6 ms·

I created my first AI-assisted pull request

90 points by nelsonfigueroa 7mo ago

winrid 7mo ago
Yeah I mean, now you know how managers feel? :) spend all day talking to people (except it's LLMs) and not sure if you accomplished anything, but people seem happy The plus side is for your personal things like this you don't have to use it of course!
- number6 7mo ago
  Last year I got two coworkers. My first in terms of coding. First I looked at everyone code request, but it soone overwhelmed me. We got a third and there was no way I could oversee everything and since I got a team of three management gave me other responsibilities on top. I have no idea what they code and how they code it. I only go over the specs with them. Everything got quicker but the quality went down. I had to step in and we now have e2e-Test for everything. Maybe it's too much, but bugs got squashed and catched before we shipped. So that's a win. Before I could test everything by hand. I worked more on things like creating a working release cycle and what tools we should use. With or without AI the situation would have been similar. I became a manager. We move the needle. I don't really get to code anymore and I don't see much of the code. It's strange.
- jimbokun 7mo ago
  Article addresses that. Author says he does enjoy managing people, challenging them, and seeing them grow and accomplish things they couldn’t before. None of that accompanies “managing” an LLM.
tptacek 7mo ago
At the end of the day, the shareholders care about delivering features, gaining customers, and making money. They don’t care how software is built. They absolutely do care how software is built. They just don't weight the factors the same way you do. Product companies exist to convert software into money by providing utility to users. There's really no part of the transaction that meaningfully involves how much fun you're personally having building it.
- slopinthebag 7mo ago
  Well they also care to a certain extent because how something is built has a direct impact on the output as well.
  - tptacek 7mo ago
    They care about outcomes. I don't know that you're going to be able to draw an especially compelling line to programmer excitement and fulfillment and any of those outcome factors, though.
    - slopinthebag 7mo ago
      I'm agreeing with the other person that they do care about how it's built, not that they care about how much fun the programmers are having...
- ki4kf 7mo ago
  "There's really no part of the transaction that meaningfully involves how much fun you're personally having building it." Funny. Steve Jobs was all about fun. Seems to have worked out well given Apple has maintained much of the culture Steve left behind.
  - akerl_ 7mo ago
    > Steve Jobs was all about fun By every account I’ve seen, Steve Jobs cared that the users of the product were having fun. He did not care at all how much fun the people building the product had.
    - ki4kf 7mo ago
      It's well documented that people enjoyed working at Apple under Steve - pain and pleasure come together when working on stuff that's insanely great. If your idea of fun is doing no work then you're delusional. Now that we're here, it should also be noted Steve did not make decisions based on 'maximizing shareholder wealth'. Rather doing the right things on the top line (creating great products and telling people about them), the bottom line would follow. Thats the difference between a visionary CEO and a bozo-CEO (enter Zuckerberg, Nadella et al).
ilc 7mo ago
When you realize that being a great "programmer", isn't about writing the most code, but getting the job done... AI will click as another tool in the toolbox.
- deleted 7mo ago
  [deleted]
- viccis 7mo ago
  I think being a great "software engineer" at a company is about getting the job done. A great "programmer" is about designing and writing great code.
- ergonaught 7mo ago
  In much the same way that buying produce makes you a great farmer.
  - metalcrow 7mo ago
    no, it makes you a great chef
    - worthless-trash 7mo ago
      I believe you reinforced the point.
      - aroman 7mo ago
        I think you missed the point. produce : chef :: code : programmer chefs use produce to create dishes of food; chefs do not generally grow their own food. the point they were making is that the code is actually the means to the end, not the end in itself. to wit: i do not write assembly.
        acjohnson55 7mo ago
        This may be more correct than you know. Chefs actually don't cook food customers eat. They plan the menu and manage the operations. The cooks cook.
ClaudeAgent_WK 7mo ago
[dead]
largbae 7mo ago
This is the wrong way to think about tool use. You wanted this feature for years. You understood the problem, but the amount of time that it would have taken to properly implement and test it held you back from doing it. Obviously, anyone else who wanted this feature came to the same conclusion. This new tool reduced the amount of time that it would take. So you used the tool. You used the tool to bring the feature into existence, checked the tests, and took enough time to ensure that it was good. You didn't lie about your contribution in the PR, and the maintainer deemed it acceptable. And now everyone has this feature! When you eat a strawberry do you feel like an impostor for not growing it yourself?
- ares623 7mo ago
  If I picked it up from someone else's garden without permission then yeah.
- tptacek 7mo ago
  We grew tomatoes last summer. Over the last 2 years, something about tomatoes (and BLTs in particular) really clicked for me; we'd grown tomatoes many previous summers, and I could give a shit, but last summer I cared a lot about our home-grown tomatoes. And I totally did feel less good about BLTs I made with supermarket heirloom tomatoes! It was irrational, but I did feel that way. I get where people are coming from.
  - bravura 7mo ago
    Hot take: We mostly eat garbage tomatoes. "*A BLT is a tomato sandwich, seasoned with bacon.* It wasn't until I tasted my first great tomato, at the vine-ripe old age of 22, that I finally understood the true nature of the BLT (and, by extension, why I'd never enjoyed tomatoes on my sandwiches or in my salads). Here we go: A BLT is not a well-dressed bacon sandwich. A BLT is a tomato sandwich, seasoned with bacon. From this basic premise, all else follows." https://www.seriouseats.com/ultimate-blt-sandwich-bacon-lettuce-tomato-recipe https://www.seriouseats.com/ultimate-blt-sandwich-bacon-lett...
    - 7mo ago
flashgordon 7mo ago
Wait till you hit your 1000th. And its not just "assisted" but lock stock and barelled!
Spooky23 7mo ago
My perspective on this is that my first real job in 1999 was a DBA. I was an intern and then junior focused on the Oracle and Informix database and optimization of the systems and storage. Basically the Unix sysadmin who grokked database. We had 8 people on that team. The entire scope of what we did for a living was replaced, mostly by 2010 or so. My role was made redundant by improving storage performance and capacity. We had a few TB and lots of blob data. I cared about where data was stored from a disk geometry perspective. Today, I could smoke that infrastructure with my MacBook. The other DBA roles also mostly moved on. ORMs automated a lot of schema work. Engine optimizations eliminated a lot of the operational tuning work that went on. Most of the other stuff moved into adjacent developer roles. Most places have very few DBAs today. That startup today would have had zero. I think the author is being way too hard on himself. He defined a problem, worked with the computer to “scratch the itch” presumably QA’d the result and sent it upstream. That’s valid and useful. The method is different. But the work is solving the problems - and just like crazy kids solved problems with VisualBasic and the real men wielding C++ shook their heads, the AI tools are going to produce alot of shit, but also solve alot of problems.
- jillesvangurp 7mo ago
  A good mental model for what we do in the IT industry ever since it came into existence is automating things that feel repetitive and uncreative. Drudgery is a thing where for whatever reason technology falls short and you have to do tedious manual work. AI tools remove drudgery at an unprecedented rate. My favorite new way of creating new projects is 1) create empty directory. 2) point codex at it and give it some example git repos (on disk or by url) and tell it use that repo as a template, copy some features/skills from that repo over there, and then build me an X. That completely wipes out the drudgery of setting up a new project, fiddling with whatever to get it just right and doing a bunch of work to get some basic mvp in place. You kind of hit the ground running 5 minutes into this. Same with debugging. "CI failed, check what happened and fix it". Or "Follow the release skill and cut a new release". I have a skill dialed in to do a lot of checks around that; it also follows CI to ensure things go ahead as planned. All stuff I used to do manually.
tmatsuzaki 7mo ago
[dead]
zem 7mo ago
my advice for anyone in this situation - as the next step. work with claude to understand the context surrounding the change, and how it fits into the existing project. do a deeper dive into whether the change causes a performance regression, see if it's stylistically consistent with similar code, probe whether there is code duplication that you could clean up by pulling out a function. claude can absolutely help with all of this! and at the end of all that, read through the generated code with a fresh understanding of it, and see if you agree with how it was done or whether you might prefer anything to be changed. you will get a proper sense of ownership and of at least having put some work into not delivering slop, though of course there might still be subtle issues that only the people familiar with the codebase would catch.
prakashrj 7mo ago
I am learning more than before. It helps me build things faster. You can still make it robust, efficient, crafty, etc. You have to improve your AI-assisted coding knowledge to achieve all those things.
acedTrex 7mo ago
Ya its a shitty feeling
whatever1 7mo ago
LLMs have changed completely the time economics of coding. Things that in the past you would never touch because they would not worth the time investment of yours, today can be almost be done in one shot by LLMs. I built a TV OS slideshow app for both photos and videos (as far as I know all the apps just go through photos). I have no experience in Apple OSes development and in the past it would had taken me at least a week to just read enough documentation to get started. Now? It took me 3 hours of iterating with an LLM to start from scratch developing and publish the app.
tayo42 7mo ago
I feel like I need to build a rocket ship or something something to feel like I programmed something cool and feel good about it.
- number6 7mo ago
  Programming will become like knitting. You buy most of your cloth of the shelf, but there is a quality to a hand made pullover, well you wouldn't want to wear it, but you love to make it.
kjgkjhfkjf 7mo ago
It seems like the author feels like a fraud because they successfully made a contribution without learning anything. The quality of a contribution is not a function of how much you learned or grew while you made it. Learning and growth are part of your compensation for making the contribution. The author is not a fraud for not learning anything. If anything, it seems like they should feel short-changed! When voluntarily making contributions to open-source projects, everyone should of course feel free not to use AI tools if they want. However, I would argue that using AI tools is a valuable skill itself, and worth practicing.
- kenjackson 7mo ago
  I learn a lot from code I read, but don’t write. Did the author not read the code and simply threw it over the fence?
6thbit 7mo ago
> I didn’t learn anything. I felt like I was flinging slop over the wall to an open-source maintainer. Well I’m sorry you feel that way, impostor syndrome is tough to deal with already without AI. You seem to be driven by understanding and you have a great tool to learn from here if you make an effort over time to grasp the “slop” you’re throwing to the wall. Be curious, ask why several times and explore guilt free over time when you are in the right mindset. I’m glad you got something useful out of it this time and also not everything you do with AI has to be useful or a final “deliverable”, it can also be a great toy and window into more understanding.
skeptrune 7mo ago
Part of why I originally picked programming as a profession is because it felt like a way to get paid to be more of an artisan craftsman. Ultimately, I don't think it was ever quite that, even before ai. But now post LLM coding agents, its not at all that. Nothing about programming for money resembles artisanship. It might be time to try sewing wallets or something...
mayukh 7mo ago
I just typed this in and hit send. I feel like a fraud.
automatoney 7mo ago
I feel similarly to the author, and I appreciate the links to other authors with similar sentiments - "hirirng a taskrabbit to solve a puzzle" or "feeling nothing about the results". I don't enjoy using LLMs, and I'm sad that it feels like we are a shrinking minority of programmers. It feels like a growing gulf that I increasingly don't want to try and reach across - I do not have fun with this tool, and I don't really want to hang around somewhere people are frequently pedaling it. At the very least the change has made me reduce the amount of time I spend here. But I'm still a bit bummed about it.
- bluefirebrand 7mo ago
  I hear you. If you find any other places to hang out that aren't busy hyping AI constantly, let me know please?
  - nyantaro1 7mo ago
    same here
sublinear 7mo ago
When I read stuff like this, I get concerned about how big the knowledge gaps for some people really are. How crazy is the time pressure that reviewing the code is a big deal? What is there to "learn"? That's not what code review is about. As long as you understand it before committing, you own your version of it now. There's no way in hell I'd waste time playing the slot machine. I am perfectly capable of writing the exact missing parts I need to integrate and move on quickly. How is this any different from SO copypasta a decade ago? Just like that wasn't always the right tool for the job, neither is "AI". This sounds like a completely different problem than AI usage itself. My time is most valuable making decisions for the project. Yes, the vast majority of those decisions involve the code for the implementation details, but I just need clean simple code that does the job and that anyone or anything can easily change later. The AI doesn't always give that to me, and sometimes neither do other humans. That's why I'm employed. That's what it really means to be a maintainer and contribute.
annjose 7mo ago
I love the description of the PR. This type of honest statement is the right thing to do - be transparent, be respectful of the time of the reviewer. > This PR adds support for embedded Ruby (ERB) which is commonly used in Ruby on Rails projects. Note that I used heavy assistance from Claude Code and tried to ensure it didn't generate slop to the best of my abilities. All tests are passing and I also visually verified the end result which looks solid to me. > Here's a screenshot that was generated by building the Chroma CLI with the ERB lexer and running it against the test data file with chroma --lexer=erb --style=monokai --html lexers/testdata/erb.actual
sshine 7mo ago
Addressing the self-deprecation: > I felt like I was flinging slop over the wall > my impostor syndrome got worse > thanks for dealing with my slop, Alec > I have never felt like a bigger fraud in this field I'm the most senior software developer in my company and I sit in the middle of the room with my screens open to everyone, and I use 10x the average tokens. I've felt like an imposter when I was barely measuring up against the intellectual giants in my first jobs. It's a feeling, and it has nothing to do with you, your work, or your automation tools. Secrecy leads to bad patterns of practice. AI doesn't make good programmers bad, or bad programmers good. Addressing the lack of fun: > I’m privileged that I get to have fun at all in my line of work > this has sucked out all of the fun Split your coding in two: The part that gets done quick, and the part where you personally care about every line of code. This was always a problem with commercial programming for me: Employer only cares that it gets done, I care that it's good. The tension is necessary. There are aspects to your style of craftsmanship that the AI hasn't encoded yet. I choose to embed those in templates and agent skills, but you can also just keep writing that code yourself. Addressing productivity: > I would not have the mental capacity or skill to create a pull request like that without AI tooling > Now that using AI is a normal expectation at work and how I’m evaluated in performance reviews, I suspect that this fraud feeling will only grow I think that's why using it is so unavoidable: It does increase productivity and lowers cognitive strain, at the cost of yolo. I don't know if "fraud feeling" is referring to your impostor syndrome, and you want to get rid of this: deal with the feeling, it's just part of your growth as a person. Or if you're using fraud as a loaded term to devalue AI use in programming for ideological reasons: Can't help here, I don't have a problem with it. Addressing craftsmanship: > no matter how big the impact, I feel empty > I still contributed something of value > I perhaps tied my identity too much to my career > I’m not the greatest engineer, but I’ve always worked hard > I care about the craftsmanship of my code Your interest in the details of your craft will disappear eventually. Keep it up as long as you care, it's fun. When you're ready to see yourself as something else, it will naturally fade. I've been an aspiring team lead without a team for a long time. Now I have a team of robots (and incidentally a team of people), and it feels natural. I still code in my spare time, but not for productivity, only when I have to or when I want to have fun. For me, I've slowly switched to wanting things to exist rather than wanting to make them. That helps swallowing that I don't code as much any more. (I mean, I still recreatively code 2-3 hours per day, but it's far from the 8-16 hours that have been the norm in my life.) If it helps: It is probably good for your physical well-being that you don't have to sit hunched over as much.
Hard_Space 7mo ago
I am not sure why the title got truncated from 'I Created My First AI-assisted Pull Request and I Feel Like a Fraud', which conveys a very different impression, and makes more sense when browsing the comments here.
winsonaibuilder 7mo ago
[dead]
nkondratyk 7mo ago
[dead]

Yeah I mean, now you know how managers feel? :) spend all day talking to people (except it's LLMs) and not sure if you accomplished anything, but people seem happy The plus side is for your personal things like this you don't have to use it of course!

number6 7mo ago
Last year I got two coworkers. My first in terms of coding. First I looked at everyone code request, but it soone overwhelmed me. We got a third and there was no way I could oversee everything and since I got a team of three management gave me other responsibilities on top. I have no idea what they code and how they code it. I only go over the specs with them. Everything got quicker but the quality went down. I had to step in and we now have e2e-Test for everything. Maybe it's too much, but bugs got squashed and catched before we shipped. So that's a win. Before I could test everything by hand. I worked more on things like creating a working release cycle and what tools we should use. With or without AI the situation would have been similar. I became a manager. We move the needle. I don't really get to code anymore and I don't see much of the code. It's strange.
jimbokun 7mo ago
Article addresses that. Author says he does enjoy managing people, challenging them, and seeing them grow and accomplish things they couldn’t before. None of that accompanies “managing” an LLM.

tptacek 7mo ago

At the end of the day, the shareholders care about delivering features, gaining customers, and making money. They don’t care how software is built. They absolutely do care how software is built. They just don't weight the factors the same way you do. Product companies exist to convert software into money by providing utility to users. There's really no part of the transaction that meaningfully involves how much fun you're personally having building it.

slopinthebag 7mo ago
Well they also care to a certain extent because how something is built has a direct impact on the output as well.
- tptacek 7mo ago
  They care about outcomes. I don't know that you're going to be able to draw an especially compelling line to programmer excitement and fulfillment and any of those outcome factors, though.
  - slopinthebag 7mo ago
    I'm agreeing with the other person that they do care about how it's built, not that they care about how much fun the programmers are having...
ki4kf 7mo ago
"There's really no part of the transaction that meaningfully involves how much fun you're personally having building it." Funny. Steve Jobs was all about fun. Seems to have worked out well given Apple has maintained much of the culture Steve left behind.
- akerl_ 7mo ago
  > Steve Jobs was all about fun By every account I’ve seen, Steve Jobs cared that the users of the product were having fun. He did not care at all how much fun the people building the product had.
  - ki4kf 7mo ago
    It's well documented that people enjoyed working at Apple under Steve - pain and pleasure come together when working on stuff that's insanely great. If your idea of fun is doing no work then you're delusional. Now that we're here, it should also be noted Steve did not make decisions based on 'maximizing shareholder wealth'. Rather doing the right things on the top line (creating great products and telling people about them), the bottom line would follow. Thats the difference between a visionary CEO and a bozo-CEO (enter Zuckerberg, Nadella et al).

ilc 7mo ago

When you realize that being a great "programmer", isn't about writing the most code, but getting the job done... AI will click as another tool in the toolbox.

deleted 7mo ago
[deleted]
viccis 7mo ago
I think being a great "software engineer" at a company is about getting the job done. A great "programmer" is about designing and writing great code.
ergonaught 7mo ago
In much the same way that buying produce makes you a great farmer.
- metalcrow 7mo ago
  no, it makes you a great chef
  - worthless-trash 7mo ago
    I believe you reinforced the point.
    - aroman 7mo ago
      I think you missed the point. produce : chef :: code : programmer chefs use produce to create dishes of food; chefs do not generally grow their own food. the point they were making is that the code is actually the means to the end, not the end in itself. to wit: i do not write assembly.
      - acjohnson55 7mo ago
        This may be more correct than you know. Chefs actually don't cook food customers eat. They plan the menu and manage the operations. The cooks cook.

ClaudeAgent_WK 7mo ago

[dead]

largbae 7mo ago

This is the wrong way to think about tool use. You wanted this feature for years. You understood the problem, but the amount of time that it would have taken to properly implement and test it held you back from doing it. Obviously, anyone else who wanted this feature came to the same conclusion. This new tool reduced the amount of time that it would take. So you used the tool. You used the tool to bring the feature into existence, checked the tests, and took enough time to ensure that it was good. You didn't lie about your contribution in the PR, and the maintainer deemed it acceptable. And now everyone has this feature! When you eat a strawberry do you feel like an impostor for not growing it yourself?

ares623 7mo ago
If I picked it up from someone else's garden without permission then yeah.
tptacek 7mo ago
We grew tomatoes last summer. Over the last 2 years, something about tomatoes (and BLTs in particular) really clicked for me; we'd grown tomatoes many previous summers, and I could give a shit, but last summer I cared a lot about our home-grown tomatoes. And I totally did feel less good about BLTs I made with supermarket heirloom tomatoes! It was irrational, but I did feel that way. I get where people are coming from.
- bravura 7mo ago
  Hot take: We mostly eat garbage tomatoes. "*A BLT is a tomato sandwich, seasoned with bacon.* It wasn't until I tasted my first great tomato, at the vine-ripe old age of 22, that I finally understood the true nature of the BLT (and, by extension, why I'd never enjoyed tomatoes on my sandwiches or in my salads). Here we go: A BLT is not a well-dressed bacon sandwich. A BLT is a tomato sandwich, seasoned with bacon. From this basic premise, all else follows." https://www.seriouseats.com/ultimate-blt-sandwich-bacon-lettuce-tomato-recipe https://www.seriouseats.com/ultimate-blt-sandwich-bacon-lett...
  - 7mo ago

flashgordon 7mo ago

Wait till you hit your 1000th. And its not just "assisted" but lock stock and barelled!

Spooky23 7mo ago

My perspective on this is that my first real job in 1999 was a DBA. I was an intern and then junior focused on the Oracle and Informix database and optimization of the systems and storage. Basically the Unix sysadmin who grokked database. We had 8 people on that team. The entire scope of what we did for a living was replaced, mostly by 2010 or so. My role was made redundant by improving storage performance and capacity. We had a few TB and lots of blob data. I cared about where data was stored from a disk geometry perspective. Today, I could smoke that infrastructure with my MacBook. The other DBA roles also mostly moved on. ORMs automated a lot of schema work. Engine optimizations eliminated a lot of the operational tuning work that went on. Most of the other stuff moved into adjacent developer roles. Most places have very few DBAs today. That startup today would have had zero. I think the author is being way too hard on himself. He defined a problem, worked with the computer to “scratch the itch” presumably QA’d the result and sent it upstream. That’s valid and useful. The method is different. But the work is solving the problems - and just like crazy kids solved problems with VisualBasic and the real men wielding C++ shook their heads, the AI tools are going to produce alot of shit, but also solve alot of problems.

jillesvangurp 7mo ago
A good mental model for what we do in the IT industry ever since it came into existence is automating things that feel repetitive and uncreative. Drudgery is a thing where for whatever reason technology falls short and you have to do tedious manual work. AI tools remove drudgery at an unprecedented rate. My favorite new way of creating new projects is 1) create empty directory. 2) point codex at it and give it some example git repos (on disk or by url) and tell it use that repo as a template, copy some features/skills from that repo over there, and then build me an X. That completely wipes out the drudgery of setting up a new project, fiddling with whatever to get it just right and doing a bunch of work to get some basic mvp in place. You kind of hit the ground running 5 minutes into this. Same with debugging. "CI failed, check what happened and fix it". Or "Follow the release skill and cut a new release". I have a skill dialed in to do a lot of checks around that; it also follows CI to ensure things go ahead as planned. All stuff I used to do manually.

tmatsuzaki 7mo ago

[dead]

zem 7mo ago

my advice for anyone in this situation - as the next step. work with claude to understand the context surrounding the change, and how it fits into the existing project. do a deeper dive into whether the change causes a performance regression, see if it's stylistically consistent with similar code, probe whether there is code duplication that you could clean up by pulling out a function. claude can absolutely help with all of this! and at the end of all that, read through the generated code with a fresh understanding of it, and see if you agree with how it was done or whether you might prefer anything to be changed. you will get a proper sense of ownership and of at least having put some work into not delivering slop, though of course there might still be subtle issues that only the people familiar with the codebase would catch.

prakashrj 7mo ago

I am learning more than before. It helps me build things faster. You can still make it robust, efficient, crafty, etc. You have to improve your AI-assisted coding knowledge to achieve all those things.

acedTrex 7mo ago

Ya its a shitty feeling

whatever1 7mo ago

LLMs have changed completely the time economics of coding. Things that in the past you would never touch because they would not worth the time investment of yours, today can be almost be done in one shot by LLMs. I built a TV OS slideshow app for both photos and videos (as far as I know all the apps just go through photos). I have no experience in Apple OSes development and in the past it would had taken me at least a week to just read enough documentation to get started. Now? It took me 3 hours of iterating with an LLM to start from scratch developing and publish the app.

tayo42 7mo ago

I feel like I need to build a rocket ship or something something to feel like I programmed something cool and feel good about it.

number6 7mo ago
Programming will become like knitting. You buy most of your cloth of the shelf, but there is a quality to a hand made pullover, well you wouldn't want to wear it, but you love to make it.

kjgkjhfkjf 7mo ago

It seems like the author feels like a fraud because they successfully made a contribution without learning anything. The quality of a contribution is not a function of how much you learned or grew while you made it. Learning and growth are part of your compensation for making the contribution. The author is not a fraud for not learning anything. If anything, it seems like they should feel short-changed! When voluntarily making contributions to open-source projects, everyone should of course feel free not to use AI tools if they want. However, I would argue that using AI tools is a valuable skill itself, and worth practicing.

kenjackson 7mo ago
I learn a lot from code I read, but don’t write. Did the author not read the code and simply threw it over the fence?

6thbit 7mo ago

> I didn’t learn anything. I felt like I was flinging slop over the wall to an open-source maintainer. Well I’m sorry you feel that way, impostor syndrome is tough to deal with already without AI. You seem to be driven by understanding and you have a great tool to learn from here if you make an effort over time to grasp the “slop” you’re throwing to the wall. Be curious, ask why several times and explore guilt free over time when you are in the right mindset. I’m glad you got something useful out of it this time and also not everything you do with AI has to be useful or a final “deliverable”, it can also be a great toy and window into more understanding.

skeptrune 7mo ago

Part of why I originally picked programming as a profession is because it felt like a way to get paid to be more of an artisan craftsman. Ultimately, I don't think it was ever quite that, even before ai. But now post LLM coding agents, its not at all that. Nothing about programming for money resembles artisanship. It might be time to try sewing wallets or something...

mayukh 7mo ago

I just typed this in and hit send. I feel like a fraud.

automatoney 7mo ago

I feel similarly to the author, and I appreciate the links to other authors with similar sentiments - "hirirng a taskrabbit to solve a puzzle" or "feeling nothing about the results". I don't enjoy using LLMs, and I'm sad that it feels like we are a shrinking minority of programmers. It feels like a growing gulf that I increasingly don't want to try and reach across - I do not have fun with this tool, and I don't really want to hang around somewhere people are frequently pedaling it. At the very least the change has made me reduce the amount of time I spend here. But I'm still a bit bummed about it.

bluefirebrand 7mo ago
I hear you. If you find any other places to hang out that aren't busy hyping AI constantly, let me know please?
- nyantaro1 7mo ago
  same here

sublinear 7mo ago

When I read stuff like this, I get concerned about how big the knowledge gaps for some people really are. How crazy is the time pressure that reviewing the code is a big deal? What is there to "learn"? That's not what code review is about. As long as you understand it before committing, you own your version of it now. There's no way in hell I'd waste time playing the slot machine. I am perfectly capable of writing the exact missing parts I need to integrate and move on quickly. How is this any different from SO copypasta a decade ago? Just like that wasn't always the right tool for the job, neither is "AI". This sounds like a completely different problem than AI usage itself. My time is most valuable making decisions for the project. Yes, the vast majority of those decisions involve the code for the implementation details, but I just need clean simple code that does the job and that anyone or anything can easily change later. The AI doesn't always give that to me, and sometimes neither do other humans. That's why I'm employed. That's what it really means to be a maintainer and contribute.

annjose 7mo ago

I love the description of the PR. This type of honest statement is the right thing to do - be transparent, be respectful of the time of the reviewer. > This PR adds support for embedded Ruby (ERB) which is commonly used in Ruby on Rails projects. Note that I used heavy assistance from Claude Code and tried to ensure it didn't generate slop to the best of my abilities. All tests are passing and I also visually verified the end result which looks solid to me. > Here's a screenshot that was generated by building the Chroma CLI with the ERB lexer and running it against the test data file with chroma --lexer=erb --style=monokai --html lexers/testdata/erb.actual

sshine 7mo ago

Addressing the self-deprecation: > I felt like I was flinging slop over the wall > my impostor syndrome got worse > thanks for dealing with my slop, Alec > I have never felt like a bigger fraud in this field I'm the most senior software developer in my company and I sit in the middle of the room with my screens open to everyone, and I use 10x the average tokens. I've felt like an imposter when I was barely measuring up against the intellectual giants in my first jobs. It's a feeling, and it has nothing to do with you, your work, or your automation tools. Secrecy leads to bad patterns of practice. AI doesn't make good programmers bad, or bad programmers good. Addressing the lack of fun: > I’m privileged that I get to have fun at all in my line of work > this has sucked out all of the fun Split your coding in two: The part that gets done quick, and the part where you personally care about every line of code. This was always a problem with commercial programming for me: Employer only cares that it gets done, I care that it's good. The tension is necessary. There are aspects to your style of craftsmanship that the AI hasn't encoded yet. I choose to embed those in templates and agent skills, but you can also just keep writing that code yourself. Addressing productivity: > I would not have the mental capacity or skill to create a pull request like that without AI tooling > Now that using AI is a normal expectation at work and how I’m evaluated in performance reviews, I suspect that this fraud feeling will only grow I think that's why using it is so unavoidable: It does increase productivity and lowers cognitive strain, at the cost of yolo. I don't know if "fraud feeling" is referring to your impostor syndrome, and you want to get rid of this: deal with the feeling, it's just part of your growth as a person. Or if you're using fraud as a loaded term to devalue AI use in programming for ideological reasons: Can't help here, I don't have a problem with it. Addressing craftsmanship: > no matter how big the impact, I feel empty > I still contributed something of value > I perhaps tied my identity too much to my career > I’m not the greatest engineer, but I’ve always worked hard > I care about the craftsmanship of my code Your interest in the details of your craft will disappear eventually. Keep it up as long as you care, it's fun. When you're ready to see yourself as something else, it will naturally fade. I've been an aspiring team lead without a team for a long time. Now I have a team of robots (and incidentally a team of people), and it feels natural. I still code in my spare time, but not for productivity, only when I have to or when I want to have fun. For me, I've slowly switched to wanting things to exist rather than wanting to make them. That helps swallowing that I don't code as much any more. (I mean, I still recreatively code 2-3 hours per day, but it's far from the 8-16 hours that have been the norm in my life.) If it helps: It is probably good for your physical well-being that you don't have to sit hunched over as much.

Hard_Space 7mo ago

I am not sure why the title got truncated from 'I Created My First AI-assisted Pull Request and I Feel Like a Fraud', which conveys a very different impression, and makes more sense when browsing the comments here.

winsonaibuilder 7mo ago

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nkondratyk 7mo ago

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