> AI makes you feel 20% more productive but in reality makes you 19% slower. How many more billions are we going to waste on this?
Adderall is similar. It makes people feel a lot more productive, but research on its effectiveness[0] seems to show that, at best, we get only a mild improvement in productivity, and marked deterioration of cognitive abilities.
Even though I don’t buy that LLMs are going to replace developers and quite agree with what is said, this is more of a critique of LLMs as English-to-code translators. LLMs are very useful for many other things.
Researching concepts, for one, has become so much easier, especially for things where you don’t know anything yet and would have a hard time to even formulate a search engine query.
That was a really great read. Not saying I agree with it all, I’m maybe more in the camp that believes AI assisted coding is a time-saver but it’s refreshing (and overdue) to have a counterpoint to the deafening and repetitive drumbeat of the VC-backed hype machine.
I use LLM to do things like brainstorm, explaining programming concepts and debug. I will not use it to write code. The output is not good enough, and I feel dumber.
I only see the worst of my programming collegues coding with AI. And the results are actual trash. They have no actual understanding of the code "they" are writing, and they have no idea how to actually debug what "they" made, if LLM is not helpful. I can smell the technical debt.
There's a lot of complaining about current compilers / languages / codebase in similar posts, but barely any ideas for how to make them better. It doesn't seem surprising that people go for the easier problem (make the current process simpler with LLMs) than for the harder one (change the whole programming landscape to something new and actually make it better).
How do we resolve the observable tension here with the fact that self-driving cars are operating right now, relatively successfully, in ten or so major American cities?
Not a billion dollar business yet, maybe, but 300 cars generating five or six figures revenue per year each isn't far off.
(And I say this as someone who is skeptical that totally autonomous cars worldwide will ever be a thing, but you can get to £10Bn far, far before that point. Become the dominant mode of transport in just ONE major American city and you're most of the way there).
I agree that most natural languages are a very poor tool to write code specification in.
Specifically, natural language is:
- ambiguous (LLMs solve this to a certain extent)
- extremely verbose
- doesn't lend itself well to refactoring
- the same thing can be expressed in way too many different ways, which leads to instability in specs -> code -> specs -> code -> specs loops (and these are essential to do incremental work)
Having something at our disposal that you can write code specs in, that is as easy as natural language yet, more concise, easy to learn and most of all not so anal/rigid as typical code languages are would be fantastic.
I started fully coding with Claude Code. It's not just vibe coding, but rather AI-assisted coding. I've noticed there's a considerable decrease in my understanding of the whole codebase, even though I'm the only one who has been coding this codebase for 2 years. I'm struggling to answer my colleagues' questions.
I am not defending we should drop AI, but we should really measure its effects and take actions accordingly. It's more than just getting more productivity.
I do agree with many points in the article, but not about the last part, namely that coding with AI assist makes you slower.
Personal experience (data points count = 1), as a somewhat seasoned dev (>30yrs of coding), it makes me WAY faster. I confess to not read the code produced at each iteration other than skimming through it for obvious architectural code smell, but I do read the final version line by line and make a few changes until I'm happy.
Long story short: things that would take me a week to put together now take a couple of hours. The vast bulk of the time saved is not having to identify the libraries I need, and not to have to rummage through API documentation.
I'm almost 50, and have been writing code professionally since the late 90s. I can pretty much see projects in my head, and know exactly what to build. I also get paid pretty well for what I do. You'd think I'd be the prototype for anti-AI.
I'm not.
I can build anything, but often struggle with getting bogged down with all the basic work. I love AI for speed running through all the boring stuff and getting to the good parts.
I liken AI development to a developer somewhere between junior and mid-level, someone I can given a paragraph or two of thought out instructions and have them bang out an hour of work. (The potential for then stunting the growth of actual juniors into tomorrow's senior developers is a serious concern, but a separate problem to solve)
>> developer somewhere between junior and mid-level,
Analogies to humans don't work that well. AI is super-human in some respects while also lacking the ability to continually work toward a goal over long periods of time. AI can do very little on its own - just short / scoped / supervised tasks.
However, sometimes the situation is reversed, AI is the teacher who provides some examples on how to do things or provides hints on how to explore a new area and knows how others have approached similar things. Then, sometimes, AI is an astute code reviewer, typically providing valuable feedback.
Anyway, I've stopped trying anthropomorphize AI and simply try to reason about it based on working with it. That means combinations of direct ChatGPT usage with copy / paste / amend type workflows, async style / full PR style usage, one-shot "hail Mary" type throw away PRs just to establish an initial direction as well as PR reviews of my own code. I'm using AI all the time, but never anything like how I would work with another human.
> It’s why the world wasted $10B+ on self driving car companies that obviously made no sense. There’s a much bigger market for truths that pump bags vs truths that don’t.
> It’s why the world wasted $10B+ on self driving car companies that obviously made no sense. There’s a much bigger market for truths that pump bags vs truths that don’t.
This reeks of bias-dismissing massive investments as ‘obvious’ nonsense while hyping its own tinygrad as the ‘truth’ in AI coding.
Author is allowed to claim ‘most people do not care to find the truth’ but it’s hypocritical when the post ignores counterpoints, like PyTorch’s dominance in efficient coding benchmarks.
Author doesn’t seem to care about finding the full truth either, just the version that pumps its bag.
Vibe coding large projects isn’t feasible yet, but as a developer here’s how I use AI to great effect, to the point where losing the tool greatly decreases my productivity:
- Autocomplete in Cursor. People think of AI agents first when they talk about AI coding but LLM-powered autocomplete is a huge productivity boost. It merges seamlessly with your existing workflow, prompting is just writings comments, it can edit multiple lines at once or redirect you to the appropriate part of the codebase, and if the output isn’t what you need you don’t waste much time because you can just choose to ignore it and write code as you usually do.
- Generating coding examples from documentation. Hallucination is basically a non-problem with Gemini Pro 2.5 especially if you give it the right context. This gets me up to speed on a new library or framework very quickly. Basically a stack overflow replacement.
- Debugging. Not always guaranteed to work, but when I’m stuck at a problem for too long, it can provide a solution, or give me a fresh new perspective.
- Self contained scripts. It’s ideal for this, like making package installers, cmake configurations, data processing, serverless micro services, etc.
- Understanding and brainstorming new solutions.
- Vibe coding parts of the codebase that don’t need deep integration. E.g. create a web component with X and Y feature, a C++ function that does a well defined purpose, or a simple file browser. I do wonder if a functional programming paradigm would be better when working with LLMs since by avoiding side effects you can work around their weaknesses when it comes to large codebases.
I have a boring opinion. A cold take? served straight from the freezer.
He is right, however AI is still darn useful. He hints at why: patterns.
Writing a test suite for a new class when an existing one is in place is a breeze. It even can come up with tests you wouldnt have thought of or would have been too time pressed to check.
It also applies to non-test code too. If you have the structure it can knock a new one out.
You could have some lisp contraption that DRYs all the WETs so there is zero boilerplate. But in reality we are not crafting these perfect cosebases, we make readable, low-magic and boilerplatey code on tbe whole in our jobs.
Pretty much nailed it. Once you’re at about 40k LOC you can just turn off the autocomplete features and use Claude or GPT to evaluate specific high-level issues. My sense is 40k LOC is the point at which the suggestions are offset by the rabbit holes they sometimes send you down, but, more importantly by obscuring from you the complexity of the thing you’re building—temporarily.
There is some amount of truth on the AI coding claims.
But, what's with the self driving hate? I take Waymos on a regular basis, and he is basing his credibility on the claim that they are not a thing. Makes him sound bitter more than insightful.
I have been working on finding out ways to make use of AI a net-positive in my professional life as opposed to yet another thing I have to work around and have cognitive load of. Some notes so far in getting great benefits out of it on couple projects -
* Getting good results from AI forced me to think through and think clearly - up front and even harder.
* AI almost forces me to structure and break down my thoughts into smaller more manageable chunks - which is a good thing. (You can't just throw a giant project at it - it gets really far off from what you want if you do that.)
* I have to make it a habit of reading what code it has added - so I understand it and point to it some improvements or rarely fixes (Claude)
* Everyone has what they think are uninteresting parts of a project that they have to put effort into to see the bigger project succeed - AI really helps with those mundane, cog in the wheel things - it not only speeds things up, personally it gives me more momentum/energy to work on the parts that I think are important.
* It's really bad at reusability - most humans will automatically know oh I have a function I wrote to do this thing in this project which I can use in that project. At some point they will turn that into a library. With AI that amount of context is a problem. I found that filling in for AI for this is just as much work and I best do that myself upfront before feeding it to AI - then I have a hope of getting it to understand the dependency structure and what does what.
* Domain specific knowledge - I deal with Google Cloud a lot and use Gemini for understanding what features exist in some GCP product and how I can use it to solve a problem - works amazingly well to save me time. At the least optioning the solution is a big part of work it makes easier.
* Your Git habits have to be top notch so you can untangle any mess AI creates - you reach a point where you have iterated over a feature addition using AI and it's a mess and you know it went off the rails after some point. If you just made one or two commits now you have to unwind everything and hope the good parts return or try to get AI to deal with it which can be risky.
Ofcourse, there is some truth in what you say. But business is desperate for new tech where they can redefine the order (who is big and who is small). There are floating billions which chase short term returns. Fund managers will be fired if they are not jumping on the new fad in the town. CIO's and CEO's will be fired if they are not jumping on AI. It's just nuclear arms race. It's good for none. but the other guy is on it, so you need to be too.
Think about this. Before there were cars on roads, people were just as much happy. Cars came, cities were redesigned for cars with buildings miles apart, and commuting miles became the new norm. You can no longer say cars are useless because the context around them has changed to make the cars a basic need.
AI does same thing. It changes the context in which we work. Everyone expects you use AI (and cars). It becomes a basic need, though a forced one.
To go further, hardly anything produced by science or technology is a basic need for humans. The context got twisted, making them basic needs. Tech solutions create the problems which they claim to solve. The problem did not exist before the solution came around. That's core driving force of business.
67 comments
[ 2.5 ms ] story [ 61.2 ms ] threadAdderall is similar. It makes people feel a lot more productive, but research on its effectiveness[0] seems to show that, at best, we get only a mild improvement in productivity, and marked deterioration of cognitive abilities.
[0] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6165228/
Researching concepts, for one, has become so much easier, especially for things where you don’t know anything yet and would have a hard time to even formulate a search engine query.
I use LLM to do things like brainstorm, explaining programming concepts and debug. I will not use it to write code. The output is not good enough, and I feel dumber.
I only see the worst of my programming collegues coding with AI. And the results are actual trash. They have no actual understanding of the code "they" are writing, and they have no idea how to actually debug what "they" made, if LLM is not helpful. I can smell the technical debt.
Not a billion dollar business yet, maybe, but 300 cars generating five or six figures revenue per year each isn't far off.
(And I say this as someone who is skeptical that totally autonomous cars worldwide will ever be a thing, but you can get to £10Bn far, far before that point. Become the dominant mode of transport in just ONE major American city and you're most of the way there).
Specifically, natural language is:
Having something at our disposal that you can write code specs in, that is as easy as natural language yet, more concise, easy to learn and most of all not so anal/rigid as typical code languages are would be fantastic.Maybe LLMs can be sued to design such a thing ?
True in the long run. Like a car with a high acceleration but low top speed.
AI makes you start fast, but regret later because you don't have the top speed.
I am not defending we should drop AI, but we should really measure its effects and take actions accordingly. It's more than just getting more productivity.
Personal experience (data points count = 1), as a somewhat seasoned dev (>30yrs of coding), it makes me WAY faster. I confess to not read the code produced at each iteration other than skimming through it for obvious architectural code smell, but I do read the final version line by line and make a few changes until I'm happy.
Long story short: things that would take me a week to put together now take a couple of hours. The vast bulk of the time saved is not having to identify the libraries I need, and not to have to rummage through API documentation.
I'm not.
I can build anything, but often struggle with getting bogged down with all the basic work. I love AI for speed running through all the boring stuff and getting to the good parts.
I liken AI development to a developer somewhere between junior and mid-level, someone I can given a paragraph or two of thought out instructions and have them bang out an hour of work. (The potential for then stunting the growth of actual juniors into tomorrow's senior developers is a serious concern, but a separate problem to solve)
Analogies to humans don't work that well. AI is super-human in some respects while also lacking the ability to continually work toward a goal over long periods of time. AI can do very little on its own - just short / scoped / supervised tasks.
However, sometimes the situation is reversed, AI is the teacher who provides some examples on how to do things or provides hints on how to explore a new area and knows how others have approached similar things. Then, sometimes, AI is an astute code reviewer, typically providing valuable feedback.
Anyway, I've stopped trying anthropomorphize AI and simply try to reason about it based on working with it. That means combinations of direct ChatGPT usage with copy / paste / amend type workflows, async style / full PR style usage, one-shot "hail Mary" type throw away PRs just to establish an initial direction as well as PR reviews of my own code. I'm using AI all the time, but never anything like how I would work with another human.
Obviously... in what way? I feel the anti-ai pattern is clear.
Self-driving cars don't work in my city so the whole concept is a hoax. LLMs don't code my proprietary language so it's a bubble.
> From this study (https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.09089)
I can tell this is going to be the most misquoted study in blogs and pop-sci books after the 10,000-hour mastery study. And it's just a preprint!
Did geohot not found one of these?
> It’s why the world wasted $10B+ on self driving car companies that obviously made no sense. There’s a much bigger market for truths that pump bags vs truths that don’t.
This reeks of bias-dismissing massive investments as ‘obvious’ nonsense while hyping its own tinygrad as the ‘truth’ in AI coding.
Author is allowed to claim ‘most people do not care to find the truth’ but it’s hypocritical when the post ignores counterpoints, like PyTorch’s dominance in efficient coding benchmarks.
Author doesn’t seem to care about finding the full truth either, just the version that pumps its bag.
- Autocomplete in Cursor. People think of AI agents first when they talk about AI coding but LLM-powered autocomplete is a huge productivity boost. It merges seamlessly with your existing workflow, prompting is just writings comments, it can edit multiple lines at once or redirect you to the appropriate part of the codebase, and if the output isn’t what you need you don’t waste much time because you can just choose to ignore it and write code as you usually do.
- Generating coding examples from documentation. Hallucination is basically a non-problem with Gemini Pro 2.5 especially if you give it the right context. This gets me up to speed on a new library or framework very quickly. Basically a stack overflow replacement.
- Debugging. Not always guaranteed to work, but when I’m stuck at a problem for too long, it can provide a solution, or give me a fresh new perspective.
- Self contained scripts. It’s ideal for this, like making package installers, cmake configurations, data processing, serverless micro services, etc.
- Understanding and brainstorming new solutions.
- Vibe coding parts of the codebase that don’t need deep integration. E.g. create a web component with X and Y feature, a C++ function that does a well defined purpose, or a simple file browser. I do wonder if a functional programming paradigm would be better when working with LLMs since by avoiding side effects you can work around their weaknesses when it comes to large codebases.
He is right, however AI is still darn useful. He hints at why: patterns.
Writing a test suite for a new class when an existing one is in place is a breeze. It even can come up with tests you wouldnt have thought of or would have been too time pressed to check.
It also applies to non-test code too. If you have the structure it can knock a new one out.
You could have some lisp contraption that DRYs all the WETs so there is zero boilerplate. But in reality we are not crafting these perfect cosebases, we make readable, low-magic and boilerplatey code on tbe whole in our jobs.
But, what's with the self driving hate? I take Waymos on a regular basis, and he is basing his credibility on the claim that they are not a thing. Makes him sound bitter more than insightful.
My teammate shared 3 phase workflow we are using on our team to deliver project at rapid phase.
It's shared on ClaudeCode subreddit https://www.reddit.com/r/ClaudeCode/s/iy058fH4sZ
I've been using it for months with great success
* Getting good results from AI forced me to think through and think clearly - up front and even harder.
* AI almost forces me to structure and break down my thoughts into smaller more manageable chunks - which is a good thing. (You can't just throw a giant project at it - it gets really far off from what you want if you do that.)
* I have to make it a habit of reading what code it has added - so I understand it and point to it some improvements or rarely fixes (Claude)
* Everyone has what they think are uninteresting parts of a project that they have to put effort into to see the bigger project succeed - AI really helps with those mundane, cog in the wheel things - it not only speeds things up, personally it gives me more momentum/energy to work on the parts that I think are important.
* It's really bad at reusability - most humans will automatically know oh I have a function I wrote to do this thing in this project which I can use in that project. At some point they will turn that into a library. With AI that amount of context is a problem. I found that filling in for AI for this is just as much work and I best do that myself upfront before feeding it to AI - then I have a hope of getting it to understand the dependency structure and what does what.
* Domain specific knowledge - I deal with Google Cloud a lot and use Gemini for understanding what features exist in some GCP product and how I can use it to solve a problem - works amazingly well to save me time. At the least optioning the solution is a big part of work it makes easier.
* Your Git habits have to be top notch so you can untangle any mess AI creates - you reach a point where you have iterated over a feature addition using AI and it's a mess and you know it went off the rails after some point. If you just made one or two commits now you have to unwind everything and hope the good parts return or try to get AI to deal with it which can be risky.
Think about this. Before there were cars on roads, people were just as much happy. Cars came, cities were redesigned for cars with buildings miles apart, and commuting miles became the new norm. You can no longer say cars are useless because the context around them has changed to make the cars a basic need.
AI does same thing. It changes the context in which we work. Everyone expects you use AI (and cars). It becomes a basic need, though a forced one.
To go further, hardly anything produced by science or technology is a basic need for humans. The context got twisted, making them basic needs. Tech solutions create the problems which they claim to solve. The problem did not exist before the solution came around. That's core driving force of business.