hard to believe anyone who writes something this overwhelmingly positive.
I use a ton of AI, it writes a shit load of code for me, and I eventually get good results.
Its also goes off on ridiculous tangents, implements things i dont want, over engineers almost everything. Makes large code bases convoluted and unreadable. Yes humans also do that, LLMs do it a lot faster.
> Now, with AI coding, I can implement any decent sized feature, exactly how I want, in a few hours and it's all polished and ready, all edge cases handled.
No way a human wrote that, sounds like a late night TV advertisement.
You obviously haven't worked on a good codebase. I've worked on both so I know the difference.
Same feature on a good codebase vs bad codebase is like 1k lines of code vs 20k lines of code and is worse in the latter case. Not an exaggeration.
Clean code is real, it's just not what's been peddled to us.
If your code is full of bugs and you ask Claude or Codex to build more features, it will take 10x to 20x the effort because of workarounds and hacks which keep compounding.
If your code has very few to no bugs and no hacks/workarounds, it will also implement hacks/workarounds and no bugs. The difference is pretty insane actually.
You can try it yourself; create a really low quality codebase, full of hacks and try to build features with AI based on its recommedations.
> Clean code is real, it's just not what's been peddled to us.
My read is: the people who "peddled" it had mostly the right ideas, they were just bad at implementing them, and bad at writing code in general, and also the contemporaneous popularity of Java caused some serious issues.
You're not an outlier. The anti-AI stance is likely to be vocal online. They're quite incentivised to talk about it. Most programmers have adopted AI assisted programming (my own assertion) and most will feel like you and I, that it is useful. I know of a few programmers personally who hate it, but even they use it. There is no going back.
It is pretty obvious that when you come into a large incomprehensible codebase (which most are), AI will be able to reason about it more quickly and guide you through it.
I switched away from my work for a few minutes, but at the very moment I'm using AI to summarise some spaghetti code in a particular area in our codebase, so I can refactor it.
And that is my style of working at the moment. AI coding is useful, sometimes amazing, but sometimes irritating, and from experience I think just telling it to refactor this area would result in something I'm not happy with. So instead I'm getting a handle on it, I'll form the design I want, then tell it to do it. I have a feeling a lot of complaints are from people who won't bother to do that.
You are not an outlier. 40+ years of hobby and pro coding experience here and I absolutely love Claude Code. It enables me to dramatically increase code quality, performance, and features while still doing the fun parts and letting the LLM do the boring parts.
If you really loved horseback riding, or you really loved breeding and training horses, or you were really good at it, I'm sure that cars fucked up your day, and that it sucked to see cars replace horses.
I'm sure there were plenty of people who said that cars were horrible and that we should stick with horses. I'm equally sure there have been C programmers looking derisively at Python programmers, Python programmers looking derisively at Node programmers, etc etc.
But there's a pretty big gap between the feeling of unhappiness that something you liked is no longer as in-demand / profitable / common / whatever, and saying that cars aren't useful and we're all worse off for letting our horse-riding skills degrade.
Normal people didn't ride horses everywhere. They weren't used like cars. I'm so sick of this analogy. People walked places. If it was too far to walk you used a horse drawn bus/tram. If you had to much to carry you used a horse drawn truck. Every single person wasn't riding an individual horse ten minutes each way to buy groceries every day like that do now with cars. Cars unquestionably kill drastically more people than horses ever did or even could. Tens of thousands a year in this country alone! The leading cause of death for children and young adults!
We're pretty off track given that ya'll are nitpicking the metaphor rather than the actual topic, but claiming that horses were never common doesn't really have any connection to the claim that per-mile-moved / per-human-carried, horses are also dangerous.
Never use analogies when arguing online. It only ever results in exactly this, people nitpicking the metaphor. You've essentially given them a way to "be correct", about something irrelevant.
This does not get to the core of it, LLMs are not equivalent to cars.
All of your analogies (in other posts) discount that:
- LLMs are not deterministic
- they do not produce high quality/expert level output.
- They are not easy to control consistently.
Once again, and i mean this in the nicest way possible. You do not sound like you understand how things operate at an expert level of engineering. I do not know of any senior engineer who thinks LLMs can consistently produce quality output.
You are way too invested in your argument and refusing to see other perspectives
Emacs, meanwhile, has a 50,000 line file that contains its display and redisplay logic: https://github.com/emacs-mirror/emacs/blob/master/src/xdisp..... (It's actually a pretty readable well-commented file all things considered, but famously difficult to hack on.)
That's descended from its terminal escape-sequence optimizer, the bit of code that transforms one screen state into another screen state in the least number of terminal commands possible. (That display code was later updated to support graphical output like X11 by treating it as sort of a special case of a terminal.)
I think I'd rather have that than the state of the art in "modern" TUIs, which is to do the opposite and treat the terminal as a special case of React canvas, redrawing the whole damn thing every time there is a keystroke or other action by you or the program. You can see Claude Code redraw itself all the time; it's maddening. And the program would absolutely be unusable on, say, a 9600bps connection, whereas Emacs could still get by on that. This is from the company that retains the best and brightest programmers, and will have self-improving runaway genius AI by Christmas, for realsies this time.
Class war started about 15 years ago post 2007 financial crisis.
The banks and those who control them all knew where we are headed, so they got a little head start destabilizing democracy.
Once us working class get a grasp of the actual situation, we are going to be so deep in the hole, fighting back is going to be quite difficult when the "asset owners" own and control the majority of the worlds resources, all media, forms of communication, AI, technology infrastructure, mass surveillance. You name it, and they have already made massive efforts to make sure they own it.
They might own it, but at a certain point it only matters whether the concept of ownership means anything to the people who don't "own" it. Ownership only works for those with assets because they have police working for them to protect the concept of ownership to begin with, but that only works at a certain scale of disenfranchisement and lack of upheaval. There isn't that much in-practice stopping a sufficiently angry group from attacking most politicians or even every-day wealthy people in their home. Money talks, but if the amount everyone else earns isn't enough to meaningfully contribute to "owning" anything, then those people would reasonably stop agreeing to respect the idea of property or non-violence. People without assets, facing down a continual decline in living standards from 15 years ago, should evaluate whether the system they operate in does anything beneficial for them at all, or whether it mainly serves those who they serve.
We're starting to see it in discrete bursts with Mangione, the paper warehouse fire, and in other non-violent ways with farmer protests, trucker protests, etc.. which have varying levels of support from regular people depending on their wealth class, background, and inclination to agree with the government.
That was the moment that business/wealth/rich decided to turn their resources towards directly influencing and controlling government. Reagan and his made up “welfare queens” came shortly after and wealth inequality has sharply risen since. Wildly successful coup.
We are in a different phase of
Capitalism, real interest rates will be kept low mechanically. Nominal Inflation rate will always be lied about. Bonds holders will lose value by design.
The governments and central banks across the world have no other choice. Corporations and big money have robbed our world of capital and are now changing the game to pull up the ladder behind them
There are no "best" prompts. Its a random BS generation machine that you can at times direct enough to get stuff done for you. The output will almost always have varying levels of BS that you have to clean up with various levels of effort.
I use a ton of AI, it writes a shit load of code for me, and I eventually get good results.
Its also goes off on ridiculous tangents, implements things i dont want, over engineers almost everything. Makes large code bases convoluted and unreadable. Yes humans also do that, LLMs do it a lot faster.
> Now, with AI coding, I can implement any decent sized feature, exactly how I want, in a few hours and it's all polished and ready, all edge cases handled.
No way a human wrote that, sounds like a late night TV advertisement.
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