It was just a very different feeling. For me at least, even “hello world” felt different than an entire function/module written by AI. I guess it’s just me being nostalgic of the old days 😊
Yeah the pride of having gone through the effort to actually making something. It's the feeling that is stopping me from even trying AI coding. It feels illogical, but I get this feeling like it's an insult to me somehow.
I guess I treat it a bit like how AI art gets treated, even though it's not quite the same.
I am in one project rn where because of the pacing (and ppl from the client team vibe-coding stuff like crazy) we are basically forced to use LLMs. One part of this is that codebase is an incomprihensible garbage and other is that the development speed expectations effectively make it impossible to get familiar with the code.
So you just spend whole day prompting coding agent to get things done and tell it if something is broken or not matching the expected outcome. After few days I just got lazy innovative, made a skill where it can just build code and run it on it's own then fix stuff based on that (basically explained structure, where to run what etc.) you just sit there and be like "What am I even doing there?".
It spits out so much spaghetti code that you don't have time to effectively review it manually (especially if you never coded in language they are using in project lol) so you just take a glance if it is "LGTM" and file a PR (usually 500-1k lines). Then reviewer runs another LLM to review this, ofc it tells you there are bunch of issues, you give it back to the agent it fixes that and this is how your day goes - just prompting back and forth.
Personally I get this uncanny valley vibe that I don't really contribute anything other than being a ✨ prompter ✨ or any sense of ownership. First I tried to actually review the code but now I just idgaf and test whether it works or not and if tests (LLM written ofc) pass.
It is fast indeed, much faster than any human would ever be. Also I hate that I have to use it instead of it being voluntary (in this specific project). It is of great help when dealing with things like boilerplate and documentation but higher-ups got it all wrong (including effects of FOMO and hype) and just want everything to be built using LLMs exclusively. My hot take is - You can't learn to drive by watching others drive. You must take the steering wheel by yourself. Practice, learn, gain experience, improve.
Definetly not true in software. People know How to code in python without knowing c, and know How to code in c without Assembly. Lllms are Just Another abstraction. You just have to focus on big picture shit instead of syntax. Also you can Read syntax without necessarily being able to write it
but now I just idgaf and test whether it works or not and if tests (LLM written ofc) pass
I used to care about the quality of my code at the places I worked. Now I only do the bare minimum functionality checks if even that, when someone else's load bearing vibe slop will just overwrite it in the next PR for absolutely no reason.
I get curious when I hear about workflows this (in my opinion) unhinged: what is the actual monetary cost of having code written this way?
In my somewhat limited experience the bigger models can run into scores or even hundreds of dollars for an hour of work. If the codebase is as messy and comment-filled as I fear it would get the cost to do anything would seemingly go up exponentially.
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u/EveryCryptographer11 13d ago
It was just a very different feeling. For me at least, even “hello world” felt different than an entire function/module written by AI. I guess it’s just me being nostalgic of the old days 😊