13 ms·

With all due respect, you sound like someone who is just getting familiar with these tools. 100 more hours spent with AI coding and you will be much more produc

With all due respect, you sound like someone who is just getting familiar with these tools. 100 more hours spent with AI coding and you will be much more productive. Coding with AI is a slightly different skill from coding, similar how managing software engineers is different from writing software.

TheRoque 1y ago
Then, it's the job of someone else to use these tools, not developers
- liszper 1y ago
  I agree with your point. I think this is the reason why most developers still don't get it, because AI coding ultimately requires a "higher level" methodology.
  - dgfitz 1y ago
    "Hacker culture never took root in the 'AI' gold rush because the LLM 'coders' saw themselves not as hackers and explorers, but as temporarily understaffed middle-managers." [0] This, this is you. This is the entire charade. It seems poetic somehow. [0]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45123094 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45123094
    - liszper 1y ago
      I see myself as a hacker.
      - dgfitz 1y ago
        By your own exposition, you aren’t a hacker.
        liszper 1y ago
        hackers can also cook and not become a chef
abtinf 1y ago
liszper: > most SWE folks still have no idea how big the difference is between the coding agents they tried a year ago and declared as useless and chatgpt 5 paired with Codex or Cursor today Also liszper: oh, you tried the current approach and don’t agree with me? Well you just don’t know what you are doing.
- pjc50 1y ago
  Funnily enough the same kind of approach you get from Lisp advocates and the more annoying faction of Linux advocacy (which isn't as prevalent these days, it seems)
  - liszper 1y ago
    I'm also a lisper, yes.
  - klibertp 1y ago
    > the same kind of approach you get from Lisp In what way? Lisp (Common Lisp) is the most stable and unchanging language out there. If you learned it anytime after the late 80s, you still know it, and will know it until the end of time. Meanwhile, here, we hear that "a year ago" is so much time that everything changed (for the better, of course). Or is it about needing some serious time investment to get comfortable with Lisp? Even then, once you do spend enough time that s-exprs stop being a problem, that's it; there's nothing else to be getting comfortable with, and certainly, you won't need to relearn any of that a year into the future. I don't think AI coding and Lisp are comparable, even considering just the tone of messages on the topic (as far as I can see, "smug lisp weenies" are a thing of the ancient past).
- liszper 1y ago
  Yes, exactly. Learning new things is hard. Personally it took me about 200 hours to get started, and since then ~2500 hours to get familiar with the advanced techniques, and now I'm very happy with the results, managing extremely large codebases with LLM in production. For context before that I had ~15 years of experience coding the traditional way.
ryandrake 1y ago
I'm starting to kind of dig C.C. but you're right, it definitely feels like a very confident, very ambitious high schooler level developer with infinite energy. You really have to give it very small tasks and be constantly steering its direction. At the end of the day, I'm not sure I'm really saving that much time coaching Claude to do the job right vs. just writing the code myself, but it's definitely a neat trick. The difference from an actual junior developer, of course, is that the human junior developer learns from his mistakes and gets better, but Claude seems to be stuck at the level of expertise of its model, and you have to wait for the model to improve before Claude improves.
- jonstewart 1y ago
  The thing I am calling BS on is that there's much productivity gain in giving it very small tasks and constantly steering its direction. For 80% of code, I'm faster than it if that's what I have to do. For debugging? For telling it to integrate a new tool? Port my legacy build system to something better? It's great at that, removes some important barriers to entry.
  - rmunn 1y ago
    Bingo. All my experience is on Linux, and I've never written anything for Windows. So recently when I needed to port a small C program to Windows, I told ChatGPT "Hey, port this to Windows for me". I wouldn't trust the result, I'd rewrite it myself, but it let me find out which Win32 API functions I'd be calling, and why I'd be calling them, faster than searching MSDN would have done.
jonstewart 1y ago
I think it has more to do with the kind of software I write and their requirements then it has to do with spending more time with this current tool. For some things it's great, but it's been a net productivity loss for me on my core coding responsibilities.
zmmmmm 1y ago
ah, they are holding it wrong. I am always so skeptical of this style of response. Because if it takes hundreds of hours to learn to use something, how can it really be the silver bullet everyone was claiming earlier? Surely they were all in the midst of the 100 hours. And what else could we do if we spent 100 hours learning something? It's a lot of time, a huge investment, all on faith that things will get better.
- jmatthews 1y ago
  How many hours do you have mastering git or your IDE or your library of choice for UX?

TheRoque 1y ago

Then, it's the job of someone else to use these tools, not developers

liszper 1y ago
I agree with your point. I think this is the reason why most developers still don't get it, because AI coding ultimately requires a "higher level" methodology.
- dgfitz 1y ago
  "Hacker culture never took root in the 'AI' gold rush because the LLM 'coders' saw themselves not as hackers and explorers, but as temporarily understaffed middle-managers." [0] This, this is you. This is the entire charade. It seems poetic somehow. [0]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45123094 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45123094
  - liszper 1y ago
    I see myself as a hacker.
    - dgfitz 1y ago
      By your own exposition, you aren’t a hacker.
      - liszper 1y ago
        hackers can also cook and not become a chef

abtinf 1y ago

liszper: > most SWE folks still have no idea how big the difference is between the coding agents they tried a year ago and declared as useless and chatgpt 5 paired with Codex or Cursor today Also liszper: oh, you tried the current approach and don’t agree with me? Well you just don’t know what you are doing.

pjc50 1y ago
Funnily enough the same kind of approach you get from Lisp advocates and the more annoying faction of Linux advocacy (which isn't as prevalent these days, it seems)
- liszper 1y ago
  I'm also a lisper, yes.
- klibertp 1y ago
  > the same kind of approach you get from Lisp In what way? Lisp (Common Lisp) is the most stable and unchanging language out there. If you learned it anytime after the late 80s, you still know it, and will know it until the end of time. Meanwhile, here, we hear that "a year ago" is so much time that everything changed (for the better, of course). Or is it about needing some serious time investment to get comfortable with Lisp? Even then, once you do spend enough time that s-exprs stop being a problem, that's it; there's nothing else to be getting comfortable with, and certainly, you won't need to relearn any of that a year into the future. I don't think AI coding and Lisp are comparable, even considering just the tone of messages on the topic (as far as I can see, "smug lisp weenies" are a thing of the ancient past).
liszper 1y ago
Yes, exactly. Learning new things is hard. Personally it took me about 200 hours to get started, and since then ~2500 hours to get familiar with the advanced techniques, and now I'm very happy with the results, managing extremely large codebases with LLM in production. For context before that I had ~15 years of experience coding the traditional way.

ryandrake 1y ago

I'm starting to kind of dig C.C. but you're right, it definitely feels like a very confident, very ambitious high schooler level developer with infinite energy. You really have to give it very small tasks and be constantly steering its direction. At the end of the day, I'm not sure I'm really saving that much time coaching Claude to do the job right vs. just writing the code myself, but it's definitely a neat trick. The difference from an actual junior developer, of course, is that the human junior developer learns from his mistakes and gets better, but Claude seems to be stuck at the level of expertise of its model, and you have to wait for the model to improve before Claude improves.

jonstewart 1y ago
The thing I am calling BS on is that there's much productivity gain in giving it very small tasks and constantly steering its direction. For 80% of code, I'm faster than it if that's what I have to do. For debugging? For telling it to integrate a new tool? Port my legacy build system to something better? It's great at that, removes some important barriers to entry.
- rmunn 1y ago
  Bingo. All my experience is on Linux, and I've never written anything for Windows. So recently when I needed to port a small C program to Windows, I told ChatGPT "Hey, port this to Windows for me". I wouldn't trust the result, I'd rewrite it myself, but it let me find out which Win32 API functions I'd be calling, and why I'd be calling them, faster than searching MSDN would have done.

jonstewart 1y ago

I think it has more to do with the kind of software I write and their requirements then it has to do with spending more time with this current tool. For some things it's great, but it's been a net productivity loss for me on my core coding responsibilities.

zmmmmm 1y ago

ah, they are holding it wrong. I am always so skeptical of this style of response. Because if it takes hundreds of hours to learn to use something, how can it really be the silver bullet everyone was claiming earlier? Surely they were all in the midst of the 100 hours. And what else could we do if we spent 100 hours learning something? It's a lot of time, a huge investment, all on faith that things will get better.

jmatthews 1y ago
How many hours do you have mastering git or your IDE or your library of choice for UX?