicate the practice from one engineer to another. Some of my colleagues are very resistant to using AI. I use it quite extensively, but rate limits mean that there are occasions when I must pick up where the machine leaves off.
Mouvelie 1y ago
> Regardless, the lesson for people like myself is that, in order to feel happy with creating, we have to actually create. An artist would not call their work art if they had little to no role in creating it. Thanks. The author touched something there, close to a truth (or deep belief I got ?) about our life, something about the journey mattering more than the destination...
- toomuchtodo 1y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drive:_The_Surprising_Truth_About_What_Motivates_Us https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drive:_The_Surprising_Truth_Ab... https://youtu.be/u6XAPnuFjJc https://youtu.be/u6XAPnuFjJc, referenced often here: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&query=u6XAPnuFjJc&sort=byDate&type=all https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
- bitwize 1y ago
  Good. Enjoy that journey... on your own time. You've been missing your productivity OKRs, and your Claude logs say you haven't been using the tools the company has provided. You're on a PIP: if measurable progress is not seen in 30 days, disciplinary action up to and including termination may be taken.
  - cyanydeez 1y ago
    Claude, write me a macro that will autofelate yourself according to these metrics.
- fithisux 1y ago
  Of interest https://medium.com/@kenichisasagawa/the-reason-behind-developing-easy-islisp-aeb011c9fde4 https://medium.com/@kenichisasagawa/the-reason-behind-develo...
- NathanKP 1y ago
  I think the author's definition of "creating" is just too narrow. A gardener can get tremendous satisfaction from watching their plants grow from the bed of soil that they prepared, even if there is not as much weeding or watering to do later on in the growth cycle. A parent can get tremendous satisfaction from watching their child continue to grow and develop, even after the child is no longer an infant who requires constant care and attention. In my opinion, having spent about a year and half working on various coding projects using AI, there are phases to the AI coding lifecycle. 1) Coding projects start out like infants: you need to write a lot of code by hand at first to set the right template and patterns you want the AI to follow going forward. 2) Coding projects continue to develop kind of like garden beds: you have to guide the structure and provide the right "nutrients" for the project, so that the AI can continue to add additional features based on what you have supplied to it. 3) Coding projects mature kind of like children growing up to become adults. A well configured AI agent, starting from a clean, structured code repo, might be mostly autonomous, but just like your adult kid might still need to phone home to Mom and Dad to ask for advice or help, you as the "parent" of the project are still going to be involved when the AI gets stuck and needs help. Personally, while I can get some joy and satisfaction from manually typing lines of code, most of those lines of code are things I've typed literally hundreds of times over my decades long journey as a developer. There isn't as much joy in typing out the same things again and again, but there is joy in the longer term steering and shaping of a project so that it stays sane, clean, and scalable. I get a similar same sense of joy out of gently steering AI towards success in my projects, that I get from gently steering my own child towards success. There is something incredible about providing the right environment and the right pushes in the right direction, and then seeing something grow and develop mostly on it's own (but with your support backing it up).
bluefirebrand 1y ago
I haven't had nearly the same experience of success with AI. I'm often accused of letting my skepticism hold me back from really trying it properly, and maybe that's true. I certainly could not imagine going months without writing any code, letting the AI just generate it while I prompt My work is pushing these tools hard and it is taking a huge toll on me. I'm constantly hearing how life changing this is, but I cannot replicate it no matter what I do I'm either just not "getting it", or I'm too much of a control freak, or everyone else is just better than I am, or something. It's been miserable. I feel like I'm either extremely unskilled or everyone else is gaslighting me, basically nowhere in between I have not once had an LLM generate code that I could accept. Not one time! Every single time I try to use the LLM to speed me up, I get code I have to heavily modify to correct. Sometimes it won't even run! The advice is to iterate, but that makes no sense to me! I would easily spend more time iterating with the LLM than just writing the code myself! It's been extremely demoralizing. I've never been unhappier in my career. I don't know what to do, I feel I'm falling behind and being singled out I probably need to change employers to get away from AI usage metrics at this point, but it feels like it's everyone everywhere guzzling the AI hype. It feels hopeless
- cheevly 1y ago
  And the irony is that those of us using AI to amplify our output to produce at exponential speeds feel like your comments are gaslighting us instead! Ive never seen such an outright divide in practitioners of a technology in terms of perception and outcomes. I got into LLMs super early, using them daily since 2022; so that may have bolstered the way I’ve augmented my approaches and tooling. Now almost everything I build uses AI at runtime to generate better tools for my AI to generate tools at runtime.
  - upghost 1y ago
    Can we use this micro moment to try to bridge the gap? I was sold on cocaine but all I've gotten so far was corn starch. Is there like a definitive tutorial on this? I mean look I am proud of my work but if I can drop 200-1000/month for the "blue stuff" I'm not gonna turn my nose up at it. I've been pretty deeply into LLMs myself since 2023 and built several small models myself from scratch and (SFT) trained many more so it's not like I'm ignorant of how it works, I'm just not getting the workflow results.
ribcage 1y ago
[dead]
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
Macha 1y ago
> I wonder if some “actual" artists (as in, those people who create the kind of art most people would recognize) have gone through a similar arc of realizing the emptiness of creating with AI tools. My impression is that artists are even more hostile than the most AI-skeptic of software engineers. In large part, this is likely because the economic argument doesn't hold much sway. For the large majority of artists, it's hard for them to make money with art as is, the bottleneck is not the volume of art they can produce. There's a much clearer path to turning "more code" into "more money", even if it's still not direct.
- jaredcwhite 1y ago
  Perhaps that's why I as a software developer am fully genAI-skeptic…I've always considered myself a multidisciplinary artist and the skill I have in writing code is simply one of the many possible avenues I use to express myself. (Alas, it's the one which produces the most income by far, but that's another conversation!)
- GianFabien 1y ago
  The way I see it: Painters (as in artists) paint with brushes not spray guns. The industrial scale painting robots work well for painting cars coming off an assembly line, but not for landscapes nor portraits. Automation (not just AI, but in general) works well for highly structured, repetitious work but not for creative expression.
randomNumber7 1y ago
When you get better than junior level you see the limitations of current coding assistants. But to get there it might be a good move to code for yourself (and read books). Then on the other hand coding will not be a fun job anymore...
Jotalea 1y ago
I agree. Using AI for development is addictive, once you start you cannot stop. It has harmed me, stunting my skills; just like the lack of exercise leads to physical decline, my coding muscles atrophied due to the lack of practice this dependency caused. And since tech is my only real strength, and I'm not what you'd call "successful", feeling stuck at the one thing I'm supposed to be good at makes me feel useless, makes me feel like a burden. And the worst thing? I'm unable to get back on track. I've tried getting back to coding manually, but I simply can't do it anymore. Last time I programmed anything without using AI was in 2023, on a Scratch project, simply because AI could not write Scratch blocks. But at least I can now ship (shitty) code a lot faster.

75 points by ssutch3 1y ago

Letting AI generate code instead of writing it yourself as a software developer is basically the same as if a painter would generate a painting instead of doing the art himself.

senko 1y ago
> generate a painting You mean have a handheld device with a button they can press, which would instantly generate a painting of what it was pointed at? Agreed, that could never be art.
- thunderfork 1y ago
  [dead]

breckenedge 1y ago

> As I have kept up conversation with my developer friends, it has become essentially the norm, and everyone is being pressed to find greater productivity using AI coding tools. What a weird alternate universe it is that I live in. My managers are somewhat skeptical of AI workflows and keep throwing up roadblocks to deeper and more coordinated use among my colleagues. Probably because there is so much churn, and it’s difficult to replicate the practice from one engineer to another. Some of my colleagues are very resistant to using AI. I use it quite extensively, but rate limits mean that there are occasions when I must pick up where the machine leaves off.

Mouvelie 1y ago

> Regardless, the lesson for people like myself is that, in order to feel happy with creating, we have to actually create. An artist would not call their work art if they had little to no role in creating it. Thanks. The author touched something there, close to a truth (or deep belief I got ?) about our life, something about the journey mattering more than the destination...

toomuchtodo 1y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drive:_The_Surprising_Truth_About_What_Motivates_Us https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drive:_The_Surprising_Truth_Ab... https://youtu.be/u6XAPnuFjJc https://youtu.be/u6XAPnuFjJc, referenced often here: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&query=u6XAPnuFjJc&sort=byDate&type=all https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
bitwize 1y ago
Good. Enjoy that journey... on your own time. You've been missing your productivity OKRs, and your Claude logs say you haven't been using the tools the company has provided. You're on a PIP: if measurable progress is not seen in 30 days, disciplinary action up to and including termination may be taken.
- cyanydeez 1y ago
  Claude, write me a macro that will autofelate yourself according to these metrics.
fithisux 1y ago
Of interest https://medium.com/@kenichisasagawa/the-reason-behind-developing-easy-islisp-aeb011c9fde4 https://medium.com/@kenichisasagawa/the-reason-behind-develo...
NathanKP 1y ago
I think the author's definition of "creating" is just too narrow. A gardener can get tremendous satisfaction from watching their plants grow from the bed of soil that they prepared, even if there is not as much weeding or watering to do later on in the growth cycle. A parent can get tremendous satisfaction from watching their child continue to grow and develop, even after the child is no longer an infant who requires constant care and attention. In my opinion, having spent about a year and half working on various coding projects using AI, there are phases to the AI coding lifecycle. 1) Coding projects start out like infants: you need to write a lot of code by hand at first to set the right template and patterns you want the AI to follow going forward. 2) Coding projects continue to develop kind of like garden beds: you have to guide the structure and provide the right "nutrients" for the project, so that the AI can continue to add additional features based on what you have supplied to it. 3) Coding projects mature kind of like children growing up to become adults. A well configured AI agent, starting from a clean, structured code repo, might be mostly autonomous, but just like your adult kid might still need to phone home to Mom and Dad to ask for advice or help, you as the "parent" of the project are still going to be involved when the AI gets stuck and needs help. Personally, while I can get some joy and satisfaction from manually typing lines of code, most of those lines of code are things I've typed literally hundreds of times over my decades long journey as a developer. There isn't as much joy in typing out the same things again and again, but there is joy in the longer term steering and shaping of a project so that it stays sane, clean, and scalable. I get a similar same sense of joy out of gently steering AI towards success in my projects, that I get from gently steering my own child towards success. There is something incredible about providing the right environment and the right pushes in the right direction, and then seeing something grow and develop mostly on it's own (but with your support backing it up).

bluefirebrand 1y ago

I haven't had nearly the same experience of success with AI. I'm often accused of letting my skepticism hold me back from really trying it properly, and maybe that's true. I certainly could not imagine going months without writing any code, letting the AI just generate it while I prompt My work is pushing these tools hard and it is taking a huge toll on me. I'm constantly hearing how life changing this is, but I cannot replicate it no matter what I do I'm either just not "getting it", or I'm too much of a control freak, or everyone else is just better than I am, or something. It's been miserable. I feel like I'm either extremely unskilled or everyone else is gaslighting me, basically nowhere in between I have not once had an LLM generate code that I could accept. Not one time! Every single time I try to use the LLM to speed me up, I get code I have to heavily modify to correct. Sometimes it won't even run! The advice is to iterate, but that makes no sense to me! I would easily spend more time iterating with the LLM than just writing the code myself! It's been extremely demoralizing. I've never been unhappier in my career. I don't know what to do, I feel I'm falling behind and being singled out I probably need to change employers to get away from AI usage metrics at this point, but it feels like it's everyone everywhere guzzling the AI hype. It feels hopeless

cheevly 1y ago
And the irony is that those of us using AI to amplify our output to produce at exponential speeds feel like your comments are gaslighting us instead! Ive never seen such an outright divide in practitioners of a technology in terms of perception and outcomes. I got into LLMs super early, using them daily since 2022; so that may have bolstered the way I’ve augmented my approaches and tooling. Now almost everything I build uses AI at runtime to generate better tools for my AI to generate tools at runtime.
- upghost 1y ago
  Can we use this micro moment to try to bridge the gap? I was sold on cocaine but all I've gotten so far was corn starch. Is there like a definitive tutorial on this? I mean look I am proud of my work but if I can drop 200-1000/month for the "blue stuff" I'm not gonna turn my nose up at it. I've been pretty deeply into LLMs myself since 2023 and built several small models myself from scratch and (SFT) trained many more so it's not like I'm ignorant of how it works, I'm just not getting the workflow results.

ribcage 1y ago

[dead]

deleted 1y ago

[deleted]

Macha 1y ago

> I wonder if some “actual" artists (as in, those people who create the kind of art most people would recognize) have gone through a similar arc of realizing the emptiness of creating with AI tools. My impression is that artists are even more hostile than the most AI-skeptic of software engineers. In large part, this is likely because the economic argument doesn't hold much sway. For the large majority of artists, it's hard for them to make money with art as is, the bottleneck is not the volume of art they can produce. There's a much clearer path to turning "more code" into "more money", even if it's still not direct.

jaredcwhite 1y ago
Perhaps that's why I as a software developer am fully genAI-skeptic…I've always considered myself a multidisciplinary artist and the skill I have in writing code is simply one of the many possible avenues I use to express myself. (Alas, it's the one which produces the most income by far, but that's another conversation!)
GianFabien 1y ago
The way I see it: Painters (as in artists) paint with brushes not spray guns. The industrial scale painting robots work well for painting cars coming off an assembly line, but not for landscapes nor portraits. Automation (not just AI, but in general) works well for highly structured, repetitious work but not for creative expression.

randomNumber7 1y ago

When you get better than junior level you see the limitations of current coding assistants. But to get there it might be a good move to code for yourself (and read books). Then on the other hand coding will not be a fun job anymore...

Jotalea 1y ago

I agree. Using AI for development is addictive, once you start you cannot stop. It has harmed me, stunting my skills; just like the lack of exercise leads to physical decline, my coding muscles atrophied due to the lack of practice this dependency caused. And since tech is my only real strength, and I'm not what you'd call "successful", feeling stuck at the one thing I'm supposed to be good at makes me feel useless, makes me feel like a burden. And the worst thing? I'm unable to get back on track. I've tried getting back to coding manually, but I simply can't do it anymore. Last time I programmed anything without using AI was in 2023, on a Scratch project, simply because AI could not write Scratch blocks. But at least I can now ship (shitty) code a lot faster.