4 ms·

I have started to wonder to what degree programming discussion online is astroturfed. The financial incentive to flood programming discussion (any discussion re

I have started to wonder to what degree programming discussion online is astroturfed. The financial incentive to flood programming discussion (any discussion related to work) with pro-AI messaging, and the simultaneous ease with which AI makes it to do so, makes it hard not to ponder what amount of seemingly organic pro-AI sentiment is not. I'm sure there is some that is indeed genuine. It could even be most. But I'd be surprised if it is all.

arw0n 1mo ago
The comment reads like flesh-generated language to me, but I might be fooled. The breadths of pro-AI sentiment is possibly astroturphed, but there's also an argument for an enthusiastic minority of people to write a lot more comments. As the person above said, AI has significantly increased my ability to execute on ideas. I always liked computers, always liked building things, but was never that great at coding, and was never that good at going super deep into one topic. Instead, I have broad knowledge of a lot of things like product design, requirements engineering, devops, security. I work with a fully agentic flow, but I would argue very seriously; My job has not gotten easier, I am doing at least as much hard thinking as before. From assisted RE over design (TDD focused Spec), implementation by agents, review by agents with partial human oversight, I have a speedup of maybe 50-100%. More importantly, I can do things I couldn't do before. And when it comes to performance and defect-density, it is comparable to very senior people I couldn't touch before. I do agree that the code doesn't look like a human would write it - too abstracted, sometimes convoluted, often way too dense. But it isn't worse code, and if you accept that no one has to read that code ever again, then it is good. Agents are able to grok it just fine.

4 ms·

I have started to wonder to what degree programming discussion online is astroturfed. The financial incentive to flood programming discussion (any discussion re

by pringk02 1mo ago

arw0n 1mo ago
The comment reads like flesh-generated language to me, but I might be fooled. The breadths of pro-AI sentiment is possibly astroturphed, but there's also an argument for an enthusiastic minority of people to write a lot more comments. As the person above said, AI has significantly increased my ability to execute on ideas. I always liked computers, always liked building things, but was never that great at coding, and was never that good at going super deep into one topic. Instead, I have broad knowledge of a lot of things like product design, requirements engineering, devops, security. I work with a fully agentic flow, but I would argue very seriously; My job has not gotten easier, I am doing at least as much hard thinking as before. From assisted RE over design (TDD focused Spec), implementation by agents, review by agents with partial human oversight, I have a speedup of maybe 50-100%. More importantly, I can do things I couldn't do before. And when it comes to performance and defect-density, it is comparable to very senior people I couldn't touch before. I do agree that the code doesn't look like a human would write it - too abstracted, sometimes convoluted, often way too dense. But it isn't worse code, and if you accept that no one has to read that code ever again, then it is good. Agents are able to grok it just fine.