alt Hacker NewsI’m not particularly proAI but I struggle with the mentality some engineers seem to apply to trying.
If you read someone say “I don’t know what’s the big deal with vim, I ran it and pressed some keys and it didn’t write text at all” they’d be mocked for it.
But with these tools there seems to be an attitude of “if I don’t get results straight away it’s bad”. Why the difference?
Replies
I don't understand how to get even bad results. Or any results at all. I'm at a level where I'm going "This can't just be me not having read the manual".
I get the same change applied multiple times, the agent having some absurd method of applying changes that conflict with what I say it like some git merge from hell and so on. I can't get it to understand even the simplest of contexts etc.
It's not really that the code it writes might not work. I just can't get past the actual tool use. In fact, I don't think I'm even at the stage where the AI output is even the problem yet.
I agree to a degree, but I am in that camp. I subscribe to alphasignal, and every morning there are 3 new agent tools, and two new features, and a new agentic approach, and I am left wondering, where is the production stuff?
Well one could say that since it's AI, AI should be able to tell us what we're doing wrong. No?
AI is supposed to make our work easier.
There isn't a bunch of managers metaphorically asking people if they're using vim enough, and not so many blog posts proclaiming vim as the only future for building software