The Cost of AI Coding

> Solving problems for real people. Isn't the answer here kind of obvious?

No. There are a thousand other ways of solving problems for real people, so that doesn't explain why some choose software development as their preferred method.

Presumably, the reason for choosing software development as the method of solving problems for people is because software development itself brings joy. Different people find joy in different aspects even of that, though.

For my part, the stuff that AI is promising to automate away is much of the stuff that I enjoy about software development. If I don't get to do that, that would turn my career into miserable drudgery.

Perhaps that's the future, though. I hope not, but if it is, then I need to face up to the truth that there is no role for me in the industry anymore. That would pretty much be a life crisis, as I'd have to find and train for something else.

Same as when higher-level languages replaced assembly for a lot of use cases. And btw, at least in places I've worked, better traditional tooling would replace a lot more headcount than AI would.

> Solving problems for real people. Isn't the answer here kind of obvious?

Look at the majority of the tech sector for the last ten years or so and tell me this answer again.

Like I guess this is kind of true, if "problems for real people" equals "compensating for inefficiencies in our system for people with money" and "solutions" equals "making a poor person do it for them and paying them as little as legally possible."

solving real problems is the core of it, but for a lot of people the joy and meaning come from how they solve them too. the shift to AI tools might feel like outsourcing the interesting part, even if the outcome is still useful. side projects will stick around for sure, but i think it's fair to ask what the day-to-day feels like when more of it becomes reviewing and prompting rather than building.

They perhaps haven’t taken away your keyboard but anecdotally, a few friends work at places where their boss is requiring them to use the LLMs. So you may not have to code with them but some people are starting to be chained to them.

So much this. The AI takes care of the tedious line by line what’s-the-name-of-that-stdlib-function parts (and most of the tedious test-writing parts) and lets me focus on the interesting bits like what it is I want to build and how the pieces should fit together. And debugging, which I find satisfying.

Sadly, I find it sorely lacking at dealing with build systems and that particular type of boilerplate, mostly because it seems to mix up different versions of things too much and gives you totally broken setups more often than not. I’d just as soon never deal with the he’ll that is front end build/lint/test config again.

I read one characterization which is that LLMs don't give new information (except to the user learning) but they reorganize old information.

I see this "prompting is an art" stuff a lot. I gave Claude a list of 10 <Route> objects and asked it to make an adjustment to all of them. It gave me 9 back. When I asked it to try again it gave me 10 but one didn't work. What's "prompt engineering" there, telling it to try again until it gets it right? I'd rather just do it right the first time.

> Let's stop pretending or denying it: most of us would delegate our work code to somebody else or something else if we could.

I don’t think this is the case, if anything the opposite is true. Most of us would like to do the work code but have realized, at some career point, that you’re paid more to abstract yourself away from that and get others to do it either in technical leadership or management.

I wouldn't, I got into software exactly because I enjoy solving problems and writing code. Verifying shitty, mindless, computer generated code is not something I would consider doing for all the money in the world.

> "verify it rigorously (which if you cannot do, you should absolutely never touch an LLM!)"

100% this.

> most of us would delegate our work code to somebody else or something else if we could

Not me. I code because I love to code, and I get paid to do what I love. If that's not you…find a different profession?

The act of coding preserves your skills for that all-important verification step. No coding and the whole system falls apart.

> Still, prompting LLMs well requires eloquence and expressiveness that many programmers don't have

It requires magical incantations that may or may not work and where a missing comma in a prompt can break the output just as badly as the US waking up and draining compute resources.

Has nothing to do with eloquence

> work on whatever code makes you happy without using an LLM?

This isn't how it works, psychologically. The whole time I'm manual coding, I'm wondering if it'd be "easier" to start prompting. I keep thinking about a passage from The Road To Wigan Pier where Orwell addresses this effect as it related to the industrial revolution:

>Mechanize the world as fully as it might be mechanized, and whichever way you turn there will be some machine cutting you off from the chance of working—that is, of living.

>At a first glance this might not seem to matter. Why should you not get on with your ‘creative work’ and disregard the machines that would do it for you? But it is not so simple as it sounds. Here am I, working eight hours a day in an insurance office; in my spare time I want to do something ‘creative’, so I choose to do a bit of carpentering—to make myself a table, for instance. Notice that from the very start there is a touch of artificiality about the whole business, for the factories can turn me out a far better table than I can make for myself. But even when I get to work on my table, it is not possible for me to feel towards it as the cabinet-maker of a hundred years ago felt towards his table, still less as Robinson Crusoe felt towards his. For before I start, most of the work has already been done for me by machinery. The tools I use demand the minimum of skill. I can get, for instance, planes which will cut out any moulding; the cabinet-maker of a hundred years ago would have had to do the work with chisel and gouge, which demanded real skill of eye and hand. The boards I buy are ready planed and the legs are ready turned by the lathe. I can even go to the wood-shop and buy all the parts of the table ready-made and only needing to be fitted together; my work being reduced to driving in a few pegs and using a piece of sandpaper. And if this is so at present, in the mechanized future it will be enormously more so. With the tools and materials available then, there will be no possibility of mistake, hence no room for skill. Making a table will be easier and duller than peeling a potato. In such circumstances it is nonsense to talk of ‘creative work’. In any case the arts of the hand (which have got to be transmitted by apprenticeship) would long since have disappeared. Some of them have disappeared already, under the competition of the machine. Look round any country churchyard and see whether you can find a decently-cut tombstone later than 1820. The art, or rather the craft, of stonework has died out so completely that it would take centuries to revive it.

>But it may be said, why not retain the machine and retain ‘creative work’? Why not cultivate anachronisms as a spare-time hobby? Many people have played with this idea; it seems to solve with such beautiful ease the problems set by the machine. The citizen of Utopia, we are told, coming home from his daily two hours of turning a handle in the tomato-canning factory, will deliberately revert to a more primitive way of life and solace his creative instincts with a bit of fretwork, pottery-glazing, or handloom-weaving. And why is this picture an absurdity—as it is, of course? Because of a principle that is not always recognized, though always acted upon: that so long as the machine is there, one is under an obligation to use it. No one draws water from the well when he can turn on the tap. One sees a good illustration of this in the matter of travel. Everyone who has travelled by primitive methods in an undeveloped country knows that the difference between that kind of travel and modern travel in trains, cars, etc., is the difference between life and death. The nomad who walks or rides, with his baggage stowed on a camel or an ox-cart, may suffer every kind of discomfort, but at least he is living while he is travelling; whereas for the passenger in an express train or a luxury liner his journey is an interregnum, a kind of temporary death. And yet so long as the railways exist, one has got to travel by train—or by car or aeroplane. Here am I, forty miles from London. When I want to go up to London why do I not pack my luggage on to a mule and set out on foot, making a two days of it? Because, with the Green Line buses whizzing past me every ten minutes, such a journey would be intolerably irksome. In order that one may enjoy primitive methods of travel, it is necessary that no other method should be available. No human being ever wants to do anything in a more cumbrous way than is necessary. Hence the absurdity of that picture of Utopians saving their souls with fretwork. In a world where everything could be done by machinery, everything would be done by machinery. Deliberately to revert to primitive methods to use archaic took, to put silly little difficulties in your own way, would be a piece of dilettantism, of pretty-pretty arty and craftiness. It would be like solemnly sitting down to eat your dinner with stone implements. Revert to handwork in a machine age, and you are back in Ye Olde Tea Shoppe or the Tudor villa with the sham beams tacked to the wall.

>The tendency of mechanical progress, then, is to frustrate the human need for effort and creation. It makes unnecessary and even impossible the activities of the eye and the hand. The apostle of ‘progress’ will sometimes declare that this does not matter, but you can usually drive him into a comer by pointing out the horrible lengths to which the process can be carried.

sorry it's so long

I'm guessing you're referencing KRAZAM? https://youtu.be/eDr6_cMtfdA

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=eDr6_cMtfdA

By then the price will have increased quite a bit; if you want me to fix your AI crap, you're going to pay until it hurts.

One trend I've been finding interesting over the past year is that a lot of engineers I know who moved into engineering management are writing code again - because LLMs mean they can get something productive done in a couple of hours where previously it would have taken them a full day.

Managers usually can't carve out a full day - but a couple of hours is manageable.

See also this quote from Gergely Orosz:

  Despite being rusty with coding (I don't code every day
  these days): since starting to use Windsurf / Cursor with
  the recent increasingly capable models: I am SO back to
  being as fast in coding as when I was coding every day
  "in the zone" [...]

  When you are driving with a firm grip on the steering
  wheel - because you know exactly where you are going, and
  when to steer hard or gently - it is just SUCH a big
  boost.

  I have a bunch of side projects and APIs that I operate -
  but usually don't like to touch it because it's (my)
  legacy code.

  Not any more.

  I'm making large changes, quickly. These tools really
  feel like a massive multiplier for experienced devs -
  those of us who have it in our head exactly what we want
  to do and now the LLM tooling can move nearly as fast as
  my thoughts!

Yeah I think flow is more about holding a lot of knowledge about the code and its control flow in your head at a time. I think there's an XKCD or something that illustrates that.

You still need to do that if you're using AI, otherwise how do you know if it's actually done a good job? Or are people really just vibe coding without even reading the code at all? That seems... unlikely to work.