4 ms·

Or just don't use AI to write code. Use it as a code reviewer assistant along with your usual test-lint development cycle. Use it to help evaluate 3rd party lib

by gwerbin 6mo ago

Or just don't use AI to write code. Use it as a code reviewer assistant along with your usual test-lint development cycle. Use it to help evaluate 3rd party libraries faster. Use it to research new topics. Use it to help draft RFCs and design documents. Use it as a chat buddy when working on hard problems. I think the AI companies all stink to high heaven and the whole thing being built on copyright infringement still makes me squirm. But the latest models are stupidly smart in some cases. It's starting to feel like I really do have a sci-fi AI assistant that I can just reach for whenever I need it, either to support hard thinking or to speed up or entirely avoid drudgery and toil. You don't have to buy into the stupid vibecoding hype to get productivity value out of the technology. You of course don't have to use it at all. And you don't owe your money to any particular company. Heck for non-code tasks the local-capable models are great. But you can't just look at vibecoding and dismiss the entire category of technology.

onlyrealcuzzo 6mo ago
> Or just don't use AI to write code. Anecdata, but I'm still finding CC to be absolutely outstanding at writing code. It's regularly writing systems-level code that would take me months to write by hand in hours, with minimal babysitting, basically no "specs" - just giving it coherent sane direction: like to make sure it tests things in several different ways, for several different cases, including performance, comparing directly to similar implementations (and constantly triple-checking that it actually did what you asked after it said "done"). For $200/mo, I can still run 2-3 clients almost 24/7 pumping out features. I rarely clear my session. I haven't noticed quality declines. Though, I will say, one random day - I'm not sure if it was dumb luck - or if I was in a test group, CC was literally doing 10x the amount of work / speed that it typically does. I guess strange things are bound to happen if you use it enough? Related anecdata: IME, there has been a MASSIVE decline in the quality of claude.ai (the chatbot interface). It is so different recently. It feels like a wanna-be crapier version of ChatGPT, instead of what it used to be, which was something that tried to be factual and useful rather than conversational and addictive and sycophantic.
- ghurtado 6mo ago
  > basically no "specs" - just giving it coherent sane direction This is one variable I almost always see in this discussion: the more strict the rules that you give the LLM, the more likely it is to deeply disappoint you The earlier in the process you use it (ie: scaffolding) the more mileage you will get out of it It's about accepting fallability and working with it, rather than trying to polish it away with care
  - phatskat 6mo ago
    To me this still feels like it would be a net negative. I can scaffold most any project with a language/stack specific CLI command or even just checking out a repo. And sure, AI could “scaffold” further into controllers and views and maybe even some models, and they probably work ok. It’s then when they don’t, or when I need something tweaked, that the worry becomes “do I really understand what’s going on under the hood? Is the time to understand that worth it? Am I going to run across a small thread that I end up pulling until my 80% done sweater is 95% loose yarn?” To me the trade-off hasn’t proven worth it yet. Maybe for a personal pet project, and even then I don’t like the idea of letting something else undeterministically touch my system. “But use a VM!” they say, but that’s more overhead than I care for. Just researching the safest way to bootstrap this feels like more effort than value to me. Lastly, I think that a big part of why I like programming is that I like the act of writing code, understanding how it works, and building something I _know_.
    - michaelmrose 6mo ago
      A lot of the benefit of scaffolding is building basic context which you can also build by feeding it the files produced by whatever CLI tool and talk about it forcing it to think for lack of a better word about your design. You can also force feed it design and api documentation. If you think that you have given it too much you are almost certainly wrong. Doing nonsensical things with a library feed it the documentation still busted make it read the source
- mlinsey 6mo ago
  My anecdata is that it heavily depends on how much of the relevant code and instructions it can fit in the context window. A small app, or a task that touches one clear smaller subsection of a larger codebase, or a refactor that applies the same pattern independently to many different spots in a large codebase - the coding agents do extremely well, better than the median engineer I think. Basically "do something really hard on this one section of code, whose contract of how it intereacts with other code is clear, documented, and respected" is an ideal case for these tools. As soon as the codebase is large and there are gotchas, edge cases where one area of the code affects the other, or old requirements - things get treacherous. It will forget something was implemented somewhere else and write a duplicate version, it will hallucinate what the API shapes are, it will assume how a data field is used downstream based on its name and write something incorrect. IMO you can still work around this and move net-faster, especially with good test coverage, but you certainly have to pay attention. Larger codebases also work better when you started them with CC from the beginning, because it's older code is more likely to actually work how it exepects/hallucinates.
buredoranna 6mo ago
> the whole thing being built on copyright infringement I am not a lawyer, but am generally familiar with two "is it fair use" tests. 1. Is it transformative? I take a picture, I own the copyright. You can't sell it. But if you take a copy, and literally chop it to pieces, reforming it into a collage, you can sell that. 2. Does the alleged infringing work devalue the original? If I have a conversation with ai about "The Lord of the Rings". Even if it reproduces good chunks of the original, it does not devalue the original... in fact, I would argue, it enhances it. Have I failed to take into account additional arguments and/or scenarios? Probably. But, in my opinion, AI passes these tests. AI output is transformative, and in general, does not devalue the original.
- jjwiseman 6mo ago
  And in Bartz v. Anthropic, the court found that Anthropic training their LLMs on books was "highly transformative."
- taikahessu 6mo ago
  In order for LLM to be useful, you need to copy and steal all of the work. Yes, you can argue you don't need the whole work, but that's what they took and feed it in. And they are making money off of other people's work. Sure, you can use mental jiujutsu to make it fair use. But fair use for LLMs means you basically copy the whole thing. All of it. It sounds more like a total use to me. I hope the free market and technology catches up and destroys the VC backed machinery. But only time will tell.
  - ragequittah 6mo ago
    I always wonder if anyone out there thinks they're not making money off of other people's work. If you're coding, writing a fantasy novel, taking a photograph or drawing a picture from first principals you came up with yourself I applaud you though.
    - taikahessu 6mo ago
      You are absolutely right. Seriously though, I do think that is the case. It would be self-righteous to argue otherwise. It's just the scale and the nature of this, that makes it so repulsive. For my taste, copying something without permission, is stealing. I don't care what a judge somewhere thinks of it. Using someone's good will for profit is disgusting. And I hope we all get to profit from it someday, not just a select few. But that is just my opinion.

by gwerbin 6mo ago

onlyrealcuzzo 6mo ago

> Or just don't use AI to write code. Anecdata, but I'm still finding CC to be absolutely outstanding at writing code. It's regularly writing systems-level code that would take me months to write by hand in hours, with minimal babysitting, basically no "specs" - just giving it coherent sane direction: like to make sure it tests things in several different ways, for several different cases, including performance, comparing directly to similar implementations (and constantly triple-checking that it actually did what you asked after it said "done"). For $200/mo, I can still run 2-3 clients almost 24/7 pumping out features. I rarely clear my session. I haven't noticed quality declines. Though, I will say, one random day - I'm not sure if it was dumb luck - or if I was in a test group, CC was literally doing 10x the amount of work / speed that it typically does. I guess strange things are bound to happen if you use it enough? Related anecdata: IME, there has been a MASSIVE decline in the quality of claude.ai (the chatbot interface). It is so different recently. It feels like a wanna-be crapier version of ChatGPT, instead of what it used to be, which was something that tried to be factual and useful rather than conversational and addictive and sycophantic.

ghurtado 6mo ago
> basically no "specs" - just giving it coherent sane direction This is one variable I almost always see in this discussion: the more strict the rules that you give the LLM, the more likely it is to deeply disappoint you The earlier in the process you use it (ie: scaffolding) the more mileage you will get out of it It's about accepting fallability and working with it, rather than trying to polish it away with care
- phatskat 6mo ago
  To me this still feels like it would be a net negative. I can scaffold most any project with a language/stack specific CLI command or even just checking out a repo. And sure, AI could “scaffold” further into controllers and views and maybe even some models, and they probably work ok. It’s then when they don’t, or when I need something tweaked, that the worry becomes “do I really understand what’s going on under the hood? Is the time to understand that worth it? Am I going to run across a small thread that I end up pulling until my 80% done sweater is 95% loose yarn?” To me the trade-off hasn’t proven worth it yet. Maybe for a personal pet project, and even then I don’t like the idea of letting something else undeterministically touch my system. “But use a VM!” they say, but that’s more overhead than I care for. Just researching the safest way to bootstrap this feels like more effort than value to me. Lastly, I think that a big part of why I like programming is that I like the act of writing code, understanding how it works, and building something I _know_.
  - michaelmrose 6mo ago
    A lot of the benefit of scaffolding is building basic context which you can also build by feeding it the files produced by whatever CLI tool and talk about it forcing it to think for lack of a better word about your design. You can also force feed it design and api documentation. If you think that you have given it too much you are almost certainly wrong. Doing nonsensical things with a library feed it the documentation still busted make it read the source
mlinsey 6mo ago
My anecdata is that it heavily depends on how much of the relevant code and instructions it can fit in the context window. A small app, or a task that touches one clear smaller subsection of a larger codebase, or a refactor that applies the same pattern independently to many different spots in a large codebase - the coding agents do extremely well, better than the median engineer I think. Basically "do something really hard on this one section of code, whose contract of how it intereacts with other code is clear, documented, and respected" is an ideal case for these tools. As soon as the codebase is large and there are gotchas, edge cases where one area of the code affects the other, or old requirements - things get treacherous. It will forget something was implemented somewhere else and write a duplicate version, it will hallucinate what the API shapes are, it will assume how a data field is used downstream based on its name and write something incorrect. IMO you can still work around this and move net-faster, especially with good test coverage, but you certainly have to pay attention. Larger codebases also work better when you started them with CC from the beginning, because it's older code is more likely to actually work how it exepects/hallucinates.

buredoranna 6mo ago

> the whole thing being built on copyright infringement I am not a lawyer, but am generally familiar with two "is it fair use" tests. 1. Is it transformative? I take a picture, I own the copyright. You can't sell it. But if you take a copy, and literally chop it to pieces, reforming it into a collage, you can sell that. 2. Does the alleged infringing work devalue the original? If I have a conversation with ai about "The Lord of the Rings". Even if it reproduces good chunks of the original, it does not devalue the original... in fact, I would argue, it enhances it. Have I failed to take into account additional arguments and/or scenarios? Probably. But, in my opinion, AI passes these tests. AI output is transformative, and in general, does not devalue the original.

jjwiseman 6mo ago
And in Bartz v. Anthropic, the court found that Anthropic training their LLMs on books was "highly transformative."
taikahessu 6mo ago
In order for LLM to be useful, you need to copy and steal all of the work. Yes, you can argue you don't need the whole work, but that's what they took and feed it in. And they are making money off of other people's work. Sure, you can use mental jiujutsu to make it fair use. But fair use for LLMs means you basically copy the whole thing. All of it. It sounds more like a total use to me. I hope the free market and technology catches up and destroys the VC backed machinery. But only time will tell.
- ragequittah 6mo ago
  I always wonder if anyone out there thinks they're not making money off of other people's work. If you're coding, writing a fantasy novel, taking a photograph or drawing a picture from first principals you came up with yourself I applaud you though.
  - taikahessu 6mo ago
    You are absolutely right. Seriously though, I do think that is the case. It would be self-righteous to argue otherwise. It's just the scale and the nature of this, that makes it so repulsive. For my taste, copying something without permission, is stealing. I don't care what a judge somewhere thinks of it. Using someone's good will for profit is disgusting. And I hope we all get to profit from it someday, not just a select few. But that is just my opinion.