2 ms·

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 manuall

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
  What will happen is that we as developers will move one layer up in the abstraction. In the future it would seem a bit nonsensical to focus on individual lines of code and syntax because AI can more or less deal with it. We will be focusing more higher level design - which database, where the data flows, which service is used where and so on. So you will just need different skills. Coding as a skill won't be that important.
  - gmueckl 1y ago
    That is wishful thinking. Every layer we added between humans and the machines (and even the ones in the machines themselves) take hordes of dedicated humans to maintain: IDEs, compilers/interpreters, linters, CI tools, assemblers, linkers, operating systems, firmware, microcode, circuitry, circuit elements (manufacturing processes).
    - wrs 1y ago
      Just about every time somebody on this site says “we developers”, you can assume they’re ignoring the (large majority of) developers that don’t work on the same things they do, in the same way. Yes, all those ever-growing layers of intricate abstraction that you take for granted and “don’t have to worry about” are conceived of, designed, built, and maintained by developers. Who do you think wrote the compiler for that syntax you don’t want to learn?
      - simianwords 1y ago
        The point of abstraction is that it doesn’t leak. Most developers don’t need to understand compiler theory or assembly to be productive. No one in my company writes assembly. very few developers work at that level of abstraction - this means those who made the compilers are doing a good job.
        wrs 1y ago
        Yes, and very few people working on compilers do OS kernels, and very few people working on databases do compilers, etc. etc. My point is, they're all developers, so when you say "we developers", you'd better be speaking for all of them.
sureglymop 1y ago
What you shouldn't forget also is that, while AI may be good at coming up with a "first shot" solution, it may be much worse if you want to change/correct parts of it. In my experience, AI very often gets into a sort of sunk-cost fallacy (sunk prompt?) and then it is very hard to get it to make significant changes, especially architecturally. I recently wrote an extension for a popular software product and gave AI the same task. It created a perfectly working version however it was 5x the lines of code of my version because it didn't know the extension API as well, even though I gave it the full documentation. It also hard coded some stuff/solutions to challenges that we totally don't want to be hard coded. A big reason why I arrived at a much better solution was that I used a debugger to step through the code and noted down just the API interactions I needed. The AI also was convinced that some things were entirely impossible. By stepping through the code I saw that they would be possible by using parts of the internal API. I suggested a change to make the public API better for my use case in a GitHub issue and now it is totally not impossible. At the end of the day I have to conclude that, the amount of time invested guiding and massaging the AI was too much and not really worth it. I would've been better off debugging the code right away and then creating my own version. The potential for AI to do the 80% is there. At this time though I personally can't accept its results yet but that may also be due to my personal flavour of perfectionism.
kazinator 1y ago
This comment captures it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44906987 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44906987
kazinator 1y ago
> Why do I need to waste time writing boring code? The better question is: should that boring code be written? Code should only be non-boring. The boredom of writing the code is not the only problem. The subsequent continued indefinite existence of that code is also a problem.
- qaq 1y ago
  Yes who needs logging :)
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
fzeroracer 1y ago
> 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 Are you sure you're actually reviewing the code? Deeply, properly reviewing and understanding it? Because from what I've seen people that say they do, don't. That's why they 'speed up' from using LLM-generated code. The old adage that it's far harder to review code than to write it still holds true.
0xfaded 1y ago
This reminds me of the phenomenon of competence being inversely correlated with confidence until some inflection point is reached on the journey to mastery. I think the argument being put forward here is that writing that boring code is part of the journey to mastery. If you haven't crossed the inflection point, a backwards slide in skills will result in less competence and more confidence, which is a scary thought given how software runs the world.
ares623 1y ago
The fear and pain of writing boring code gave us the processes and systems we have today. i.e. microservices, (I know they have their own problems) were born out of pain from maintaining monoliths. Agile (again, own problems) was born out of pain from waterfall. What happens when all pain and boredom is taken away? Why do we need to invent new frameworks, systems, design patterns in that scenario?

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
What will happen is that we as developers will move one layer up in the abstraction. In the future it would seem a bit nonsensical to focus on individual lines of code and syntax because AI can more or less deal with it. We will be focusing more higher level design - which database, where the data flows, which service is used where and so on. So you will just need different skills. Coding as a skill won't be that important.
- gmueckl 1y ago
  That is wishful thinking. Every layer we added between humans and the machines (and even the ones in the machines themselves) take hordes of dedicated humans to maintain: IDEs, compilers/interpreters, linters, CI tools, assemblers, linkers, operating systems, firmware, microcode, circuitry, circuit elements (manufacturing processes).
  - wrs 1y ago
    Just about every time somebody on this site says “we developers”, you can assume they’re ignoring the (large majority of) developers that don’t work on the same things they do, in the same way. Yes, all those ever-growing layers of intricate abstraction that you take for granted and “don’t have to worry about” are conceived of, designed, built, and maintained by developers. Who do you think wrote the compiler for that syntax you don’t want to learn?
    - simianwords 1y ago
      The point of abstraction is that it doesn’t leak. Most developers don’t need to understand compiler theory or assembly to be productive. No one in my company writes assembly. very few developers work at that level of abstraction - this means those who made the compilers are doing a good job.
      - wrs 1y ago
        Yes, and very few people working on compilers do OS kernels, and very few people working on databases do compilers, etc. etc. My point is, they're all developers, so when you say "we developers", you'd better be speaking for all of them.

sureglymop 1y ago

What you shouldn't forget also is that, while AI may be good at coming up with a "first shot" solution, it may be much worse if you want to change/correct parts of it. In my experience, AI very often gets into a sort of sunk-cost fallacy (sunk prompt?) and then it is very hard to get it to make significant changes, especially architecturally. I recently wrote an extension for a popular software product and gave AI the same task. It created a perfectly working version however it was 5x the lines of code of my version because it didn't know the extension API as well, even though I gave it the full documentation. It also hard coded some stuff/solutions to challenges that we totally don't want to be hard coded. A big reason why I arrived at a much better solution was that I used a debugger to step through the code and noted down just the API interactions I needed. The AI also was convinced that some things were entirely impossible. By stepping through the code I saw that they would be possible by using parts of the internal API. I suggested a change to make the public API better for my use case in a GitHub issue and now it is totally not impossible. At the end of the day I have to conclude that, the amount of time invested guiding and massaging the AI was too much and not really worth it. I would've been better off debugging the code right away and then creating my own version. The potential for AI to do the 80% is there. At this time though I personally can't accept its results yet but that may also be due to my personal flavour of perfectionism.

kazinator 1y ago

This comment captures it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44906987 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44906987

kazinator 1y ago

> Why do I need to waste time writing boring code? The better question is: should that boring code be written? Code should only be non-boring. The boredom of writing the code is not the only problem. The subsequent continued indefinite existence of that code is also a problem.

qaq 1y ago
Yes who needs logging :)

deleted 1y ago

[deleted]

fzeroracer 1y ago

> 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 Are you sure you're actually reviewing the code? Deeply, properly reviewing and understanding it? Because from what I've seen people that say they do, don't. That's why they 'speed up' from using LLM-generated code. The old adage that it's far harder to review code than to write it still holds true.

0xfaded 1y ago

This reminds me of the phenomenon of competence being inversely correlated with confidence until some inflection point is reached on the journey to mastery. I think the argument being put forward here is that writing that boring code is part of the journey to mastery. If you haven't crossed the inflection point, a backwards slide in skills will result in less competence and more confidence, which is a scary thought given how software runs the world.

ares623 1y ago

The fear and pain of writing boring code gave us the processes and systems we have today. i.e. microservices, (I know they have their own problems) were born out of pain from maintaining monoliths. Agile (again, own problems) was born out of pain from waterfall. What happens when all pain and boredom is taken away? Why do we need to invent new frameworks, systems, design patterns in that scenario?