[throwatdem12311]

For me it’s just a matter of “does this actually save me time at all?”

If it generates the slop version in a week but it takes me 3 more weeks to clean it up, could I have I just done it right the first time myself in 4 weeks instead? How much money have I wasted in tokens?

[sunaurus]

I've been arguing that it's POSSIBLE to get a small (but meaningful) uplift in productivity on average if you are careful with how you use LLMs, but at the same time, it's also extremely easy to actually negatively impact your productivity.

In both cases, you feel super productive all the time, because you are constantly putting in instructions and getting massive amounts of output, and this feels like constant & fast progress. It's scary how easy it is to waste time on LLMs while not even realizing you are wasting time.

[0xbadcafebee]

A car saves you time in getting to and from the store. But if you don't learn to drive, and just hop in the car and press things, you're going to crash, and that definitely won't save you time. Cars are also more expensive than walking or a bike, yet people still buy them.

[throwatdem12311]

I already know how to drive stick (trad coding), I don’t feel like I’m gaining much by switching to automatic transmission.

[0xbadcafebee]

Yeah that's not the difference, lol. With AI coding you can get the same work done in an order of magnitude less time, without even knowing how to program.

The only comparison I can come up with is 3D printers, but even that's not as ridiculously fast and easy as AI coding. An average person can ask an agent to write a program, in any popular language, and it'll do it, and it'll work. We still need people intelligent enough to steer the agent, but you do not need to edit a single line of code anymore.

[skydhash]

Most people that don't know how to program have no real desire in coding with AI (unless to pose as a SWE and get that sweet money). Most of them don't even like computers. Yes they do some tasks on it, but they're not that attached to the tool and its capabilities.

[zephen]

> does this actually save me time at all?

Soooooo....

As one who hasn't taken the plunge yet -- I'm basically retired, but have a couple of projects I might want to use AI for -- "time" is not always fungible with, or a good proxy for, either "effort" or "motivation"

> How much money have I wasted in tokens?

This, of course, may be a legitimate concern.

> If it generates the slop version in a week but it takes me 3 more weeks to clean it up, could I have I just done it right the first time myself in 4 weeks instead?

This likewise may be a legitimate concern, but sometimes the motivation for cleaning up a basically working piece of code is easier to find that the motivation for staring at a blank screen and trying to write that first function.

[throwatdem12311]

Well for me, the amount of time/effort as a function my of my motivation has acted as a natural gatekeeper to bad ideas. Just because I can do something with AI now doesn’t necessarily mean that I should. I am also weary of trading time and effort for outright money right out of my own pocket to find out, especially when I find the people I’d be giving money to so reprehensible. I don’t live somewhere where developers make a lot of money. I’m not poor in any stretch but not rich enough that I can waste money on slop for funsies. But I can spend a month on validating a side project because I find coding as a hobby enjoyable in and of itself, and I don’t care if I throw out a few thousand lines of code after a little while and realize I’m wasting my time.

Cleaning up agent slop code by hand is also a miserable experience and makes me hate my job. I do it already because at $DAYJOB because my boss thinks “investing” in third worlders for pennies on the dollar and just giving them a Claude subscription will be better than investing in technical excellence and leadership. The ROI on this strategy is questionable at best, at least at my current job. Code Review by humans is still the bottleneck and delivering proper working features has not accelerated because they require much more iteration because of slop.

Would much rather spend the time making my own artisanal tradslop instead if it’s gonna take me the same amount of time anyway - at least it’s more enjoyable.

[zephen]

Your position makes an immense amount of sense for your described situation.

As I said, I'm retired, and so I've never had to clean up AI slop at $DAYJOB.

Since the whole AI thing would be a learning experience for me, it would include trying to toilet train the AI itself, as others have intimated can be done in some cases, rather than dealing with a bunch of already-checked-into-the-repo-slop.

And that may be a losing proposition. I don't know; haven't tried it yet.

> Would much rather spend the time making my own artisanal tradslop instead if it’s gonna take me the same amount of time anyway - at least it’s more enjoyable.

Although I haven't had the AI experience you describe, I have had a similar experience with coworkers who moved fast and broke all kinds of shit. That was similarly no fun. It's like trying to work on your wife's minivan, but she won't pull over and let you properly fix it.

Given sufficient time, I enjoy polishing/perfecting/refactoring code. My final output often looks radically different from my prototype. It is clear to me that I would hate the situation you describe. It is not clear to me that starting with prompted slop and wrangling it into submission would be much less enjoyable to me than writing my own slop and then wrangling it into submission.

> especially when I find the people I’d be giving money to so reprehensible.

This is a bit of a concern, but I'm pretty sure that, at the moment, every token you burn costs them more than you.

[throwatdem12311]

The biggest thing that has changed in my experience (at least in a professions setting) is now that people have AI agents they don’t really have any motivation to improve. If you tell them something that needs to be changed they just reprompt the agent until it’s good enough - but the most sinister thing is they keep making the same mistakes over and over again. There is no growth, no shared understanding that disseminates through review - just re-prompting. They often just directly use my review comments as prompts! People don’t understand code they generated themselves just a few days later. But not in a “oh just let me reread this again real quick” kind of way but a “I have absolutely no clue wtf I am even looking at” way.

I’ve been sounding the alarm in my own circles about the lack of junior roles now because of AI - which will lead to a shortage of seniors in just a few years - but there is something even more sinister: juniors no longer improve enough to be intermediates and seniors, and worse…seniors and intermediates have regressed to juniors through laziness and cognitive offloading.

Like if I’m just sending code review to a middle man prompter - why not just skip the middle man? I’m already wrangling a handful of AI agents myself every day, so what is even the point of this extra person anyway? I don’t want to replace people with AI but if the person is so lazy that even I would probably prefer just doing the prompting myself then why shouldn’t I replace them with AI?

[zephen]

That does sound like an intractable problem.

My problem, if and when I get started, would be tangential to this. It is clear that communication with LLMs is changing so rapidly that there may not be any universal long-lived lessons to be learned from optimizing your interactions with a particular model.

I know that one-shotting things is probably not best, but determining how far to take it and when to cut over and finish it myself is something that I want to learn, but perhaps not too well.

My skills are an eclectic mix of high- and low- level. I know exactly what, for example, a frequency analyzer can do for me, but controlling the $400K frequency analyzer is often best left to the guy who lives and breathes it.

Likewise, my debugging skills are exceptional, but I am not as proficient with any particular debugger as are people who live in the debugger daily because they write terrible code. My debugging skills are mostly predicated on a big part of your daily life -- reading code.

(To be fair, I have known a very few people who live in the debugger because they are dealing with intractable problems caused by other people, but those are the rarities. I, myself, used to live in the debugger a lot when I was writing graphics drivers for the mostly undocumented Windows 3.1.)

Which brings us to your reports and/or co-workers. These people have always existed. They pride themselves on and partly base their value on and derive their value from the tools they think they know inside-out.

In truth, they don't know the tools, but they are intimately familiar with the controls of the tool, like a child who knows how to make a smartphone do exactly what their parent needs it to do.

So, as long as it's a tool you need, but it's too painful for you to control directly, these people are useful. In your case, you already have cause to use the LLM directly on a regular basis, so, as you point out, the value of these people is diminishing and maybe already negative.

> why shouldn’t I replace them with AI?

You probably should. Or, at a minimum, if possible, you should restructure things so that the people who are doing things that you are already proficient at are doing them for someone else who isn't as proficient at the tools, and you can get out of that loop.

One reason I am not yet completely insane is that I realized about 40 years ago that the place I hated most being was inside someone else's debug loop. Because most people are objectively stupid, and this goes double for people who need you in that loop. So I always work to structure my responsibilities and work setup to avoid this. If I find a bug in an internal supplier's code, I create an MVCE and hand it over to them. If an internal customer claims to find a bug in my code and doesn't provide an MVCE, I figure out what they are attempting to do, create my own MVCE for their function, and either fix it if it was really my problem, or hand it back to them, and ask them to expand on it until it breaks and get back to me.

Reflecting on this, I realize that I am probably not too likely to succumb to interminable prompting loops, because that wouldn't feel much different to what I nave avoided most of my life. On the few occasions over the last four decades where being involved in someone else's debug loop was completely unavoidable, the most useful thing I brought to the table when they were out of ideas and ready to throw a lot of effort at trying random things was a series of questions like "What are you going to learn from that? What will your decision points be?"

And I'm not much of a gambler, so I won't be spending too many tokens hoping "the next time, for sure!"

[theshrike79]

1. Make it work

2. Make it pretty

3. Make it fast.

If you have something that's pretty and fast but doesn't work, is that useful?

But if you have something that works, but is ugly and slow - you can still use it and fix it while you dogfood it. Maybe figure out other ways to improve it beyond making the code look pretty.