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AI is bad at figuring out what to do, but fantastic at actually doing it. I’ve totally transformed how I write code from writing it to myself to writing detail
by brokencode 11mo ago
AI is bad at figuring out what to do, but fantastic at actually doing it.
I’ve totally transformed how I write code from writing it to myself to writing detailed instructions and having the AI do it.
It’s so much faster and less cognitively demanding. It frees me up to focus on the business logic or the next change I want to make. Or to go grab a coffee.
- teaearlgraycold 11mo agoI would say from my experience there's a high variability in AI's ability to actually write code unless you're just writing a lot of scripts and basic UI components.
- wry_discontent 11mo agoI would say this does not work in any nontrivial way from what I've seen. Even basic scripts and UI components are fucked up all the time.
- brokencode 11mo agoYou have to learn how and where to use it. If you give it bad instructions and inadequate context, it will do a bad job.
- lazide 11mo agoThis is the ‘you’re holding it wrong’ of LLMs.
- brokencode 11mo agoWhat tool can’t you hold wrong? Literally every tool worth using in software engineering from the IDE to the debugger to the profiler takes practice and skill to use correctly. Don’t confuse AI with AGI. Treat it like the tool it is.
- lazide 11mo agoYou might want to ask ChatGPT what that is referencing. Specifically, Steve Jobs telling everyone it was their fault that Apple put the antenna right where people hold their phones and it was their fault they had bad reception. The issue is really that LLMs are impossible to deterministically control, and no one has any real advice on how to deterministically get what you want from them.
- brokencode 11mo agoI recognized the reference. I just don’t think it applies here. The iPhone antenna issue was a design flaw. It’s not reasonable to tell people to hold a phone in a certain way. Most phones are built without a similar flaw. LLMs are of course nondeterministic. That doesn’t mean they can’t be useful tools. And there isn’t a clear solution similar to how there was a clear solution to the iPhone problem.
- JohnBooty 10mo ago"Antennagate" is the gift that keeps on giving. Great litmus test for pundits and online peanut galleries. You are technically correct: it was a design flaw. But folks usually incorrectly trot it out as an example of a manufacturer who arrogantly blamed users for a major product flaw. The reality is that that essentially nobody experienced this issue in real life. The problem disappeared as long as you used a cell phone case. Which is how 99.99% of people use their phones. To experience the issue in real life you had to use the phone "naked", hold it a certain way, and have slightly spotty reception to begin with. So when people incorrectly trot this one out I can just ignore the rest of what they're saying...
- unusualmonkey 11mo agoHumans are not deterministic. Ironically AI models are iirc. Come up with a real argument.
- y0eswddl 10mo agoYOU come up with a real argument first "no, you're wrong" is not a valid rebuttal lolol
- theshrike79 11mo ago"All the time"? This always feels like you're just holding it wrong and blaming the tool.
- teaearlgraycold 11mo agoIt can still fuck it up. And you need to actually read the code. But still a time saver for certain trivial tasks. Like if I'm going to scrape a web page as a cron job I can pretty much just tell it here's the URL, here's the XPath for the elements I want, and it'll take it from there. Read over the few dozen lines of code, run it and we're done in a few minutes.
- Spivak 11mo agoThe AI version of that Kent Beck mantra is probably "Make the change tedious but trivial (warning: this may be hard). Then make the AI do the tedious and trivial change." AI's advantage is that it has infinite stamina, so if your can make your hard problem a marathon of easy problems it becomes doable.
- m4tthumphrey 11mo ago[flagged]
- SubiculumCode 11mo agoCouldn't help your self, could you.
- coldtea 11mo agoLay off him, he did the right thing
- belter 11mo ago> AI is bad at figuring out what to do, but fantastic at actually doing it. AI is so smart, one day might even figure out how to subtract... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45821635 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45821635
- brokencode 11mo agoWhen you need to take the square root of 37282613, do you do it in your head or pull out the calculator? Why does the AI have to be good at math when it can just use a calculator? AI tool usage is getting better all the time.
- justsid 11mo agoI think people generally think AI should be good at math because it runs on a very complex and very fast calculator to begin with.
- binary132 11mo agoYore brain runs on physics and biology, yet here we are…
- belter 11mo agoThat is not the point...Its about not understanding subtraction...
- dataviz1000 11mo agoI think it is like protein folding. It will make a mess but if you drop a console.log into the browser debug console to show the AI what it should be looking for after it spent 3 hours failing to help understand and debug the problem, it will do 1 week of work in 2 hours.
- meander_water 11mo agoI've noticed this too. The latest cursor version has a @browser command which will launch a browser with playwright, and call tools to inspect the html and inject JavaScript to debug in real-time. When it has access to the right tools, it does a decent job, especially for fixing CSS issues. But when it can't see the artifacts it's debugging, it starts guessing, confident that it knows the root cause. A recent example: I was building up a html element out of the DOM and exporting to PNG using html2canvas. The element was being rendered correctly in the DOM, but the exported image was incorrect, and it spent 2 hours spinning it's wheels and repeating the same fixes over and over.
- zrn900 11mo agoWe're all architects now...
- 9rx 11mo ago> AI is bad at figuring out what to do, but fantastic at actually doing it. I've found AI is pretty good at figuring out what to do, but hit or miss at actually doing it.