alt Hacker NewsI agree with you, and I don't want anything related to the current AI craze in my life, at all.
But when I come on HN and see people posting about AI IDEs and vibe coding and everything, I'm led to believe that there are developers that like this sort of thing.
I cannot explain this.
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Partly it's these people all trying to make money selling AI tools to each other, and partly there's a lot of people who want to take shortcuts to learning and productivity without thinking or caring about long term consequences, and AI offers that.
The "AI" gold rush pays a lot. So they're trying to present themselves as "AI" experts so they can demand those "AI" gold rush salaries.
I cannot explain this.
That usually means you're missing something, not that everyone else is.
Even as a principal software developer and someone who is skeptical and exhausted with the AI hype, AI IDEs can be useful. The rule I give to my coworkers is: use it where you know what to write but want to save time doing it. Unit tests are great for this. Quick demos and test benches are great. Boilerplate and glue are great for this. There are lots of places where trivial, mind-numbing work can be done quickly and effortlessly with an AI. These are cases where it's actually making life better for the developer, not replacing their expertise.
I've also had luck with it helping with debugging. It has the knowledge of the entire Internet and it can quickly add tracing and run debugging. It has helped me find some nasty interactions that I had no idea were a thing.
AI certainly has some advantages in certain use cases, that's why we have been using AI/ML for decades. The latest wave of models bring even more possibilities. But of course, it also brings a lot of potential for abuse and a lot of hype. I, too, all quite sick of it all and can't wait for the bubble to burst so we can get back to building effective tools instead of making wild claims for investors.
If you develop software you can’t be as productive without an LLM as a competitor or coworker can be with one.
> I'm led to believe that there are developers that like this sort of thing.
this is their aim, along with rabbiting on about "inevitability"
once you drop out of the SF/tech-oligarch bubble the advocacy drops off
I see using AI for coding as a little different. I'm producing something that is designed for a machine to consume and react to. Code is the means by which I express my aims to the machine. With AI there's an extra layer of machine that transforms my written aims into a language any machine can understand. I'm still ambivalent about it, I'm proud of my code. I like to know it inside out. Surrendering all that feels alien to me. But it's also undeniable that AI has sped up a bunch of the boring grunt work I have to do in projects. You can write, say, an OpenAPI spec, some tests and tell the AI to do the rest. It's very, very far from perfect but it remains very useful.
But the fact remains that I'm producing something for a machine to consume. When I see people using AI to e.g. write e-mails for them that's where I object: that's communication intended for humans. When you fob that off onto a machine something important is lost.