17 ms·

>I don’t really understand the, “more, better, faster,” cachet to be honest. Writing the code hasn’t been the bottle neck to developing software for a long time

• koolba 6mo ago
  > The act of typing isn't the hard part - its understanding what's going on, and why you're doing it. Using AI to generate code is only faster if you try and skip that step - which leads to an inevitable disaster It’s more than just typing though. A simple example remembering the exact incantation of CSS classes to style something that you can easily describe in plain English. Yes, you could look them up or maybe even memorize them. But there’s no way you can make wholesale changes to a layout faster than a machine. It lowers the cost for experimentation. A whole series of “what if this was…” can be answered with an implementation in minutes. Not a whole afternoon on one idea that you feel a sunk cost to keep.
  • sublinear 6mo ago
    This is not correct. CSS is the style rules for all rendering situations of that HTML, not just your single requirement that it "looks about right" in your narrow set of test cases. Nobody writing production CSS for a serious web page can avoid rewriting it. Nobody is memorizing anything. It's deeply intertwined with the requirements as they change. You will eventually be forced to review every line of it carefully as each new test is added or when the HTML is changed. No AI is doing that level of testing or has the training data to provide those answers. It sounds like you're better off not using a web page at all if this bothers you. This isn't a deficiency of CSS. It's the main feature. It's designed to provide tools that can cover all cases. If you only have one rendering case, you want an image. If you want to skip the code, you can just not write code. Create a mockup of images and hand it off to your web devs.
    • ufish235 6mo ago
      So AI is good for CSS? That’s fine, I always hated CSS.
    • slopinthebag 6mo ago
      Eh, I've written so much CSS and I hate it so much I use AI to write it now not because it's faster or better at doing so, just so I don't need to do it.
  • CivBase 6mo ago
    > But there’s no way you can make wholesale changes to a layout faster than a machine. You lost me here. I can make changes very quickly once I understand both the problem and the solution I want to go with. Modifying text is quite easy. I spend very little time doing it as a developer.
  • EagnaIonat 6mo ago
    > It lowers the cost for experimentation. A whole series of “what if this was…” Anecdotal, but I've noticed while this is true it also adds the danger of knowing when to stop. Early on I would take forever trying to get something exactly to whats in my head. Which meant I would spend too much time in one sitting then if I had previously built it by hand. Now I try to time box with the mindset "good enough".
  • lelanthran 6mo ago
    > It’s more than just typing though. A simple example remembering the exact incantation of CSS classes to style something that you can easily describe in plain English. Do that enough and you won't know enough about your codebase to recognise errors in the LLM output.
    • mrklol 6mo ago
      imo a question is, do you still need to understand the codebase? What if that process changes and the language you’re reading is a natural one instead of code?
      • cassianoleal 6mo ago
        What happens when your LLM of choice goes on an infinite loop failing to solve a problem? What happens when your LLM provider goes down during an incident? What happens when you have an incident on a distributed system so complex that no LLM can maintain a good enough understanding of the system as a whole in a single session to spot the problem? What happens when the LLM providers stop offering loss leader subscriptions?
        • junofan 6mo ago
          AFAIK everything I use has timeouts, retries, and some way of throwing up its hands and turning things back to me. I use several providers interchangeably. I stay away from overly complex distributed systems and use the simplest thing possible. I plan to wait for some guys in China to train a model on traces that I can run locally, benefitting from their national “diffusion” strategy and lack of access to bleeding-edge chips. I’m not worried.
      • lelanthran 6mo ago
        > What if that process changes and the language you’re reading is a natural one instead of code? Okay, when that happens, then sure, you don't need to understand the codebase. I have not seen any evidence that that is currently the case, so my observation that "Continue letting the LLM write your code for you, and soon you won't be able to spot errors in its output" is still applicable today. When the situation changes, then we can ask if it is really that improtant to understand the code. Until that happens, you still need to understand the code.
• vbezhenar 6mo ago
  AI not just types code for you. It can assist with almost every part of software development. Design, bug hunting, code review, prototyping, testing.
  • tonyedgecombe 6mo ago
    It can even create a giant ball of mud ten times faster than you can.
  • NilMostChill 6mo ago
    A Luddite farm worker can assist in all those things, the question is, can it assist in a useful manner?
    • kjksf 6mo ago
      Not only it can but it does. Just as I was reading this claude implemented a drag&drop of images out of SumatraPDF. I asked: > implement dragging out images; if we initiate drag action and the element under cursor is an image, allow dragging out the image and dropping on other applications then it didn't quite work: I'm testing it by trying to drop on a web application that accepts dropped images from file system but it doesn't work for that Here's the result: https://github.com/sumatrapdfreader/sumatrapdf/commit/58d9a499de2ed95cdb5fc01372071b6823542ed0 https://github.com/sumatrapdfreader/sumatrapdf/commit/58d9a4... It took me less than 15 mins, with testing. Now you tell me: 1. Can a farm worker do that? 2. Can you improve this code in a meaningful way? If you were doing a code review, what would you ask to be changed? 3. How long would it take you to type this code? Here's what I think: No. No. Much longer.
      • svieira 6mo ago
        Why is it using a temp file? Is there really no more elegant way to pass around pointers to images than spilling to disk?
        • 16bitvoid 6mo ago
• rwmj 6mo ago
  Don't worry. In a few years we'll be like the COBOL programmers who still understand how things work, our brains haven't atrophied, and we make good money fixing the giant messes created by others.
  • Applejinx 6mo ago
    Sounds awful. I'm not interested in fixing giant messes. I'll just be tinkering away making little things (at scale) where the scope is very constrained and the fixing isn't needed. People can do their vibecoding to make weird rehackings of stuff I did, almost always to make it more mainstream, limited, and boring, and usually to some mainstream acclaim. And they can flame out, not my problem. I'm not fixing anybody's giant mess. I'm doing the equivalent of simply refusing to give up COBOL. To stop me, people will have to EOL a huge amount of working useful stuff for no good reason and replace it with untrustworthy garbage. I am aware this is exactly the plan on so many levels. Bring it. I don't think it's going to be popular, or rather: I think only at this historical moment can you get away with that and not immediately be called on it, as a charlatan. When our grandest celebrity charlatans go in the bin, the time for vibecoding will truly be over.
• locknitpicker 6mo ago
  > This is what I've always found confusing as well about this push for AI. The act of typing isn't the hard part - its understanding what's going on, and why you're doing it. This is a very superficial and simplistic analysis of the whole domain. Programmers don't "type". They apply changes to the code. Pressing buttons in a keyboard is not the bottleneck. If that was the case, code completion and templating would have been a revolutionary, world changing development in the field. The difficult part is understanding what to do and how to do it, and why. It turns out LLMs can handle all these types of task. You are onboarding onto a new project? Hit a LLM assistant with /explain. You want to implement a feature that matches a specific requirement? You hit your LLM assistant with /plan followed by apply. You want to cover some code with tests? You hit your LLM assistant with /tests. In the end you review the result,and do with it whatever you want. Some even feel confident enough to YOLO the output of the LLM. So while you still try to navigate through files, others already have features out.
  • drekipus 6mo ago
    > If that was the case, code completion and templating would have been a revolutionary, world changing development in the field. And yet this is "AI is world changing, look at how fast it can change code!" > So while you still try to navigate through files, others already have features out. Your argument is "it can also read code faster too" - but it doesn't have the same tacit knowledge within the codebase. Documentation and comments can be wrong sometimes. Names are poorly chosen That's the thing about reviews: the implementor doesn't know what's needed for the feature, but the reviewer now needs to. The latter can't trust the former anymore. /Explain is constantly wrong. /Plan is constantly over engineered. /Tests are constantly fragile The only benefit AI has produced to existing codebase is now people care a lot more about getting documentation right and adding little snippet/how-tos called "skills" or whatever.
• rvz 6mo ago
  > This is what I've always found confusing as well about this push for AI. They want you to pay for their tokens at their casino and rack up a 5 - 6 figure bill.
• cess11 6mo ago
  "This is what I've always found confusing as well about this push for AI." I think it's a few things converging. One is that software developers have become more expensive for US corporations for several reasons and blaming layoffs on a third party is for some reason more palatable to a lot of people. Another is that a lot of decision makers are pretty mediocre thinkers and know very little about the people they rule over, so they actually believe that machines will be able to automate what software developers do rather than what these decision makers do. Then there's the ever-present allure of the promise that middle managers will somehow wrestle control over software crafts from the nerds, i.e. what has underpinned low-code business solutions for ages and always, always comes with very expensive consultants, commonly software developers, on the side.
• prox 6mo ago
  It always seemed to me like its lootbox behavior. Highly addictive for the dopamine hit you get.