[HN Gopher] I am uninstalling AI coding assistants from my perso...
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I am uninstalling AI coding assistants from my personal computer
Author : ssutch3
Score : 42 points
Date : 2025-07-07 18:52 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (sam.sutch.net)
(TXT) w3m dump (sam.sutch.net)
| breckenedge wrote:
| > As I have kept up conversation with my developer friends, it
| has become essentially the norm, and everyone is being pressed to
| find greater productivity using AI coding tools.
|
| What a weird alternate universe it is that I live in. My managers
| are somewhat skeptical of AI workflows and keep throwing up
| roadblocks to deeper and more coordinated use among my
| colleagues. Probably because there is so much churn, and it's
| difficult to replicate the practice from one engineer to another.
| Some of my colleagues are very resistant to using AI. I use it
| quite extensively, but rate limits mean that there are occasions
| when I must pick up where the machine leaves off.
| Mouvelie wrote:
| > Regardless, the lesson for people like myself is that, in order
| to feel happy with creating, we have to actually create. An
| artist would not call their work art if they had little to no
| role in creating it.
|
| Thanks. The author touched something there, close to a truth (or
| deep belief I got ?) about our life, something about the journey
| mattering more than the destination...
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drive:_The_Surprising_Truth_Ab...
|
| https://youtu.be/u6XAPnuFjJc, referenced often here:
| https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
| bitwize wrote:
| Good. Enjoy that journey... on your own time. You've been
| missing your productivity OKRs, and your Claude logs say you
| haven't been using the tools the company has provided. You're
| on a PIP: if measurable progress is not seen in 30 days,
| disciplinary action up to and including termination may be
| taken.
| cyanydeez wrote:
| Claude, write me a macro that will autofelate yourself
| according to these metrics.
| fithisux wrote:
| Of interest
|
| https://medium.com/@kenichisasagawa/the-reason-behind-develo...
| NathanKP wrote:
| I think the author's definition of "creating" is just too
| narrow. A gardener can get tremendous satisfaction from
| watching their plants grow from the bed of soil that they
| prepared, even if there is not as much weeding or watering to
| do later on in the growth cycle. A parent can get tremendous
| satisfaction from watching their child continue to grow and
| develop, even after the child is no longer an infant who
| requires constant care and attention.
|
| In my opinion, having spent about a year and half working on
| various coding projects using AI, there are phases to the AI
| coding lifecycle.
|
| 1) Coding projects start out like infants: you need to write a
| lot of code by hand at first to set the right template and
| patterns you want the AI to follow going forward.
|
| 2) Coding projects continue to develop kind of like garden
| beds: you have to guide the structure and provide the right
| "nutrients" for the project, so that the AI can continue to add
| additional features based on what you have supplied to it.
|
| 3) Coding projects mature kind of like children growing up to
| become adults. A well configured AI agent, starting from a
| clean, structured code repo, might be mostly autonomous, but
| just like your adult kid might still need to phone home to Mom
| and Dad to ask for advice or help, you as the "parent" of the
| project are still going to be involved when the AI gets stuck
| and needs help.
|
| Personally, while I can get some joy and satisfaction from
| manually typing lines of code, most of those lines of code are
| things I've typed literally hundreds of times over my decades
| long journey as a developer. There isn't as much joy in typing
| out the same things again and again, but there is joy in the
| longer term steering and shaping of a project so that it stays
| sane, clean, and scalable. I get a similar same sense of joy
| out of gently steering AI towards success in my projects, that
| I get from gently steering my own child towards success. There
| is something incredible about providing the right environment
| and the right pushes in the right direction, and then seeing
| something grow and develop mostly on it's own (but with your
| support backing it up).
| fakedang wrote:
| Cue me, cursing the AI with a choice selection of names, when
| my AI code writer of choice decides to change core files that
| I had explicitly told it not to touch earlier in the chat.
|
| Guess I will not be a good parent lol.
| bluefirebrand wrote:
| I haven't had nearly the same experience of success with AI.
|
| I'm often accused of letting my skepticism hold me back from
| really trying it properly, and maybe that's true. I certainly
| could not imagine going months without writing any code, letting
| the AI just generate it while I prompt
|
| My work is pushing these tools hard and it is taking a huge toll
| on me. I'm constantly hearing how life changing this is, but I
| cannot replicate it no matter what I do
|
| I'm either just not "getting it", or I'm too much of a control
| freak, or everyone else is just better than I am, or something.
| It's been miserable. I feel like I'm either extremely unskilled
| or everyone else is gaslighting me, basically nowhere in between
|
| I have not once had an LLM generate code that I could accept. Not
| one time! Every single time I try to use the LLM to speed me up,
| I get code I have to heavily modify to correct. Sometimes it
| won't even run!
|
| The advice is to iterate, but that makes no sense to me! I would
| easily spend more time iterating with the LLM than just writing
| the code myself!
|
| It's been extremely demoralizing. I've never been unhappier in my
| career. I don't know what to do, I feel I'm falling behind and
| being singled out
|
| I probably need to change employers to get away from AI usage
| metrics at this point, but it feels like it's everyone everywhere
| guzzling the AI hype. It feels hopeless
| cheevly wrote:
| And the irony is that those of us using AI to amplify our
| output to produce at exponential speeds feel like your comments
| are gaslighting _us_ instead! Ive never seen such an outright
| divide in practitioners of a technology in terms of perception
| and outcomes. I got into LLMs super early, using them daily
| since 2022; so that may have bolstered the way I've augmented
| my approaches and tooling. Now almost everything I build uses
| AI at _runtime_ to generate better tools for my AI to generate
| tools at runtime.
| upghost wrote:
| Can we use this micro moment to try to bridge the gap? I was
| sold on cocaine but all I've gotten so far was corn starch.
| Is there like a definitive tutorial on this? I mean look I am
| proud of my work but if I can drop 200-1000/month for the
| "blue stuff" I'm not gonna turn my nose up at it.
|
| I've been pretty deeply into LLMs myself since 2023 and built
| several small models myself from scratch and (SFT) trained
| many more so it's not like I'm ignorant of how it works, I'm
| just not getting the workflow results.
| ssutch3 wrote:
| It's going to depend heavily on what you're doing. If
| you're doing common tasks in popular languages, and not
| using cutting edge library features, the tools are pretty
| good at automating a large amount of the code production.
| Just make sure the context/instruction file (i.e.
| claude.md) and codebase are set up to properly constrict
| the bot and you can get away with a lot.
|
| If you're not doing tasks that are statistically common in
| the training data however you're not going to have a great
| experience. That being said, very little in software is
| "novel" anymore so you might be surprised.
| bluefirebrand wrote:
| Just because it's not strictly novel doesn't mean that
| the LLM is outputting the right thing
|
| We used to caution people not to copy and paste from
| StackOverflow without understanding the code snippets,
| now we have people generating "vibe code" from nothing
| using AI, never reading it once and pushing it to master?
|
| It feels like an insane fever dream
| bluefirebrand wrote:
| > And the irony is that those of us using AI to amplify our
| output
|
| I'm guessing you don't care about quality very much, since
| you are focusing on your output volume
| 01HNNWZ0MV43FF wrote:
| Maybe I need to watch some videos on YouTube to understand
| what other people are seeing.
|
| I couldn't even get Zed hooked up to GitHub Copilot. I use
| ChatGPT for snippets and search and it's okay but I don't
| want to bother checking its work on a large scale
| ssutch3 wrote:
| AI coding tools aren't equally effective across all software
| domains or languages. They're going to be the "best" (relative
| to their own ability distribution) in the "fat middle" of
| software engineering where they have the most training data.
| Popular tasks in popular languages and popular libraries (web
| dev in React, for example). You're probably out of luck if your
| task is writing netcode for a game engine, for instance.
| bluefirebrand wrote:
| I am a web dev in React, though
|
| My experience is in one of the areas that people are saying
| it is most helpful
|
| Which really just adds to the gaslighting effect
| 20after4 wrote:
| I have a working theory that it's mostly bad programmers who
| are achieving massive productivity gains. Really good
| programmers will probably have trouble getting the LLM tools to
| perform as well as their normal level of output.
|
| This could be cope but I don't think it is.
| bluefirebrand wrote:
| I'm not sure if it is cope, but I sort of feel the same
|
| The quality of LLM code is consistently average at best, and
| usually quite bad imo. People say it is like a junior, but if
| a junior I hired produced such code consistently and never
| improved I would be recommending the company PIP them out.
|
| Having output like a Junior would be fine, if I didn't have
| to fix it myself. As it stands, I've never been able to get
| it to produce code of the quality I want so I have to spend
| more time fixing it than I would just writing it.
|
| I dunno. It sucks man
| steveklabnik wrote:
| I have seen good programmers, ones I respect a lot, get good
| results with AI.
|
| I don't think this is it, personally.
| glouwbug wrote:
| My approach has always been to consult 3 different models to
| get my understanding on the right path and then do the rest
| myself. Are we really just doing blind copy pastes? As an
| example, I recently was able to prototype several different
| one dimensional computational fluid dynamic GLSL shaders.
| Claude outputted everything with vec3s, and so the flux math
| matched what you'd see in the theory. It's rapid iteration
| and a declutterred search engine for me with an interactive
| inline comment section, though I do understand some would
| disagree that statement, especially since it's lacking any
| sort of formal verification. I counter with the old adage
| that anyone can be a dog on the internet
| bluefirebrand wrote:
| > My approach has always been to consult 3 different models
| to get my understanding on the right path and then do the
| rest myself. Are we really just doing blind copy pastes
|
| For me, if I spent the time testing 3 different models I
| would definitely be slower than writing the code myself
| clown_strike wrote:
| You're being gaslit. The point is to make you look
| unproductive.
|
| The untrained temp workers using AI to do the entirety of their
| jobs aren't producing code of professional quality, it doesn't
| adhere to best practices or security unless you monitor that
| shit like a hawk but if you're still engineering for quality
| then AI is not the first train you've missed.
|
| They will get code into production quicker and cheaper than you
| through brute force iteration. Nothing else matters. Best
| practices went the way of the rest of the social contract the
| instant feigned competence became cheaper.
|
| Even my podunk employer has AI metrics. You won't escape it. AI
| will eventually gatekeep all expertise and the future employee
| becomes just a disposable meat interface (technician) running
| around doing whatever SHODAN tells them to.
| Macha wrote:
| > I wonder if some "actual" artists (as in, those people who
| create the kind of art most people would recognize) have gone
| through a similar arc of realizing the emptiness of creating with
| AI tools.
|
| My impression is that artists are even more hostile than the most
| AI-skeptic of software engineers. In large part, this is likely
| because the economic argument doesn't hold much sway. For the
| large majority of artists, it's hard for them to make money with
| art as is, the bottleneck is not the volume of art they can
| produce. There's a much clearer path to turning "more code" into
| "more money", even if it's still not direct.
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