> How do I feel, about all the code I wrote that was ingested by LLMs? I feel great to be part of that, because I see this as a continuation of what I tried to do all my life: democratizing code, systems, knowledge. LLMs are going to help us to write better software, faster, and will allow small teams to have a chance to compete with bigger companies.
Every now and then I post the same exact comment here on HN, where the heck are the products then? Or where is the better outcome? The faster software? Let alone small team competing with bigger companies?
We are NOT anti AI we're exhausted to keep reading bs from ai astroturfers or wanna be ai tech influencers. It's so exhausting it's always your fault that you're not "using the tool properly", and you're going to be left behind. I'm not anti AI I just wish the bubble will pop so instead of fighting back bs from managers that "I read that on HN" I can go back coding with and without ai where applies to my needs
This is how I feel too. Let me try to itemize it:
how AI speeds me up:
- no longer have to remember how to set up unit test boilerplate in each of the 6ish programming languages i commonly use
- can often vaguely gesture at an existing pattern and have AI "copy-paste" it into new code. "do that read-through cache pattern like you see there and there but do it for this table and this proto msg type."
- can quickly answer questions like "does anyone in the code seem to build this string manually instead of using the library/helper method for it"
- can quickly generate code like "all I want is a gosh dang PKCS-formatted key, why is that so hard for this library" which the docs did not provide
which is really cool. it absolutely speeds things up by 10-100x in some scenarios. a lot of the sucky parts of programming are being mired down in these kinds of messes.
how AI slows me down:
- have to explain to jr dev why, even though it has unit tests, the AI-generated bespoke mutex async cache is not going into our production codebase
- have to explain to PM why I cannot let them vibe code new features into the hot path of our prod services when they are not on-call to be forced to clean it up when it explodes at 3am
- have to explain to senior dev who should REALLY know better why you cannot _just_ ask someone to review a 2000 LOC PR
- have to explain to CEO in tremendous itemized, evidenced detail why [big project in eye of sauron] did not go noticeably faster than it did 2 years ago even though the team was hand-picked to be full of people he knew would use AI as much as he wanted them to.
- have to explain to CEO why I really wish he would stop playing with AI and bothering the crap out of the engineers and go back to actually doing whatever it is the CEO gets paid 10-100x what a software engineer salary to do. [actually still trying to figure this one out without getting fired.]
I'm as interested in AI use as anyone can be, when I have to put up with sycophantic "believers" who really wish they could replace me entirely with the chatbot.
Also, this shit is expensive and still being sold at a loss. I signed up for Amp and blew through my $10 of signup credit getting very little done. I'm certainly not paying my own money for that.
[dead]