5 ms·

I think the whole AI vs non. AI debate is a bit besides the point. Engineers are stuck in the old paradigm of "perfect" algorithms. I think the image you post

I think the whole AI vs non. AI debate is a bit besides the point. Engineers are stuck in the old paradigm of "perfect" algorithms. I think the image you post at the beginning basically sums it up for me: ChatGPT o3/5 Thinking can one-shot 75% of most reasonably sized tasks I give it without breaking a sweat, but struggles with tweaks to get it to 100%. So I make those tweaks myself and I have cut my code writing task in half or one third of the time. ChatGPT also knows more idioms and useful libraries than I do so I generally end up with cleaner code this way. Ferrari's are still hand assembled but Ford's assembly line and machines help save up human labor even if the quality of a mass-produced item is less than a hand-crafted one. But if everything was hand-crafted, we would have no computers at all to program. Programming and writing will become niche and humans will still be used where a quality higher than what AI can produce is needed. But most code will be done by minotaur human-ai teams, where the human has a minimal but necessary contribution to keep the AI on track... I mean, it already is.

nwatson 1y ago
Yeah, I'm trying to branch out to build things outside my comfort zone. AI already is helpful in my normal day-to-day (backend engineer, mostly Python w/ PyCharm/Datagrip working in monorepo style), but Claude Code helped me graft on a Typescript/Javascript UI ecosystem with an independent Webstorm IDE setup that will integrate well, along with all the presumably latest build tools and package management. The research and self-education I would have needed to do this without Claude would have been extensive, and would have been nowhere as complete. I don't see any point in going back to pre-AI. And I don't generally use AI results blindly, I go back and review and set some breakpoints in an IDE and watch it do its thing.
zerocharge 1y ago
Depends on what you do, and what systems you develop for I would reckon. If it's another TODO app or some kind of table + form system that's been done to death - AI can probably have a go at creating a barebones minimal viable product. Targeting code that's outside the sweet spot of the training data ("blurry" area), you'll start to stumble. I've also found agents to be useless in large code bases with distributed logic where parts are in react, web back-end, service system). Slow and unreliable for large systems. Good for small tasks and scaffolding up proof of concepts.
simianwords 1y ago
This comment captures it. AI can do 80% of the work. I can review it later. And I spend much less time reviewing than I would have typing up everything manually. I recently used it to add some logging and exception handling. It had to be done in multiple places. A simple 2 line prompt one shotted it. Why do I need to waste time writing boring code?
- ok_dad 1y ago
  > Why do I need to waste time writing boring code? Some people actually enjoy that, believe it or not.
  - dingnuts 1y ago
    seriously! excuse me while I cry with the artists about the robot doing the fun part. automate my goddamned dishes, not the coding! I chose this field because I liked that part ;_; honestly I've largely stopped coding for fun since Claude Code got popular. It's too expensive to use for personal projects, and it does the fun part. I don't want to pay but if I'm not using it, all I can think about is how inefficient doing everything manually is .. I'm going to get into gardening or something :(
    - rwyinuse 1y ago
      I can highly recommend gardening. Even before LLM's I found it much more satisfying than coding as a hobby.
- roblh 1y ago
  Are you still going to have the skills to review it a year from now? Or 5 years from now when you’ve become accustomed to only writing <20% of the code? I’m already witnessing my coworkers skills degrading because of this, and it’s only going to get worse. Programming is a language, and when you don’t use it, it fades.
  - simianwords 1y ago
Davidzheng 1y ago
Why are you assuming the cases where humans can code better than AI still exists after three years say -- I think in some industries today artisanal products are also not higher quality than machine made ones.
- BriggyDwiggs42 1y ago
  Progress under current paradigms has gotten much slower
- Zanfa 1y ago
  Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence and if there's one thing we've learned is that progress in AI is not linear nor predictable. We've been a few years away from fully self-driving cars for a really long time now.
- dns_snek 1y ago
  Because we're not even close to that happening. However I've observed a sort of cognitive decline in a few formerly experienced and extremely knowledgeable developers whom I used to respect. They happen to be the most vocal supporters of LLMs now and sometimes our discussions get so ridiculous I have to practically beg them to put the LLM down and just think about what they're saying for just 5 seconds. I think they're about a year away from believing that the sky is green if the AI says so. So maybe LLMs will win on a technicality by making us more stupid as a species.
guluarte 1y ago
Yeah, it's definitely shifting how we work. Feels like an upgrade from high-level languages, but we're still guiding the process. The performance boost is real, but once everyone adopts it, we'll probably just be building more complex things at a similar pace.
lallysingh 1y ago
Hard disagree. We'll be able to use more expressive languages with better LLM support for understanding how to express ourselves and to understand compiler results. LLMs are only good at stuff that better languages don't require you to do. After that they fall off the cliff quickly. LLMs are a communication technology, with a huge trained context of conversation. They have a long way to go before becoming anything intelligent.
- lukeschlather 1y ago
  LLMs lack intentionality, and they lack the ability to hold a series of precepts "in mind" and stick to those precepts. That is, if I say "I want code that satisfies properties A, B, C, D..." at some point the LLM just can't keep track of all the properties, which ones are satisfied, which ones aren't, what needs to be done or can be done to make them all satisfied. But LLMs aren't "only good at stuff that better languages don't require you to do." In fact they are very good at taking a bad function definition and turning it into an idiomatic one that does what I wanted to do. That's very intelligent, there is no language that can take a bad spec and make it specific and fit for the specified task. LLMs can. (not perfectly mind you, but faster and often better than I can.) The problem is they just can't always figure out when what they've written is off-spec. But "always" isn't "never" and I've yet to meet an intelligence that is perfect.
  - tkgally 1y ago
    > LLMs ... lack the ability to hold a series of precepts "in mind" and stick to those precepts. That is perhaps the biggest weakness I've noticed lately, too. When I let Claude Code carry out long, complex tasks in YOLO mode, it often fails because it has stopped paying attention to some key requirement or condition. And this happens long before it has reached its context limit. It seems that it should be possible to avoid that through better agent design. I don't know how to do it, though.
kazinator 1y ago
> ChatGPT also knows more idioms and useful libraries than I do so I generally end up with cleaner code this way ... ... and can now measure my productivity in dependencies added per day! :)
rustystump 1y ago
Another hard disagree. The crux here is that if u are not an expert in the given domain you do not know where that missing 25% is wrong. You think you do but you dont. I have seen people bring in thousands of lines of opencv lut code in ai slop form because they didnt understand how to interpolate between two colors and didnt have the experience to know that is what they needed to do. This is the catch 20/20 of the ai expert narrative. The other part is that improvement has massively stagnated in the space. It is painfully obvious too.
- A4ET8a8uTh0_v2 1y ago
  << you do not know where that missing 25% is wrong I think there is something to this line of thinking. I just finished a bigger project and without going into details, one person from team supposedly dedicated to providing viable data about data was producing odd results. Since the data was not making much sense, I asked for info on how the data was produced. I was given SQL script and 'and then we applied some regex' explanation. Long story short, I dig in and find that applied regex apparently messed with dates in an unexpected way and I knew because I knew the 'shape' that data was expected to have. I corrected it, because we were right around the deadline, but.. I noted it. Anyway, I still see llm as a tool, but I think there is some reckoning on the horizon as: 1. managers push for more use and speed given that new tool 2. getting there faster wronger, because people go with 1 and do not check the output ( or don't know how to check it or don't know when its wrong ) It won't end well, because the culture does not reward careful consideration.
  - rustystump 1y ago
    Exactly. I use ai tools daily and they bite me. Not enough to stop but enough to know. Recently was building a ws merger of sorts based on another libs sub protocol. I wasnt familiar with the language or protocol but ai sure was. However the ai used a wrong id when repacking messages. Unless i knew the spec (which i didnt) i never would have known. Eventually, i did read the spec and figured it out. To be clear here i give the spec to ai many times asking what was off and it never found the issue. Once i did get it working, ai one shotted converting it from python to go with the exception of the above mistake being added back in again. You dont know what you dont know. That final 25% or 5% or whatever is where the money is at, not the 80%. Almost doesnt count.
recursive 1y ago
Engineering isn't stuck on perfect algorithms. Management is. There's lip service for AI code gen, but if my name is on a module, I still have to vouch for its correctness. If it's wrong, that might become my problem. I don't always write perfect code, but I aspire to. If I see evidence that these tools are writing more correct and reliable code than I do, then I will start to take it more seriously. For some code, it matters whether it's robust basically.
- skydhash 1y ago
  Yep, I don't think you'll ever see AI code near the payment system. Or the code managing the store and the cart systems.
strangattractor 1y ago
IMO LLMs have demonstrated how uncomplicated the man behind the curtain really is. If we do happen to achieve AGI it will likely have many of the problems associated with the real thing which often fails in spectacular fashion.
scotty79 1y ago
You are describing accurately where AI is now. But it wasn't there two years ago and it won't be there in two years. You still have 25% of your job today, but this will most likely gonna halve evey x-number of months. I mean I'm opposed to all work, but the transition to jobless society might be traumatic. I hope you didn't neglect to buy crypto because that's the only remaining way to spontaneously and easily tap into the wealth of the rich when the work is gone.
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
bcrosby95 1y ago
The analogy seems to fall apart because the quality of an assembly line produced car is higher than the hand crafted one. Fords lose out because they engineer to a price point, a Ferrari doesn't have that "problem" - arguably, the more expensive the better.
- vonneumannstan 1y ago
  >The analogy falls apart because the quality of an assembly line produced car is higher than the hand crafted one. What? So Your Jeep Compass is higher quality than a 458?
  - jazzyjackson 1y ago
    try driving a ferrari 80,000 miles without taking it into the shop...
    - vonneumannstan 1y ago
      Try driving a Jeep Compass 5000 miles without taking it into the shop lmao. Terrible example
      - jazzyjackson 1y ago
        :^)
ponector 1y ago
However, from my experience, the quality of code produced by developers in project we are working for the last 3+ years gone south. Amount of bugs now literally tripled year on year. I bet the reason is extensive use of AI tools, as the developers are the same.
- utyop22 1y ago
  Its because most people don't have the discipline and obsession of attention to detail to know when one should use an LLM and when one shouldn't. I highly doubt the best of the best folks are even touching LLMs (barely) because they can see the flaws and the tradeoffs that are not-so-visible to others until they are 50 levels deep, with sunk investments, unwilling to go back to how they used to do things.
godelski 1y ago
> Engineers are stuck in the old paradigm of "perfect" algorithms. Reminds me of a misinterpretation of Knuth. > Premature optimization is the root of all evil. He was definitely knocking engineers for wanting to write "perfect" algorithms, but this quote also got bastardized to mean something different from what he said (happens to many clichés). All he said was "grab a fucking profiler before you optimize." But now, I'm not sure a lot of programmers even know what a profiler is. When was the last time you saw someone profile their code? Problem is we've taken the idea of "minimum viable product" too far. People are saying "Doesn't have to be perfect, just has to work." I think most people agree. But with the current state of things? I disagree that things even work. We're so far away from the question of optimization. It's bad enough that there are apps that require several gigs to just edit a 30kb document but FFS we're living in a world where Windows Hello crashes Microsoft Outlook. It's not the programs are ugly babies that could be better, they are monstrosities begging to be put to death. I WISH we could talk about optimization. I WISH our problem was perfectionism. But right now our problem is that everything is a steaming pile of garbage and most people are just shrugging their arms like "it is the way it is". Just because you don't clean up that steaming pile of garbage doesn't mean someone else doesn't. So stop passing the buck.
- trinsic2 1y ago
  > Problem is we've taken the idea of "minimum viable product" too far. People are saying "Doesn't have to be perfect, just has to work." I think most people agree. But with the current state of things? I disagree that things even work. We're so far away from the question of optimization. It's bad enough that there are apps that require several gigs to just edit a 30kb document but FFS we're living in a world where Windows Hello crashes Microsoft Outlook. It's not the programs are ugly babies that could be better, they are monstrosities begging to be put to death. LOL. OMG that was beautiful. It almost feels like we are de-evolving software to a state where shit is going to stop working bad. I know this is not full of facts, but this take reminds me of Jonathan Blow's video "Preventing the Collapse of Civilization"[0] Where he talks about how code runs worse than it ever has and I think he was arguing that civilization is collapsing before our eyes in slow time. [0]: https://youtu.be/pW-SOdj4Kkk?si=LToItJb1Cv-GgB4q&t=1089 https://youtu.be/pW-SOdj4Kkk?si=LToItJb1Cv-GgB4q&t=1089
b_e_n_t_o_n 1y ago
> Programming and writing will become niche and humans will still be used where a quality higher than what AI can produce is needed. But most code will be done by minotaur human-ai teams, where the human has a minimal but necessary contribution to keep the AI on track... I mean, it already is. Or alternatively, we will build bigger and better things with the power of AI. Everyone talks about it replacing us, but we aren't running out of things to build. It's not like we're gonna run out of ways to improve the world, and compared to other things the digital world is unconstrained.

nwatson 1y ago

Yeah, I'm trying to branch out to build things outside my comfort zone. AI already is helpful in my normal day-to-day (backend engineer, mostly Python w/ PyCharm/Datagrip working in monorepo style), but Claude Code helped me graft on a Typescript/Javascript UI ecosystem with an independent Webstorm IDE setup that will integrate well, along with all the presumably latest build tools and package management. The research and self-education I would have needed to do this without Claude would have been extensive, and would have been nowhere as complete. I don't see any point in going back to pre-AI. And I don't generally use AI results blindly, I go back and review and set some breakpoints in an IDE and watch it do its thing.

zerocharge 1y ago

Depends on what you do, and what systems you develop for I would reckon. If it's another TODO app or some kind of table + form system that's been done to death - AI can probably have a go at creating a barebones minimal viable product. Targeting code that's outside the sweet spot of the training data ("blurry" area), you'll start to stumble. I've also found agents to be useless in large code bases with distributed logic where parts are in react, web back-end, service system). Slow and unreliable for large systems. Good for small tasks and scaffolding up proof of concepts.

simianwords 1y ago

This comment captures it. AI can do 80% of the work. I can review it later. And I spend much less time reviewing than I would have typing up everything manually. I recently used it to add some logging and exception handling. It had to be done in multiple places. A simple 2 line prompt one shotted it. Why do I need to waste time writing boring code?

ok_dad 1y ago
> Why do I need to waste time writing boring code? Some people actually enjoy that, believe it or not.
- dingnuts 1y ago
  seriously! excuse me while I cry with the artists about the robot doing the fun part. automate my goddamned dishes, not the coding! I chose this field because I liked that part ;_; honestly I've largely stopped coding for fun since Claude Code got popular. It's too expensive to use for personal projects, and it does the fun part. I don't want to pay but if I'm not using it, all I can think about is how inefficient doing everything manually is .. I'm going to get into gardening or something :(
  - rwyinuse 1y ago
    I can highly recommend gardening. Even before LLM's I found it much more satisfying than coding as a hobby.
roblh 1y ago
Are you still going to have the skills to review it a year from now? Or 5 years from now when you’ve become accustomed to only writing <20% of the code? I’m already witnessing my coworkers skills degrading because of this, and it’s only going to get worse. Programming is a language, and when you don’t use it, it fades.
- simianwords 1y ago

Davidzheng 1y ago

Why are you assuming the cases where humans can code better than AI still exists after three years say -- I think in some industries today artisanal products are also not higher quality than machine made ones.

BriggyDwiggs42 1y ago
Progress under current paradigms has gotten much slower
Zanfa 1y ago
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence and if there's one thing we've learned is that progress in AI is not linear nor predictable. We've been a few years away from fully self-driving cars for a really long time now.
dns_snek 1y ago
Because we're not even close to that happening. However I've observed a sort of cognitive decline in a few formerly experienced and extremely knowledgeable developers whom I used to respect. They happen to be the most vocal supporters of LLMs now and sometimes our discussions get so ridiculous I have to practically beg them to put the LLM down and just think about what they're saying for just 5 seconds. I think they're about a year away from believing that the sky is green if the AI says so. So maybe LLMs will win on a technicality by making us more stupid as a species.

guluarte 1y ago

Yeah, it's definitely shifting how we work. Feels like an upgrade from high-level languages, but we're still guiding the process. The performance boost is real, but once everyone adopts it, we'll probably just be building more complex things at a similar pace.

lallysingh 1y ago

Hard disagree. We'll be able to use more expressive languages with better LLM support for understanding how to express ourselves and to understand compiler results. LLMs are only good at stuff that better languages don't require you to do. After that they fall off the cliff quickly. LLMs are a communication technology, with a huge trained context of conversation. They have a long way to go before becoming anything intelligent.

lukeschlather 1y ago
LLMs lack intentionality, and they lack the ability to hold a series of precepts "in mind" and stick to those precepts. That is, if I say "I want code that satisfies properties A, B, C, D..." at some point the LLM just can't keep track of all the properties, which ones are satisfied, which ones aren't, what needs to be done or can be done to make them all satisfied. But LLMs aren't "only good at stuff that better languages don't require you to do." In fact they are very good at taking a bad function definition and turning it into an idiomatic one that does what I wanted to do. That's very intelligent, there is no language that can take a bad spec and make it specific and fit for the specified task. LLMs can. (not perfectly mind you, but faster and often better than I can.) The problem is they just can't always figure out when what they've written is off-spec. But "always" isn't "never" and I've yet to meet an intelligence that is perfect.
- tkgally 1y ago
  > LLMs ... lack the ability to hold a series of precepts "in mind" and stick to those precepts. That is perhaps the biggest weakness I've noticed lately, too. When I let Claude Code carry out long, complex tasks in YOLO mode, it often fails because it has stopped paying attention to some key requirement or condition. And this happens long before it has reached its context limit. It seems that it should be possible to avoid that through better agent design. I don't know how to do it, though.

kazinator 1y ago

> ChatGPT also knows more idioms and useful libraries than I do so I generally end up with cleaner code this way ... ... and can now measure my productivity in dependencies added per day! :)

rustystump 1y ago

Another hard disagree. The crux here is that if u are not an expert in the given domain you do not know where that missing 25% is wrong. You think you do but you dont. I have seen people bring in thousands of lines of opencv lut code in ai slop form because they didnt understand how to interpolate between two colors and didnt have the experience to know that is what they needed to do. This is the catch 20/20 of the ai expert narrative. The other part is that improvement has massively stagnated in the space. It is painfully obvious too.

A4ET8a8uTh0_v2 1y ago
<< you do not know where that missing 25% is wrong I think there is something to this line of thinking. I just finished a bigger project and without going into details, one person from team supposedly dedicated to providing viable data about data was producing odd results. Since the data was not making much sense, I asked for info on how the data was produced. I was given SQL script and 'and then we applied some regex' explanation. Long story short, I dig in and find that applied regex apparently messed with dates in an unexpected way and I knew because I knew the 'shape' that data was expected to have. I corrected it, because we were right around the deadline, but.. I noted it. Anyway, I still see llm as a tool, but I think there is some reckoning on the horizon as: 1. managers push for more use and speed given that new tool 2. getting there faster wronger, because people go with 1 and do not check the output ( or don't know how to check it or don't know when its wrong ) It won't end well, because the culture does not reward careful consideration.
- rustystump 1y ago
  Exactly. I use ai tools daily and they bite me. Not enough to stop but enough to know. Recently was building a ws merger of sorts based on another libs sub protocol. I wasnt familiar with the language or protocol but ai sure was. However the ai used a wrong id when repacking messages. Unless i knew the spec (which i didnt) i never would have known. Eventually, i did read the spec and figured it out. To be clear here i give the spec to ai many times asking what was off and it never found the issue. Once i did get it working, ai one shotted converting it from python to go with the exception of the above mistake being added back in again. You dont know what you dont know. That final 25% or 5% or whatever is where the money is at, not the 80%. Almost doesnt count.

recursive 1y ago

Engineering isn't stuck on perfect algorithms. Management is. There's lip service for AI code gen, but if my name is on a module, I still have to vouch for its correctness. If it's wrong, that might become my problem. I don't always write perfect code, but I aspire to. If I see evidence that these tools are writing more correct and reliable code than I do, then I will start to take it more seriously. For some code, it matters whether it's robust basically.

skydhash 1y ago
Yep, I don't think you'll ever see AI code near the payment system. Or the code managing the store and the cart systems.

strangattractor 1y ago

IMO LLMs have demonstrated how uncomplicated the man behind the curtain really is. If we do happen to achieve AGI it will likely have many of the problems associated with the real thing which often fails in spectacular fashion.

scotty79 1y ago

You are describing accurately where AI is now. But it wasn't there two years ago and it won't be there in two years. You still have 25% of your job today, but this will most likely gonna halve evey x-number of months. I mean I'm opposed to all work, but the transition to jobless society might be traumatic. I hope you didn't neglect to buy crypto because that's the only remaining way to spontaneously and easily tap into the wealth of the rich when the work is gone.

deleted 1y ago

[deleted]

bcrosby95 1y ago

The analogy seems to fall apart because the quality of an assembly line produced car is higher than the hand crafted one. Fords lose out because they engineer to a price point, a Ferrari doesn't have that "problem" - arguably, the more expensive the better.

vonneumannstan 1y ago
>The analogy falls apart because the quality of an assembly line produced car is higher than the hand crafted one. What? So Your Jeep Compass is higher quality than a 458?
- jazzyjackson 1y ago
  try driving a ferrari 80,000 miles without taking it into the shop...
  - vonneumannstan 1y ago
    Try driving a Jeep Compass 5000 miles without taking it into the shop lmao. Terrible example
    - jazzyjackson 1y ago
      :^)

ponector 1y ago

However, from my experience, the quality of code produced by developers in project we are working for the last 3+ years gone south. Amount of bugs now literally tripled year on year. I bet the reason is extensive use of AI tools, as the developers are the same.

utyop22 1y ago
Its because most people don't have the discipline and obsession of attention to detail to know when one should use an LLM and when one shouldn't. I highly doubt the best of the best folks are even touching LLMs (barely) because they can see the flaws and the tradeoffs that are not-so-visible to others until they are 50 levels deep, with sunk investments, unwilling to go back to how they used to do things.

godelski 1y ago

> Engineers are stuck in the old paradigm of "perfect" algorithms. Reminds me of a misinterpretation of Knuth. > Premature optimization is the root of all evil. He was definitely knocking engineers for wanting to write "perfect" algorithms, but this quote also got bastardized to mean something different from what he said (happens to many clichés). All he said was "grab a fucking profiler before you optimize." But now, I'm not sure a lot of programmers even know what a profiler is. When was the last time you saw someone profile their code? Problem is we've taken the idea of "minimum viable product" too far. People are saying "Doesn't have to be perfect, just has to work." I think most people agree. But with the current state of things? I disagree that things even work. We're so far away from the question of optimization. It's bad enough that there are apps that require several gigs to just edit a 30kb document but FFS we're living in a world where Windows Hello crashes Microsoft Outlook. It's not the programs are ugly babies that could be better, they are monstrosities begging to be put to death. I WISH we could talk about optimization. I WISH our problem was perfectionism. But right now our problem is that everything is a steaming pile of garbage and most people are just shrugging their arms like "it is the way it is". Just because you don't clean up that steaming pile of garbage doesn't mean someone else doesn't. So stop passing the buck.

trinsic2 1y ago
> Problem is we've taken the idea of "minimum viable product" too far. People are saying "Doesn't have to be perfect, just has to work." I think most people agree. But with the current state of things? I disagree that things even work. We're so far away from the question of optimization. It's bad enough that there are apps that require several gigs to just edit a 30kb document but FFS we're living in a world where Windows Hello crashes Microsoft Outlook. It's not the programs are ugly babies that could be better, they are monstrosities begging to be put to death. LOL. OMG that was beautiful. It almost feels like we are de-evolving software to a state where shit is going to stop working bad. I know this is not full of facts, but this take reminds me of Jonathan Blow's video "Preventing the Collapse of Civilization"[0] Where he talks about how code runs worse than it ever has and I think he was arguing that civilization is collapsing before our eyes in slow time. [0]: https://youtu.be/pW-SOdj4Kkk?si=LToItJb1Cv-GgB4q&t=1089 https://youtu.be/pW-SOdj4Kkk?si=LToItJb1Cv-GgB4q&t=1089

b_e_n_t_o_n 1y ago

> Programming and writing will become niche and humans will still be used where a quality higher than what AI can produce is needed. But most code will be done by minotaur human-ai teams, where the human has a minimal but necessary contribution to keep the AI on track... I mean, it already is. Or alternatively, we will build bigger and better things with the power of AI. Everyone talks about it replacing us, but we aren't running out of things to build. It's not like we're gonna run out of ways to improve the world, and compared to other things the digital world is unconstrained.