3 ms·

> a very steep price that you may not actually account for Could you elaborate on this steep price that you have in mind? What does it consist of?

by aix1 3mo ago

mrbungie 3mo ago
From what I gather from GPs upper post: Technical debt, skill atrophy, delusions of grandeur about one's own abilities / psychosis.
shevis 3mo ago
The cost is skill atrophy. When was the last time you wrote something entirely from scratch by hand without AI assistance? It’s a skill entirely separate from prompting and reviewing. And it atrophies when you stop using it.
- aix1 3mo ago
  > The cost is skill atrophy I hear what you're saying but I'm not sure I buy it in the context of this thread (a response to someone who is 54 and has been coding since they were eight). I am in a similar boat, having been coding full-time for fourty years. The way I use the current tools is that I own all architectural and design decisions but let Claude Code fill in the blanks. I reckon the quality of the output is about 90% of what it would have been had I done everything myself, but I get a lot more done (easily 3-5X). Will I forget how to write a "for" loop just because I haven't been writing many of them by hand lately? Those skills are so deeply ingrained that I seriously doubt it. I can ride a bike after a multi-year break, or converse in a language I haven't regularly spoken for several decades. Or write using pen & paper even though I hardly ever do it. I don't see why coding would be any different.
  - defrost 3mo ago
    I have a greater concern about societal skill atrophy. I also am not about to forget how to for(;;), that said, as a result of some years invested in aligning old pre WGS84 mapping with modern GPS and improving digital mapping, there are fewer people per capita with the skills to navigate via paper maps in the absence of GPS. Old farts coding since age 8 (in which I include myself with a decade+ over a sprightly young 54) will retain coding skills for as long as they apply them - the fear is that fewer and fewer others will develop and exercise such skills due to AI. It remains to be seen if that's a bad thing long term.
    - aix1 3mo ago
      I am not worried about the loss of skills per se. Over the centuries the average person has become less skilled at, for example, butchering animals. Is that bad for society? I don't know. What I am worried about is us becoming dependent on tools that we as individuals neither own nor fully control, and gradually losing our ability to function without those tools. This, I think, is a huge societal risk.
jimbo808 3mo ago
Technical debt and skill atrophy Technical debt due to accumulated excessively verbose, badly architected, often redundant, feature-bloated code which always looks good, even upon earnest review, but actually sucks and becomes extremely difficult to maintain in ways which are not obvious in code review. The issue is this: your tooling can help, and can make you feel better, and you might think you wrote all the prompts and made all the tools to mitigate these issues, but you haven't. If you're not consistently seeing it generate code that is very very close to the way a skilled senior dev such as yourself would have done it (with similar line count, etc), that is a red flag even if the code looks great and works.
- mingusrude 3mo ago
  > ...badly architected, often redundant, feature-bloated code which always looks good, even upon earnest review, but actually sucks and becomes extremely difficult to maintain in ways which are not obvious in code review. I can only judge from my own experience but with or without LLMs, these are the codebases that I have worked with during most of my career. To me, much of the question is whether LLMs produce worse code than the me and my colleagues have done in the past and I don't think that's the case. It is however very common that people hold LLMs to a higher standard than human colleagues and then it's not a useful comparison.
  - torginus 3mo ago
    LLMs can produce bad code in ways no human ever would. I remember working on headscratcher problem of walking a tree while gradually building up state, and since LLMs are supposed to be good at algorithms, I asked Claude. It came up with a correct LC-hard tier solution that involved dynamic programming, and was essentially an unreadable dense mess that was impossible to reason through as a human. It worked, but it was so bad, that I sat down and realized after a bit that with maintaining a small cache, and being very particular about how the nodes are traversed, I reduced the solution to like a 10 line modified DFS, that I could understand.
    - socalgal2 3mo ago

> a very steep price that you may not actually account for Could you elaborate on this steep price that you have in mind? What does it consist of?

by aix1 3mo ago

> a very steep price that you may not actually account for Could you elaborate on this steep price that you have in mind? What does it consist of?

mrbungie 3mo ago

From what I gather from GPs upper post: Technical debt, skill atrophy, delusions of grandeur about one's own abilities / psychosis.

shevis 3mo ago

The cost is skill atrophy. When was the last time you wrote something entirely from scratch by hand without AI assistance? It’s a skill entirely separate from prompting and reviewing. And it atrophies when you stop using it.

aix1 3mo ago
> The cost is skill atrophy I hear what you're saying but I'm not sure I buy it in the context of this thread (a response to someone who is 54 and has been coding since they were eight). I am in a similar boat, having been coding full-time for fourty years. The way I use the current tools is that I own all architectural and design decisions but let Claude Code fill in the blanks. I reckon the quality of the output is about 90% of what it would have been had I done everything myself, but I get a lot more done (easily 3-5X). Will I forget how to write a "for" loop just because I haven't been writing many of them by hand lately? Those skills are so deeply ingrained that I seriously doubt it. I can ride a bike after a multi-year break, or converse in a language I haven't regularly spoken for several decades. Or write using pen & paper even though I hardly ever do it. I don't see why coding would be any different.
- defrost 3mo ago
  I have a greater concern about societal skill atrophy. I also am not about to forget how to for(;;), that said, as a result of some years invested in aligning old pre WGS84 mapping with modern GPS and improving digital mapping, there are fewer people per capita with the skills to navigate via paper maps in the absence of GPS. Old farts coding since age 8 (in which I include myself with a decade+ over a sprightly young 54) will retain coding skills for as long as they apply them - the fear is that fewer and fewer others will develop and exercise such skills due to AI. It remains to be seen if that's a bad thing long term.
  - aix1 3mo ago
    I am not worried about the loss of skills per se. Over the centuries the average person has become less skilled at, for example, butchering animals. Is that bad for society? I don't know. What I am worried about is us becoming dependent on tools that we as individuals neither own nor fully control, and gradually losing our ability to function without those tools. This, I think, is a huge societal risk.

jimbo808 3mo ago

Technical debt and skill atrophy Technical debt due to accumulated excessively verbose, badly architected, often redundant, feature-bloated code which always looks good, even upon earnest review, but actually sucks and becomes extremely difficult to maintain in ways which are not obvious in code review. The issue is this: your tooling can help, and can make you feel better, and you might think you wrote all the prompts and made all the tools to mitigate these issues, but you haven't. If you're not consistently seeing it generate code that is very very close to the way a skilled senior dev such as yourself would have done it (with similar line count, etc), that is a red flag even if the code looks great and works.

mingusrude 3mo ago
> ...badly architected, often redundant, feature-bloated code which always looks good, even upon earnest review, but actually sucks and becomes extremely difficult to maintain in ways which are not obvious in code review. I can only judge from my own experience but with or without LLMs, these are the codebases that I have worked with during most of my career. To me, much of the question is whether LLMs produce worse code than the me and my colleagues have done in the past and I don't think that's the case. It is however very common that people hold LLMs to a higher standard than human colleagues and then it's not a useful comparison.
- torginus 3mo ago
  LLMs can produce bad code in ways no human ever would. I remember working on headscratcher problem of walking a tree while gradually building up state, and since LLMs are supposed to be good at algorithms, I asked Claude. It came up with a correct LC-hard tier solution that involved dynamic programming, and was essentially an unreadable dense mess that was impossible to reason through as a human. It worked, but it was so bad, that I sat down and realized after a bit that with maintaining a small cache, and being very particular about how the nodes are traversed, I reduced the solution to like a 10 line modified DFS, that I could understand.
  - socalgal2 3mo ago