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An alternative: don't use LLMs. Focus on the enjoyment of coding, not on becoming more efficient. Because the lion's share of the gains from increased efficienc

An alternative: don't use LLMs. Focus on the enjoyment of coding, not on becoming more efficient. Because the lion's share of the gains from increased efficiency are mainly going to the CEOs.

wahnfrieden 1y ago
This is HN, we are not all wage workers here For wage workers, not learning the latest productivity tools will result in job loss. By the time it is expected of your role, if you have not learned already, you won't be given the leniency to catch up on company time. There is no impactful resistance to this through individual protest, only by organizing your peers in industry
- wahnfrieden 1y ago
  I would like downvotes to explain what’s wrong
- gitremote 1y ago
  What does wage versus salary have to do with anything?
  - wahnfrieden 1y ago
    Salary is a specific type of wage
  - deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
freedomben 1y ago
This might be good short term advice, but in the medium and long term I think devs who don't use any AI will start to be much slower at delivery than devs who do. I'm alreay seeing it IRL (and I'm not a fan of AI coding, so this sucks for me)
- ivape 1y ago
  Slower in initial delivery maybe, but the maintenance and debugging of production applications requires intimate knowledge of the code base usually. The amount of code AI writes will require AI itself to manage it since no human would inundate themselves with that much code. Will it be faster even so? We simply won’t know because those vibe coded apps have just entered production. The horror stories can’t be written yet because the horror is ongoing. I’m big on AI, but vibe coding is such a fuck around and find out situation.
  - jdiff 1y ago
    Plenty of small FAFO stories circulate already. There will certainly be more. Lots of demonstration code out there in the training data meant only for illustrative purposes, and all too often vibe coding overlooks the rock bottom basics of security.
  - freedomben 1y ago
    Oh yeah, I totally agree. Vibe coding is not (anytime soon at least) going to be a thing. But using AI tools for things like completing simple functions (co-pilot) or asking questions about a codebase can still be huge time savers. I've also had really good success with having AI generate me basic scripts that would have taken 45 minutes of work, but it gets me a working script in 3. It's not the revolution that's been promised, but it definitely makes me faster even though I don't like it
    - javawizard 1y ago
      This. If there's one thing I've found AI to be a huge timesaver for, it's writing things that interact with libraries/frameworks/codebases that have an atrociously large surface area. AI can sift through the noise so much faster than I can and get me going down the right pack in way less time. (Aside: Hi Ben! If you are who I think you are, we started at the same company on the same day back in August of 2014.)
- jdiff 1y ago
  Good news for you then, this idea is less and less born out by the data. The productivity and efficiency gains aren't there, so there's no reason to be compelled by the spectre of obsolescence. The models may be getting better, but it doesn't seem to be actually changing much for programming. The illusion of busywork, perhaps, is swallowing up the decreased mental bandwidth in constant context switching.

An alternative: don't use LLMs. Focus on the enjoyment of coding, not on becoming more efficient. Because the lion's share of the gains from increased efficiency are mainly going to the CEOs.

wahnfrieden 1y ago

This is HN, we are not all wage workers here For wage workers, not learning the latest productivity tools will result in job loss. By the time it is expected of your role, if you have not learned already, you won't be given the leniency to catch up on company time. There is no impactful resistance to this through individual protest, only by organizing your peers in industry

wahnfrieden 1y ago
I would like downvotes to explain what’s wrong
gitremote 1y ago
What does wage versus salary have to do with anything?
- wahnfrieden 1y ago
  Salary is a specific type of wage
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]

freedomben 1y ago

This might be good short term advice, but in the medium and long term I think devs who don't use any AI will start to be much slower at delivery than devs who do. I'm alreay seeing it IRL (and I'm not a fan of AI coding, so this sucks for me)

ivape 1y ago
Slower in initial delivery maybe, but the maintenance and debugging of production applications requires intimate knowledge of the code base usually. The amount of code AI writes will require AI itself to manage it since no human would inundate themselves with that much code. Will it be faster even so? We simply won’t know because those vibe coded apps have just entered production. The horror stories can’t be written yet because the horror is ongoing. I’m big on AI, but vibe coding is such a fuck around and find out situation.
- jdiff 1y ago
  Plenty of small FAFO stories circulate already. There will certainly be more. Lots of demonstration code out there in the training data meant only for illustrative purposes, and all too often vibe coding overlooks the rock bottom basics of security.
- freedomben 1y ago
  Oh yeah, I totally agree. Vibe coding is not (anytime soon at least) going to be a thing. But using AI tools for things like completing simple functions (co-pilot) or asking questions about a codebase can still be huge time savers. I've also had really good success with having AI generate me basic scripts that would have taken 45 minutes of work, but it gets me a working script in 3. It's not the revolution that's been promised, but it definitely makes me faster even though I don't like it
  - javawizard 1y ago
    This. If there's one thing I've found AI to be a huge timesaver for, it's writing things that interact with libraries/frameworks/codebases that have an atrociously large surface area. AI can sift through the noise so much faster than I can and get me going down the right pack in way less time. (Aside: Hi Ben! If you are who I think you are, we started at the same company on the same day back in August of 2014.)
jdiff 1y ago
Good news for you then, this idea is less and less born out by the data. The productivity and efficiency gains aren't there, so there's no reason to be compelled by the spectre of obsolescence. The models may be getting better, but it doesn't seem to be actually changing much for programming. The illusion of busywork, perhaps, is swallowing up the decreased mental bandwidth in constant context switching.