3 ms·

> does this actually save me time at all? Soooooo.... As one who hasn't taken the plunge yet -- I'm basically retired, but have a couple of projects I might w

by zephen 7mo ago

> does this actually save me time at all? Soooooo.... As one who hasn't taken the plunge yet -- I'm basically retired, but have a couple of projects I might want to use AI for -- "time" is not always fungible with, or a good proxy for, either "effort" or "motivation" > How much money have I wasted in tokens? This, of course, may be a legitimate concern. > If it generates the slop version in a week but it takes me 3 more weeks to clean it up, could I have I just done it right the first time myself in 4 weeks instead? This likewise may be a legitimate concern, but sometimes the motivation for cleaning up a basically working piece of code is easier to find that the motivation for staring at a blank screen and trying to write that first function.

throwatdem12311 7mo ago
Well for me, the amount of time/effort as a function my of my motivation has acted as a natural gatekeeper to bad ideas. Just because I can do something with AI now doesn’t necessarily mean that I should. I am also weary of trading time and effort for outright money right out of my own pocket to find out, especially when I find the people I’d be giving money to so reprehensible. I don’t live somewhere where developers make a lot of money. I’m not poor in any stretch but not rich enough that I can waste money on slop for funsies. But I can spend a month on validating a side project because I find coding as a hobby enjoyable in and of itself, and I don’t care if I throw out a few thousand lines of code after a little while and realize I’m wasting my time. Cleaning up agent slop code by hand is also a miserable experience and makes me hate my job. I do it already because at $DAYJOB because my boss thinks “investing” in third worlders for pennies on the dollar and just giving them a Claude subscription will be better than investing in technical excellence and leadership. The ROI on this strategy is questionable at best, at least at my current job. Code Review by humans is still the bottleneck and delivering proper working features has not accelerated because they require much more iteration because of slop. Would much rather spend the time making my own artisanal tradslop instead if it’s gonna take me the same amount of time anyway - at least it’s more enjoyable.
- zephen 7mo ago
  Your position makes an immense amount of sense for your described situation. As I said, I'm retired, and so I've never had to clean up AI slop at $DAYJOB. Since the whole AI thing would be a learning experience for me, it would include trying to toilet train the AI itself, as others have intimated can be done in some cases, rather than dealing with a bunch of already-checked-into-the-repo-slop. And that may be a losing proposition. I don't know; haven't tried it yet. > Would much rather spend the time making my own artisanal tradslop instead if it’s gonna take me the same amount of time anyway - at least it’s more enjoyable. Although I haven't had the AI experience you describe, I have had a similar experience with coworkers who moved fast and broke all kinds of shit. That was similarly no fun. It's like trying to work on your wife's minivan, but she won't pull over and let you properly fix it. Given sufficient time, I enjoy polishing/perfecting/refactoring code. My final output often looks radically different from my prototype. It is clear to me that I would hate the situation you describe. It is not clear to me that starting with prompted slop and wrangling it into submission would be much less enjoyable to me than writing my own slop and then wrangling it into submission. > especially when I find the people I’d be giving money to so reprehensible. This is a bit of a concern, but I'm pretty sure that, at the moment, every token you burn costs them more than you.
  - throwatdem12311 7mo ago
    The biggest thing that has changed in my experience (at least in a professions setting) is now that people have AI agents they don’t really have any motivation to improve. If you tell them something that needs to be changed they just reprompt the agent until it’s good enough - but the most sinister thing is they keep making the same mistakes over and over again. There is no growth, no shared understanding that disseminates through review - just re-prompting. They often just directly use my review comments as prompts! People don’t understand code they generated themselves just a few days later. But not in a “oh just let me reread this again real quick” kind of way but a “I have absolutely no clue wtf I am even looking at” way. I’ve been sounding the alarm in my own circles about the lack of junior roles now because of AI - which will lead to a shortage of seniors in just a few years - but there is something even more sinister: juniors no longer improve enough to be intermediates and seniors, and worse…seniors and intermediates have regressed to juniors through laziness and cognitive offloading. Like if I’m just sending code review to a middle man prompter - why not just skip the middle man? I’m already wrangling a handful of AI agents myself every day, so what is even the point of this extra person anyway? I don’t want to replace people with AI but if the person is so lazy that even I would probably prefer just doing the prompting myself then why shouldn’t I replace them with AI?

by zephen 7mo ago

throwatdem12311 7mo ago

Well for me, the amount of time/effort as a function my of my motivation has acted as a natural gatekeeper to bad ideas. Just because I can do something with AI now doesn’t necessarily mean that I should. I am also weary of trading time and effort for outright money right out of my own pocket to find out, especially when I find the people I’d be giving money to so reprehensible. I don’t live somewhere where developers make a lot of money. I’m not poor in any stretch but not rich enough that I can waste money on slop for funsies. But I can spend a month on validating a side project because I find coding as a hobby enjoyable in and of itself, and I don’t care if I throw out a few thousand lines of code after a little while and realize I’m wasting my time. Cleaning up agent slop code by hand is also a miserable experience and makes me hate my job. I do it already because at $DAYJOB because my boss thinks “investing” in third worlders for pennies on the dollar and just giving them a Claude subscription will be better than investing in technical excellence and leadership. The ROI on this strategy is questionable at best, at least at my current job. Code Review by humans is still the bottleneck and delivering proper working features has not accelerated because they require much more iteration because of slop. Would much rather spend the time making my own artisanal tradslop instead if it’s gonna take me the same amount of time anyway - at least it’s more enjoyable.

zephen 7mo ago
Your position makes an immense amount of sense for your described situation. As I said, I'm retired, and so I've never had to clean up AI slop at $DAYJOB. Since the whole AI thing would be a learning experience for me, it would include trying to toilet train the AI itself, as others have intimated can be done in some cases, rather than dealing with a bunch of already-checked-into-the-repo-slop. And that may be a losing proposition. I don't know; haven't tried it yet. > Would much rather spend the time making my own artisanal tradslop instead if it’s gonna take me the same amount of time anyway - at least it’s more enjoyable. Although I haven't had the AI experience you describe, I have had a similar experience with coworkers who moved fast and broke all kinds of shit. That was similarly no fun. It's like trying to work on your wife's minivan, but she won't pull over and let you properly fix it. Given sufficient time, I enjoy polishing/perfecting/refactoring code. My final output often looks radically different from my prototype. It is clear to me that I would hate the situation you describe. It is not clear to me that starting with prompted slop and wrangling it into submission would be much less enjoyable to me than writing my own slop and then wrangling it into submission. > especially when I find the people I’d be giving money to so reprehensible. This is a bit of a concern, but I'm pretty sure that, at the moment, every token you burn costs them more than you.
- throwatdem12311 7mo ago
  The biggest thing that has changed in my experience (at least in a professions setting) is now that people have AI agents they don’t really have any motivation to improve. If you tell them something that needs to be changed they just reprompt the agent until it’s good enough - but the most sinister thing is they keep making the same mistakes over and over again. There is no growth, no shared understanding that disseminates through review - just re-prompting. They often just directly use my review comments as prompts! People don’t understand code they generated themselves just a few days later. But not in a “oh just let me reread this again real quick” kind of way but a “I have absolutely no clue wtf I am even looking at” way. I’ve been sounding the alarm in my own circles about the lack of junior roles now because of AI - which will lead to a shortage of seniors in just a few years - but there is something even more sinister: juniors no longer improve enough to be intermediates and seniors, and worse…seniors and intermediates have regressed to juniors through laziness and cognitive offloading. Like if I’m just sending code review to a middle man prompter - why not just skip the middle man? I’m already wrangling a handful of AI agents myself every day, so what is even the point of this extra person anyway? I don’t want to replace people with AI but if the person is so lazy that even I would probably prefer just doing the prompting myself then why shouldn’t I replace them with AI?