7 ms·

Having an AI is like having a dedicated assistant or junior programmer that sometimes has senior-level insights. I use it to do tedious tasks where I don't care

Having an AI is like having a dedicated assistant or junior programmer that sometimes has senior-level insights. I use it to do tedious tasks where I don't care about the code - like today I used it to generate a static web page that let me experiment with the spring-ai chat bot code I was writing - basic. But yesterday it was able to track down the cause of a very obscure bug having to do with a pom.xml loading two versions of the same library - in my experience I've spent a full day on that type of bug and Claud was able to figure it out from the exception in just minutes. But when I've used AI to generate new code for features I care about and will need to maintain it's never gotten it right. I can do it myself in less code and cleaner. It reminds me of code in the 2000s that you would get from your team in India - lots of unnecessary code copy-pasted from other projects/customers (I remember getting code for an Audi project that had method names related to McDonalds) I think though that the day is coming where I can trust the code it produces and at that point I'll just by writing specs. It's not there yet though.

andoando 7mo ago
For any non professional work its there for me. Wire up authentication system with sso. done Setup websockets, stream audio from mic, transcribe with elvenlabs. done. Shit that would take me hours takes literally 5 mins.
- leptons 7mo ago
  All that stuff would take me about 5 minutes without AI. Those are things with 10,000 examples all over the web. AI is good at distilling the known solutions. But anything even slightly out of the ordinary, it fails miserably. I'd much rather write that code myself instead of spend an hour convincing an AI to do it for me.
  - andoando 7mo ago
    There is absolutely no way. Those tasks take 5 mins to do. Itd be done by the time you read the documentation for elvenlabs
    - gedy 7mo ago
      You might be comparing people who know how to do something vs those who don't.
      - iihhhyfvhj 7mo ago
        [dead]
  - andoando 7mo ago
    Im curious though, what do you consider slightly out of the ordinary that it fails to do?
    - lpnam0201 7mo ago
      Haven't tried Claude for this, but I can't think how it could possibly do. I built a game bot using Win32 API to send input and screen capture to OCR and some OpenCV to recognize game elements. Dead simple and actually quite boring and repeatitive after I worked on it for a while. How could Claude agents possibly do this ? I did use Claude to refer docs and API, though.
      - DennisP 7mo ago
        That actually sounds like something Claude could do pretty easily. Yegge's book describes his coauthor's first vibe coding project. It went through screenshots he'd saved of youtube videos, read the time with OCR, looked up transcripts, and generated video snippets with subtitles added. (I think this was before youtube added subtitles itself.) He had it done in 45 minutes. And using agents to control other applications is pretty common.
      - in_cahoots 7mo ago
        My elementary schooler did this with pictures of his stuffed animals last week. I helped a little bit, but most of it was Claude. He's never coded before.
        leptons 7mo ago
        Great, and you've taught him to never learn to code. That's not as great an achievment as you might think it is.
        in_cahoots 7mo ago
        Yes, I've doomed him all because of a 30 minute interaction. Just like when he watched Kerbal Space Program videos on YouTube he lost all motivation to get to the moon himself. Oh wait. And he definitely doesn't make up missions using the mission builder using if / then loops. He'll never learn to code. Oh the humanity. I'd rather have my kid typing on a real keyboard into Claude, asking questions about what Python, and modifying the Claude-generated code than watching random videos and playing Roblox on his iPad.
  - coldtea 7mo ago
    >All that stuff would take me about 5 minutes without AI. No, it wouldn't. Merely finding the examples and deps would take over an hour.
    - conartist6 7mo ago
      Back when, we'd just go write a blog post or SO answer so the next person wouldn't suffer as much. Thank god THOSE days are over and everyone just lets everyone else suffer alone now
      - coldtea 7mo ago
        And when those resources dry up for newer stuff, and LLMs start training on LLM output, they'll start degrading
    - iijaachok 7mo ago
      Yes, because search engines are populated with SEO-optimized LLM-filled articles that say nothing of value anymore. The only reason AI-assisted tools are "better" is because Web search is so much worse.
      - mexicocitinluez 7mo ago
        It's like everyone forgot that the first result for anything web-related would be W3schools, and the next 5 would be spam message boards that tries to scrape all the other boards and sends you to a porn site when you click on it.
        mrbombastic 7mo ago
        Yeah it is worse now but I don’t remember it ever being good. If you know where to look and have a trusted set of resources curated sure, but of course you won’t for unfamiliar territory which is exactly what LLMs help with.
  - mexicocitinluez 7mo ago
    > All that stuff would take me about 5 minutes without AI. There isn't a single person on this planet (detractor or not) that would believe this statement. If you're argument rests on an insane amount of hyperbole (that immediately comes off as just lying), then maybe it's not a great argument. > I'd much rather write that code myself instead of spend an hour convincing an AI to do it for me. You're not suggesting that asking CC to build the UI for a route planner takes me an hour to type, are you?
    - ch4s3 7mo ago
      > There isn't a single person on this planet (detractor or not) that would believe this statement. It's so galling to see people say shit like this. It's like the old build slack in a weekend trope.
    - leptons 7mo ago
      >Wire up authentication system with sso. Simple npm install, all of it has already been distilled into dozens of similar repos. Just pick one, install it, and follow the simple use case. 5 minutes if we're in a race. >done Setup websockets If this takes you more than 5 minutes, then you're a shit developer. >stream audio from mic Again, another npm install or two, simple POC could take 5 minutes. >transcribe with elvenlabs I don't know what elvenlabs is, nor do I care, but I doubt it's as complex as the OP thinks it is considering the rest of their comment was about simple, solved problems.
triyambakam 7mo ago
This is the take when you haven't really tried driving these tools with much practice
- nickjj 7mo ago
  I don't think it's that Here's an example from Gemini with some Lua code: label = key:gsub("on%-", ""):gsub("%-", " "):gsub("(%a)([%w_']*)", function(f, r) return f:upper() .. r:lower() end) if label:find("Click") then label = label:gsub("(%a+)%s+(%a+)", "%2 %1") elseif label:find("Scroll") then label = label:gsub("(%a+)%s+(%a+)", "%2 %1") end I don't know Lua too well (which is why I used AI) but I know programming well enough to know this logic is ridiculous. It was to help convert "on-click-right" into "Right Click". The first bit of code to extract out the words is really convoluted and hard to reason about. Then look at the code in each condition. It's identical. That's already really bad. Finally, "Click" and "Scroll" are the only 2 conditions that can ever happen and the AI knew this because I explained this in an earlier prompt. So really all of that code isn't necessary at all. None of it. What I ended up doing was creating a simple map and looked up the key which had an associated value to it. No conditions or swapping logic needed and way easier to maintain. No AI used, I just looked at the Lua docs on how to create a map in Lua. This is what the above code translated to: local on_event_map = { ["on-click"] = "Left Click", ["on-click-right"] = "Right Click", ["on-click-middle"] = "Middle Click", ["on-click-backward"] = "Backward Click", ["on-click-forward"] = "Forward Click", ["on-scroll-up"] = "Scroll Up", ["on-scroll-down"] = "Scroll Down", } label = on_event_map[key] IMO the above is a lot clearer on what's happening and super easy to modify if another thing were added later, even if the key's format were different. Now imagine this. Imagine coding a whole app or a non-trivial script where the first section of code was used. You'd have thousands upon thousands of lines of gross, brittle code that's a nightmare to follow and maintain.
  - triyambakam 7mo ago
    This sounds like moving the goal posts but Gemini is generally not a good model. Try Sonnet
kansface 7mo ago
I've generated 250KLoC this week, absolutely no changes in deps or any other shenanigans. I'm not even really trying to optimize my output. I work on plans/proposals with 2 or 3 agents simultaneously in Cursor while one does work, sometimes parallelized. I can't do that in less code and cleaner. I can't do it at all. Don't wait too long.
- habinero 7mo ago
  > I've generated 250KLoC this week It's horrifying, all right, but not in the way you think lol. If you don't understand why this isn't a brag, then my job is very safe.
  - coldtea 7mo ago
    If managers can't understand why this isn't a brag, then your job is hardly safe.
    - motbus3 7mo ago
      Managers jobs are more at risk than senior engineers. My company, and few others I know reduced the number of managers by 90% or more.
      - kakacik 7mo ago
        This. We moved to 'agile' roughly at same time llms started coming. You know who is mostly missing from the wider IT teams landscape now? Most of PMs and BAs, on purpose. Who is keeping their work - devs or more like devops, surprisingly testers (since our stuff seems ridiculously complex to test well for many use cases and we can't just break our bank by destroying production by fast half-assed deliveries). And then admins/unix/network/windows/support team, nobody replacing those anytime soon. Those few PMs left are there only for big efforts requiring organizing many teams, and we rarely do those now. I don't like it, chasing people, babysitting processes and so on, but certainly just more work for me.
      - GeoAtreides 7mo ago
thangalin 7mo ago
Syntax highlighting rules, initially vibe-coded 40 languages and formats in about 10 minutes. What surprised me is when it switched the design from a class to the far more elegant single line of code: return \file_exists( $file ) ? require $file : []; * https://repo.autonoma.ca/repo/treetrek/blob/HEAD/render/Highlighter.php https://repo.autonoma.ca/repo/treetrek/blob/HEAD/render/High... The rules files: * https://repo.autonoma.ca/repo/treetrek/tree/HEAD/render/rules https://repo.autonoma.ca/repo/treetrek/tree/HEAD/render/rule...
zazibar 7mo ago
>I think though that the day is coming where I can trust the code it produces and at that point I'll just by writing specs. It's not there yet though. Must be nice to still have that choice. At the company I work for they've just announced they're cancelling all subscriptions to JetBrains, Visual Studio, Windsurf, etc. and forcing every engineer to use Claude Code as a cost-saving measure. We've been told we should be writing prompts for Claude instead of working in IDEs now.
- deadbabe 7mo ago
  I hope they are prepared to pay the $500/month per head when subsidies expire.
  - delecti 7mo ago
    Realistically that's an increase of maybe a couple percent of cost per employee. If it truly does end up being a force multiplier, 2-5% more per dev is a bargain. I think it's exceedingly unlikely that LLMs will replace devs for most companies, but it probably will speed up dev work enough to justify at least a single-digit percent increase in per-dev cost.
    - deadbabe 7mo ago
      “speeding up dev work” is pointless to a company. That benefit goes entirely to the developer and does not trickle down well. You might think “ok, we’ll just push more workload onto the developers so they stay at higher utilization!” Except most companies do not have endless amounts of new feature work. Eventually devs are mostly sitting idle. So you think “Ha! Then we’ll fire more developers and get one guy to do everything!” Another bad idea for several reason. For one, you are increasing the bus factor. Two, most work being done in companies at any given time is actually maintenance. One dev cannot maintain everything by themselves, even with the help of LLMs. More eyes on stuff means issues get resolved faster, and those eyes need to have real knowledge and experience behind them. Speed is sexy but a poor trade off for quality code architecture and expert maintainers. Unless you are a company with a literal never ending list of new things to be implemented (very few), it is of no benefit. Also don’t forget the outrage when Cursor went from $20/month to $200/month and companies quickly cancelled subscriptions…
DennisP 7mo ago
I'm halfway through Steve Yegge's book Vibe Coding. Yegge was quoted in the article: > “We’re talking 10 to 20 — to even 100 — times as productive as I’ve ever been in my career,” Steve Yegge, a veteran coder who built his own tool for running swarms of coding agents That tool has been pretty popular. It was a couple hundred thousand lines of code and he wrote it in a couple months. His book is about using AI to write major new projects and get them reliable and production-ready, with clean, readable code. It's basically a big dose of solid software engineering practices, along with enough practice to get a feel for when the AI is screwing up. He said it takes about a year to get really good at it. (Yegge, fwiw, was a lead dev at Amazon and Google, and a well-known blogger since the early 2000s.)
dehrmann 7mo ago
> pom.xml loading two versions of the same library Just checking that you're using maven-enforcer-plugin

andoando 7mo ago

For any non professional work its there for me. Wire up authentication system with sso. done Setup websockets, stream audio from mic, transcribe with elvenlabs. done. Shit that would take me hours takes literally 5 mins.

leptons 7mo ago
All that stuff would take me about 5 minutes without AI. Those are things with 10,000 examples all over the web. AI is good at distilling the known solutions. But anything even slightly out of the ordinary, it fails miserably. I'd much rather write that code myself instead of spend an hour convincing an AI to do it for me.
- andoando 7mo ago
  There is absolutely no way. Those tasks take 5 mins to do. Itd be done by the time you read the documentation for elvenlabs
  - gedy 7mo ago
    You might be comparing people who know how to do something vs those who don't.
    - iihhhyfvhj 7mo ago
      [dead]
- andoando 7mo ago
  Im curious though, what do you consider slightly out of the ordinary that it fails to do?
  - lpnam0201 7mo ago
    Haven't tried Claude for this, but I can't think how it could possibly do. I built a game bot using Win32 API to send input and screen capture to OCR and some OpenCV to recognize game elements. Dead simple and actually quite boring and repeatitive after I worked on it for a while. How could Claude agents possibly do this ? I did use Claude to refer docs and API, though.
    - DennisP 7mo ago
      That actually sounds like something Claude could do pretty easily. Yegge's book describes his coauthor's first vibe coding project. It went through screenshots he'd saved of youtube videos, read the time with OCR, looked up transcripts, and generated video snippets with subtitles added. (I think this was before youtube added subtitles itself.) He had it done in 45 minutes. And using agents to control other applications is pretty common.
    - in_cahoots 7mo ago
      My elementary schooler did this with pictures of his stuffed animals last week. I helped a little bit, but most of it was Claude. He's never coded before.
      - leptons 7mo ago
        Great, and you've taught him to never learn to code. That's not as great an achievment as you might think it is.
        in_cahoots 7mo ago
        Yes, I've doomed him all because of a 30 minute interaction. Just like when he watched Kerbal Space Program videos on YouTube he lost all motivation to get to the moon himself. Oh wait. And he definitely doesn't make up missions using the mission builder using if / then loops. He'll never learn to code. Oh the humanity. I'd rather have my kid typing on a real keyboard into Claude, asking questions about what Python, and modifying the Claude-generated code than watching random videos and playing Roblox on his iPad.
- coldtea 7mo ago
  >All that stuff would take me about 5 minutes without AI. No, it wouldn't. Merely finding the examples and deps would take over an hour.
  - conartist6 7mo ago
    Back when, we'd just go write a blog post or SO answer so the next person wouldn't suffer as much. Thank god THOSE days are over and everyone just lets everyone else suffer alone now
    - coldtea 7mo ago
      And when those resources dry up for newer stuff, and LLMs start training on LLM output, they'll start degrading
  - iijaachok 7mo ago
    Yes, because search engines are populated with SEO-optimized LLM-filled articles that say nothing of value anymore. The only reason AI-assisted tools are "better" is because Web search is so much worse.
    - mexicocitinluez 7mo ago
      It's like everyone forgot that the first result for anything web-related would be W3schools, and the next 5 would be spam message boards that tries to scrape all the other boards and sends you to a porn site when you click on it.
      - mrbombastic 7mo ago
        Yeah it is worse now but I don’t remember it ever being good. If you know where to look and have a trusted set of resources curated sure, but of course you won’t for unfamiliar territory which is exactly what LLMs help with.
- mexicocitinluez 7mo ago
  > All that stuff would take me about 5 minutes without AI. There isn't a single person on this planet (detractor or not) that would believe this statement. If you're argument rests on an insane amount of hyperbole (that immediately comes off as just lying), then maybe it's not a great argument. > I'd much rather write that code myself instead of spend an hour convincing an AI to do it for me. You're not suggesting that asking CC to build the UI for a route planner takes me an hour to type, are you?
  - ch4s3 7mo ago
    > There isn't a single person on this planet (detractor or not) that would believe this statement. It's so galling to see people say shit like this. It's like the old build slack in a weekend trope.
  - leptons 7mo ago
    >Wire up authentication system with sso. Simple npm install, all of it has already been distilled into dozens of similar repos. Just pick one, install it, and follow the simple use case. 5 minutes if we're in a race. >done Setup websockets If this takes you more than 5 minutes, then you're a shit developer. >stream audio from mic Again, another npm install or two, simple POC could take 5 minutes. >transcribe with elvenlabs I don't know what elvenlabs is, nor do I care, but I doubt it's as complex as the OP thinks it is considering the rest of their comment was about simple, solved problems.

triyambakam 7mo ago

This is the take when you haven't really tried driving these tools with much practice

nickjj 7mo ago
I don't think it's that Here's an example from Gemini with some Lua code: label = key:gsub("on%-", ""):gsub("%-", " "):gsub("(%a)([%w_']*)", function(f, r) return f:upper() .. r:lower() end) if label:find("Click") then label = label:gsub("(%a+)%s+(%a+)", "%2 %1") elseif label:find("Scroll") then label = label:gsub("(%a+)%s+(%a+)", "%2 %1") end I don't know Lua too well (which is why I used AI) but I know programming well enough to know this logic is ridiculous. It was to help convert "on-click-right" into "Right Click". The first bit of code to extract out the words is really convoluted and hard to reason about. Then look at the code in each condition. It's identical. That's already really bad. Finally, "Click" and "Scroll" are the only 2 conditions that can ever happen and the AI knew this because I explained this in an earlier prompt. So really all of that code isn't necessary at all. None of it. What I ended up doing was creating a simple map and looked up the key which had an associated value to it. No conditions or swapping logic needed and way easier to maintain. No AI used, I just looked at the Lua docs on how to create a map in Lua. This is what the above code translated to: local on_event_map = { ["on-click"] = "Left Click", ["on-click-right"] = "Right Click", ["on-click-middle"] = "Middle Click", ["on-click-backward"] = "Backward Click", ["on-click-forward"] = "Forward Click", ["on-scroll-up"] = "Scroll Up", ["on-scroll-down"] = "Scroll Down", } label = on_event_map[key] IMO the above is a lot clearer on what's happening and super easy to modify if another thing were added later, even if the key's format were different. Now imagine this. Imagine coding a whole app or a non-trivial script where the first section of code was used. You'd have thousands upon thousands of lines of gross, brittle code that's a nightmare to follow and maintain.
- triyambakam 7mo ago
  This sounds like moving the goal posts but Gemini is generally not a good model. Try Sonnet

kansface 7mo ago

I've generated 250KLoC this week, absolutely no changes in deps or any other shenanigans. I'm not even really trying to optimize my output. I work on plans/proposals with 2 or 3 agents simultaneously in Cursor while one does work, sometimes parallelized. I can't do that in less code and cleaner. I can't do it at all. Don't wait too long.

habinero 7mo ago
> I've generated 250KLoC this week It's horrifying, all right, but not in the way you think lol. If you don't understand why this isn't a brag, then my job is very safe.
- coldtea 7mo ago
  If managers can't understand why this isn't a brag, then your job is hardly safe.
  - motbus3 7mo ago
    Managers jobs are more at risk than senior engineers. My company, and few others I know reduced the number of managers by 90% or more.
    - kakacik 7mo ago
      This. We moved to 'agile' roughly at same time llms started coming. You know who is mostly missing from the wider IT teams landscape now? Most of PMs and BAs, on purpose. Who is keeping their work - devs or more like devops, surprisingly testers (since our stuff seems ridiculously complex to test well for many use cases and we can't just break our bank by destroying production by fast half-assed deliveries). And then admins/unix/network/windows/support team, nobody replacing those anytime soon. Those few PMs left are there only for big efforts requiring organizing many teams, and we rarely do those now. I don't like it, chasing people, babysitting processes and so on, but certainly just more work for me.
    - GeoAtreides 7mo ago

thangalin 7mo ago

Syntax highlighting rules, initially vibe-coded 40 languages and formats in about 10 minutes. What surprised me is when it switched the design from a class to the far more elegant single line of code: return \file_exists( $file ) ? require $file : []; * https://repo.autonoma.ca/repo/treetrek/blob/HEAD/render/Highlighter.php https://repo.autonoma.ca/repo/treetrek/blob/HEAD/render/High... The rules files: * https://repo.autonoma.ca/repo/treetrek/tree/HEAD/render/rules https://repo.autonoma.ca/repo/treetrek/tree/HEAD/render/rule...

zazibar 7mo ago

>I think though that the day is coming where I can trust the code it produces and at that point I'll just by writing specs. It's not there yet though. Must be nice to still have that choice. At the company I work for they've just announced they're cancelling all subscriptions to JetBrains, Visual Studio, Windsurf, etc. and forcing every engineer to use Claude Code as a cost-saving measure. We've been told we should be writing prompts for Claude instead of working in IDEs now.

deadbabe 7mo ago
I hope they are prepared to pay the $500/month per head when subsidies expire.
- delecti 7mo ago
  Realistically that's an increase of maybe a couple percent of cost per employee. If it truly does end up being a force multiplier, 2-5% more per dev is a bargain. I think it's exceedingly unlikely that LLMs will replace devs for most companies, but it probably will speed up dev work enough to justify at least a single-digit percent increase in per-dev cost.
  - deadbabe 7mo ago
    “speeding up dev work” is pointless to a company. That benefit goes entirely to the developer and does not trickle down well. You might think “ok, we’ll just push more workload onto the developers so they stay at higher utilization!” Except most companies do not have endless amounts of new feature work. Eventually devs are mostly sitting idle. So you think “Ha! Then we’ll fire more developers and get one guy to do everything!” Another bad idea for several reason. For one, you are increasing the bus factor. Two, most work being done in companies at any given time is actually maintenance. One dev cannot maintain everything by themselves, even with the help of LLMs. More eyes on stuff means issues get resolved faster, and those eyes need to have real knowledge and experience behind them. Speed is sexy but a poor trade off for quality code architecture and expert maintainers. Unless you are a company with a literal never ending list of new things to be implemented (very few), it is of no benefit. Also don’t forget the outrage when Cursor went from $20/month to $200/month and companies quickly cancelled subscriptions…

DennisP 7mo ago

I'm halfway through Steve Yegge's book Vibe Coding. Yegge was quoted in the article: > “We’re talking 10 to 20 — to even 100 — times as productive as I’ve ever been in my career,” Steve Yegge, a veteran coder who built his own tool for running swarms of coding agents That tool has been pretty popular. It was a couple hundred thousand lines of code and he wrote it in a couple months. His book is about using AI to write major new projects and get them reliable and production-ready, with clean, readable code. It's basically a big dose of solid software engineering practices, along with enough practice to get a feel for when the AI is screwing up. He said it takes about a year to get really good at it. (Yegge, fwiw, was a lead dev at Amazon and Google, and a well-known blogger since the early 2000s.)

dehrmann 7mo ago

> pom.xml loading two versions of the same library Just checking that you're using maven-enforcer-plugin