6 ms·
I agree with you on everything you said here except: > when you know how the thing works and have that mental context, you will always be faster than an AI Th
by ditchfieldcaleb 4mo ago
I agree with you on everything you said here except:
> when you know how the thing works and have that mental context, you will always be faster than an AI
That's just plain false, honestly. No one can type at the speed AI can code, even factoring in the time you need to spend to properly write out the spec & design rules the AI needs to follow when implementing your app/feature/whatever. And that gap will only increase as LLMs get more intelligent.
- nullsanity 4mo ago[dead]
- JSR_FDED 4mo agoIt should be “…you will always be faster than someone _without the knowledge_ using an AI”
- leostarship 4mo agoas i understood it he's referring to the overall time it takes to build a complete finished piece of software, accounting for the refactoring and bug fixes and all that. cause handn't you understood the tools you're using you would be running into roadblocks and that adds up
- deleted 4mo ago[deleted]
- notnullorvoid 4mo agoSome of us do actually have intimate knowledge in certain areas where guidance of an AI takes longer than doing it yourself. It's not about typing speed, it's that when you know something really really well the solution/code is already known to you or the very act of thinking about the problem makes the solution known to you in full. When that happens it's less text to write that solution than it is to write a sufficient description of the solution to AI (not even counting the back and forth required of reviewing the AI output and correcting it).
- bulbar 4mo agoGiving a precise description of what the computer is supposed to do is exactly what programming is. The more specific your requirements the closer you get to natural language not being useful anymore.
- kyykky 4mo agoI code mostly in APL and J. It’s much faster to type the code than explain everything to AI.
- satvikpendem 4mo agoThe exceptions that prove the rule. When your programming language is built up of singular Unicode characters with specific meanings, of course that's faster than typing out in English what you want. What do you use them for? For most AI users it's usually CRUD and I've never seen a web server or frontend in APL like languages.
- noosphr 4mo agoThe exception is the rule. The reason why programming is hard is because most languages force you to use a hammer when you need a screw driver. LLMs are very good at misusing hammers and most people find them useful for that reason. If you use a sane dsl instead the natural language description of a problem is always more complex and much longer than the equivalent description in a dsl. It's also usually wrong to boot. This is what algebra used to look like before variables: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archimedes%27s_cattle_problem#Problem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archimedes%27s_cattle_problem#... I don't think you will find anyone who can do better than an LLM at one shotting the prose version of the problem. Both will of course be wrong. But I also don't think you will find an LLM that can solve the problem faster than a human with Prolog when you have to use the prose description of the problem.
- stingraycharles 4mo ago
- Turskarama 4mo agoIn my experience AI can write _something_ from scratch, but often edge cases won't be handled until I go through and read the results or test it. Usually when I'm writing by hand I will naturally find the majority of edge cases as I go. By the time I've read through the results and fixed said edge cases, I usually would have been faster just doing it myself.
- toponijo 4mo agoIt also loves to add edge case handling where it's not needed and in poorly chosen places
- Kiro 4mo agoMy experience is the opposite: AI takes too many edge cases into account and guard against even the most unlikely thing. The upside is that it often handles edge cases that I either didn't think about or was too lazy to implement. I can with full confidence say that the code AI writes is more robust and safe than if I would have done it myself. The code definitely becomes more bloated though.
- strken 4mo agoMy experience has been that it wraps all the obvious things, and even some obscure things, in error handling. In this sense it is safer. It also fails to write abstractions unless they're carbon copies of a well established pattern, and when abstractions already exist, it needs babysitting to ensure it will use them appropriately. It won't introspect about its current direction unless forced to by the user or by an error, and when forced it will happily "fix" non-issues just because you pointed them out, since it's a happy little yes-man. Because of this, code written by a good engineer is more likely to start out broken but converges towards correctness as more abstractions get built, while code written by AI duplicates abstraction layers, leaks between them, and never converges towards anything.
- cableshaft 4mo agoI've definitely had a lot of these same experiences (in fact I've been fighting it on one particular issue the past couple of days and I'm pretty much just giving up and going back to solving it manually now). But it still seems to get it right (or at least close enough to right that I keep using it) more often than it gets into these traps.
- charcircuit 4mo ago>No one can type at the speed AI can code You can definitely be faster than frontier models. The number of tokens per second is not that high and they require a lot of tokens for thinking and navigating things.
- Aerolfos 4mo agoEspecially if you use auto-complete AI, ironically. You type a few characters, the line fills out in less than a second, as opposed to a reasoning model that takes maybe a second per 2-3 lines it writes out.
- gaanbal 4mo agoif you've never had the experience of handing something off to someone else being more laborious and slower than doing it yourself due to having to set constraints and define success, then you simply haven't held a senior enough position to comment on this with any authority
- andai 4mo agoAlso employees who work slower than you (and spend most of their time not actually working).
- erfgh 4mo agoWhere does this certainty that LLMs will get more intelligent stem from?
- eloisant 4mo agoThey progressed very quickly in the past year. Not just models, but all the harness around them to code. When they start plateauing, then we can assume they're done progressing.
- utopiah 4mo ago> No one can type at the speed AI can code Don't we already have a weekly post nowadays explaining, again, that typing isn't the bottleneck?
- Kiro 4mo agoWhich is still false and not serious. It's one of the dumbest rationalizations I've seen. AI has many flaws but pretending that it's useless because of that is not it.
- esafak 4mo agoThat is not true in startups, where people are getting work done. Maybe in later stage companies where 'stakeholders' are 'synergizing' in meetings over the Q2 roadmap.
- stephenr 4mo ago> LLMs get more intelligent The Spicy Autocomplete koolaid club is out in force today I see. We clearly have different ideas of what the word "intelligent" means.
- TeriyakiBomb 4mo agoPlenty of cars can get off the line faster than an F1 car. But around a track, an F1 is by far the fastest in the world. Going fast isn’t the difficult bit.
- draxil 4mo agoExcept it's often faster to make the change yourself than explain it to an AI.
- deleted 4mo ago[deleted]
- jmull 4mo agoThey probably mean faster to a higher-level goal rather than SLOC. Typing speed and SLOC have never been that useful for measuring productivity.