AI Coding assistants provide little value because a programmer's job is to think

https://www.doliver.org/articles/programming-is-a-thinkers-game

by d0liver • 1 year ago

100 200 1 year ago

fire_lake• 1 year ago

Most developers use languages that lack expressivity. LLMs allow them to generate the text faster, bringing it closer to the speed of thought.

bamboozled• 1 year ago

What if they help you to think ?

I know LLMs are masters of averages and I use that to my advantage.

65• 1 year ago

I wish people would realize you can replace pretty much any LLM with GitHub code search. It's a far better way to get example code than anything I've used.

ponty_rick• 1 year ago

If you use github, sure

monkaiju• 1 year ago

Couldn't agree more. And I'm regards to some of the comments here, generating the text isn't the hard OR time consuming part of development, and that's even assuming the generated code was immediately trustworthy. Given that it isn't must be checked, it's really just not very valuable

lobochrome• 1 year ago

Object-oriented languages provide little value because a programmer’s job is to think

Memory-safe languages provide little value because a programmer’s job is to think

…

DidYaWipe• 1 year ago

Not comparable at all.

ahartmetz3• 1 year ago

Now this isn't a killer argument, but your examples are about readability and safety, respectively - the quality of the result. LLMs seem to be more about shoveling the same or worse crap faster.

dymk3• 1 year ago

Have you tried an AI coding assistant, or is that just the impression you get?

skydhash9• 1 year ago

Using deterministic methods as counter arguments about a probabilistic one. Something apples, something oranges….

protocolture• 1 year ago

So theres no value in dealing with the repeatable stuff to free the programmer up to solve new problems? Seems like a stretch.

9rx• 1 year ago

There is no new value that we didn’t already recognize. We’ve know for many decades that programming languages can help programmers.

player1234• 1 year ago

They are expecting a value of trillions of $$$. Is it that valuable to you, that you are willing to pay the subscription fee necessary to make them break even and the profit and give VC it's ROI? Looks like hundres of dollars each month.

adocomplete• 1 year ago

I disagree. It's all about how you're using them. AI coding assistants make it easy to translate thought to code. So much boilerplate can be given to the assistant to write out while you focus on system design, architecture, etc, and then just guide the AI system to generate the code for you.

wakefulsales• 1 year ago

this is just stupid, anyone who's used ai to code knows this is wrong empirically

recursive• 1 year ago

I've used it and haven't had much success.

dukeofdoom• 1 year ago

It's more like an assistant that can help you write a class to do something. You could write on your own but feeling lazy. Sometimes it's good, other times it's idioticly bad. Need to keep it in check and keep telling it what it needs to do because it has a tendency to dig holes it can't get out of. Breaking things up into Smaller classes helps to a degree.

incoming1211• 1 year ago

I'm sorry to say, but the author of this post doesn't appear to have much, if any experience with AI and sounds like he's just trying to justify not using it and pretend hes better without it.

cedws• 1 year ago

It’s okay to be a sceptic, I am too, but the logic and reasoning in the post is just really flimsy and makes our debate look weak.

permo-w6• 1 year ago

seriously. if you want to say that AI will likely reduce wages and supply for certain more boilerplate jobs; or that they are comparatively much worse for the environment than normal coding; or that they are not particularly good once you get into something quite esoteric or complex; or that they've led certain companies to think that developing AGI is a good idea; or that they're mostly centralised into the hands of a few unpleasant actors; then any of those criticisms, and certainly others, are valid to me, but to say that they're not actually useful or provide little value? it's just nonsense or ragebait

tensor• 1 year ago

"Spellcheck provides little value because an authors job is to write." - rolls eyes

torben-friis3• 1 year ago

These articles keep popping up, analyzing an hypothetical usage of AI (and guessing it won’t be useful) as if it wasn’t something already being used in practice. It’s kinda weird to me.

“It won’t deal with abstractions” -> try asking cursor for potential refactors or patterns that could be useful for a given text.

“It doesn’t understand things beyond the code” -> try giving them an abstract jira ticket or asking what it things about certain naming, with enough context

“Reading code and understanding whether it’s wrong will take more time than writing it yourself” -> ask any engineer that saves time with everything from test scaffolding to run-and-forget scripts.

It’s as if I wrote an article today arguing that exercise won’t make you able to lift more weight - every gymgoer would raise an eyebrow, and it’s hard to imagine even the non-gymgoers would be sheltered enough to buy the argument either.

tyleo• 1 year ago

Agreed. It isn’t like crypto where the proponents proclaimed some use case that would prove value always on the verge of arriving. AI is useful right now. People are using these tools now and enjoying them.

jdiff5• 1 year ago

I'm not sure that's a convincing argument given that crypto heads haven't just been enthusiastically chatting about the possibilities in the abstract. They do an awful lot of that, see Web3, but they have been using crypto.

awesome_dude3• 1 year ago

I don't (use AI tools), I've tried them and found that they got in the way, made things more confusing, and did not get me to a point where the thing I was trying to create was working (let alone working well/safe to send to prod)

I am /hoping/ that AI will improve, to the point that I can use it like Google or Wikipedia (that is, have some trust in what's being produced)

I don't actually know anyone using AI right now. I know one person on Bluesky has found it helpful for prototyping things (and I'm kind of jealous of him because he's found how to get AI to "work" for him).

Oh, I've also seen people pasting AI results into serious discussions to try and prove the experts wrong, but only to discover that the AI has produced flawed responses.

plsbenice344• 1 year ago

Even in 2012 bitcoin could very concretely be used to order drugs. Many people have used it to transact and preserve value in hostile economic environments. Etc etc. Ridiculous comment.

Personally i have still yet to find LLMs useful at all with programming.

d0liver5• 1 year ago

Observer bias is the tendency of observers to not see what is there, but instead to see what they expect or want to see.

Unfortunately, people enjoying a thing and thinking that it works well doesn't actually mean much on its own.

But, more than that I suspect that AI is making more people realize that they don't need to write everything themselves, but they never needed to to begin with, and they'd be better off to do the code reuse thing in a different way.

rsynnott2• 1 year ago

People are using divining rods now and enjoying them: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dowsing

crispinb• 1 year ago

It's the barstool economist argument style, on long-expired loan from medieval theology. Responding to clear empirical evidence that X occurs: "X can't happen because [insert 'rational' theory recapitulation]"

Kapura• 1 year ago

weird metaphor, because a gym goer practices what they are doing by putting in the reps in order to increase personal capacity. it's more like you're laughing at people at the gym, saying "don't you know we have forklifts already lifting much more?"

asadotzler2• 1 year ago

"If you want to be good at lifting, just buy an exoskeleton like me and all my bros have. Never mind that your muscles will atrophy and you'll often get somersaulted down a flight of stairs while the exoskeleton makers all keep trying, and failing, to contain the exoskeleton propensity for tossing people down flights of stairs."

cgriswald• 1 year ago

I see it as almost the opposite. It’s like the pulley has been invented but some people refuse to acknowledge its usefulness and make claims that you’re weaker if you use it. But you can grow quite strong working a pulley all day.

torben-friis3• 1 year ago

That’s a completely different argument, however, and a good one to have.

I can buy “if you use the forklift you’ll eventually lose the ability to lift weight by yourself”, but the author is going for “the forklift is actually not able to lift anything” which can trivially be proven wrong.

jstummbillig• 1 year ago

Well said. It's not that there would not be much to seriously think about and discuss – so much is changing, so quickly – but the stuff that a lot of these articles focus is a strange exercise in denial.

amelius• 1 year ago

If AI gives a bad experience 20% of the time, and if there are 10M programmers using it, then about 3000 of them will have a bad experience 5 times in a row. You can't really blame them for giving up and writing about it.

charlie-833• 1 year ago

Out if interest, what kind of codebases are you able to get AI to do these things on. Everytime I have tried it with even simpler things than these it has failed spectacularly. Every example I see of people doing this kind of thing seems to be on some kind if web development so I have a hypothesis that AI might currently be much worse for the kinds of codebases I work on.

idontwantthis2• 1 year ago

That’s my experience too. It also fails terribly with ElasticSearch probably because the documentation doesn’t have a lot of examples. ChatGPT, copilot and claude were all useless for that and gave completely plausible nonsense. I’ve used it with most success for writing unit tests and definitely shell scripts.

torben-friis3• 1 year ago

I currently work for a finance-related scaleup. So backend systems, with significant challenges related to domain complexity and scalability, but nothing super low level either.

It does take a bit to understand how to prompt in a way that the results are useful, can you share what you tried so far?

doug_durham2• 1 year ago

I work in Python, Swift, and Objective-C. AI tools work great in all of these environment. It's not just limited to web development.

thenaturalist• 1 year ago

While I tend to agree with your premise that the linked article seems to be reasoning to the extreme off the basis of a very small code snippet, I think the core critique the author wants to make stands:

AI agents alone, unbounded, currently cannot provide huge value.

try asking cursor for potential refactors or patterns that could be useful for a given text.

You, the developer, will be selecting this text.

try giving them an abstract jira ticket or asking what it things about certain naming, with enough context

You still selected a JIRA ticket and provided context.

ask any engineer that saves time with everything from test scaffolding to run-and-forget scripts.

Yes that is true, but again, what you are providing as a counterfactual are very bounded, aka easy contexts.

In any case, the industry (both the LLM providers as well as tooling builders and devs) is clearly going into the direction of constantly etching out small imoprovements by refining which context is deemed relevant for a given problem and most efficient ways to feed it to LLMs.

And let's not kid ourselves, Microsoft, OpenAI, hell Anthropic all have 2027-2029 plans where these things will be significantly more powerful.

tptacek13• 1 year ago

Why does it matter that you're doing the thinking? Isn't that good news? What we're not doing any more is any the rote recitation that takes up most of the day when building stuff.

tomnipotent• 1 year ago

I think maybe you have unrealistic expectations.

Yesterday I needed to import a 1GB CSV into ClickHouse. I copied the first 500 lines into Claude and asked it for a CREATE TABLE and CLI to import the file. Previous day I was running into a bug with some throw-away code so I pasted the error and code into Claude and it found the non-obvious mistake instantly. Week prior it saved me hours converting some early prototype code from React to Vue.

I do this probably half a dozen times a day, maybe more if I'm working on something unfamiliar. It saves at a minimum an hour a day by pointing me in the right direction - an answer I would have reached myself, but slower.

Over a month, a quarter, a year... this adds up. I don't need "big wins" from my LLM to feel happy and productive with the many little wins it's giving me today. And this is the worst it's ever going to be.

viraptor• 1 year ago

In lots of jobs, the person doing work is not the one selecting text or the JIRA ticket. There's lots of "this is what you're working on next" coding positions that are fully managed.

But even if we ignored those, this feels like goalpost moving. They're not selecting the text - ok, ask LLM what needs refactoring and why. They're not selecting the JIRA ticket with context? Ok, provide MCP to JIRA, git and comms and ask it to select a ticket, then iterate on context until it's solvable. Going with "but someone else does the step above" applies to almost everyone's job as well.

danielschreber• 1 year ago

   >etching out

Could you explain what you mean by etching out small improvements? I've never seen the phrase "etching out" before.

Wowfunhappy2• 1 year ago

Here's an experience I've had with Claude Code several times:

1. I'll tell Claude Code to fix a bug.

2. Claude Code will fail, and after a few rounds of explaining the error and asking it to try again, I'll conclude this issue is outside the AI's ability to handle, and resign myself to fixing it the old fashioned way.

3. I'll start actually looking into the bug on my own, and develop a slightly deeper understanding of the problem on a technical level. I still don't understand every layer to the point where I could easily code a solution.

4. I'll once again ask Claude Code to fix the bug, this time including the little bit I learned in #3. Claude Code succeeds in one round.

I'd thought I'd discovered a limit to what the AI could do, but just the smallest bit of digging was enough to un-stick the AI, and I still didn't have to actually write the code myself.

(Note that I'm not a professional programmer and all of this is happening on hobby projects.)

verelo• 1 year ago

It’s all good to me - let these folks stay in the simple times while you and i arbitrage our efforts against theirs? I agree, there’s massive value in using these tools and it’s hilarious to me when others don’t see it. My reaction isn’t going to be convince them they’re wrong, it’s just to find ways to use it to get ahead while leaving them behind.

Glyptodon• 1 year ago

I don't know. Cursor is decent at refactoring. ("Look at x and ____ so that it ____." With some level of elaboration, where the change is code or code organization centric.)

And it's okay at basic generation - "write a map or hash table wrapper where the input is a TZDB zone and the output is ______" will create something reasonable and get some of the TZDB zones wrong.

But it hasn't been that great for me at really extensive conceptual coding so far. Though maybe I'm bad at prompting.

Might be there's something I'm missing w/ my prompts.

idontwantthis2• 1 year ago

For me, the hard part of programming is figuring out what I want to do. Sometimes talking with an AI helps with that, but with bugs like “1 out of 100 times a user follows this path, a message gets lost somewhere in our pipeline”, which are the type of bugs that really require knowledge and skill, AIs are completely worthless.

skydhash9• 1 year ago

“It won’t deal with abstractions” -> try asking cursor for potential refactors or patterns that could be useful for a given text.

That is not what abstraction is about. Abstraction is having a simpler model to reason about, not simply code rearranging.

“It doesn’t understand things beyond the code” -> try giving them an abstract jira ticket or asking what it things about certain naming, with enough context

Again, that is still pretty much coding. What matters is the overall design (or at least the current module).

“Reading code and understanding whether it’s wrong will take more time than writing it yourself” -> ask any engineer that saves time with everything from test scaffolding to run-and-forget scripts.

Imagine having a script and not checking the man pages for expected behavior. I hope the backup games are strong.

tptacek13• 1 year ago

There really is a category of these posts that are coming from some alternate dimension (or maybe we're in the alternate dimension and they're in the real one?) where this isn't one of the most important things ever to happen to software development. I'm a person who didn't even use autocomplete (I use LSPs almost entirely for cross-referencing --- oh wait that's another thing I'm apparently never going to need to do again because of LLMs), a sincere tooling skeptic. I do not understand how people expect to write convincingly that tools that reliably turn slapdash prose into median-grade idiomatic working code "provide little value".

quesera13• 1 year ago

tools that reliably turn slapdash prose into median-grade idiomatic working code

This may be the crux of it.

Turning slapdash prose into median-grade code is not a problem I can imagine needing to solve.

I think I'm better at describing code in code than I am in prose.

I Want to Believe. And I certainly don't want to be "that guy", but my honest assessment of LLMs for coding so far is that they are a frustrating Junior, who maybe I should help out because mentoring might be part of my job, but from whom I should not expect any near-term technical contribution.

pcwalton• 1 year ago

I do not understand how people expect to write convincingly that tools that reliably turn slapdash prose into median-grade idiomatic working code "provide little value".

Honestly, I'm curious why your experience is so different from mine. Approximately 50% of the time for me, LLMs hallucinate APIs, which is deeply frustrating and sometimes costs me more time than it would have taken to just look up the API. I still use them regularly, and the net value they've imparted has been overall greater than zero, but in general, my experience has been decidedly mixed.

It might be simply that my code tends to be in specialized areas in which the LLM has little training data. Still, I get regular frustrating API hallucinations even in areas you'd think would be perfect use cases, like writing Blender plugins, where the documentation is poor (so the LLM has a relatively higher advantage over reading the documentation) and examples are plentiful.

Edit: Specifically, the frustrating pattern is: (1) the LLM produces some code that contains hallucinated APIs; (2) in order to test (or even compile) that code, I need to write some extra supporting code to integrate it into my project; (3) I discover that the APIs were hallucinated because the code doesn't work; (4) now I not only have to rewrite the LLM's code, but I also have to rewrite all the supporting code I wrote, because it was based around a pattern that didn't work. Overall, this adds up to more time than if I had just written the code from scratch.

agentultra• 1 year ago

I don’t think the argument from such a simple example does much for the authors point.

The bigger risk is skill atrophy.

Proponents say, it doesn’t matter. We shouldn’t have to care about memory allocation or dependencies. The AI system will eventually have all of the information it needs. We just have to tell it what we want.

However, knowing what you want requires knowledge about the subject. If you’re not a security engineer you might not know what funny machines are. If someone finds an exploit using them you’ll have no idea what to ask for.

AI may be useful for some but at the end of the day, knowledge is useful.

SoftTalker2• 1 year ago

There are people at the gym I go to benching 95 lbs and asking what does it take to get to 135, or 225? The answer is "lift more weight" not "have someone help you lift more weight"

If you already know how to code, yes AI/LLMs can speed you along at certain tasks, though be careful you don't let your skills atrophy. If you can bench 225 and then you stop doing it, you soon will not be able to do that anymore.

CharlesW• 1 year ago

If you already know how to code, yes AI/LLMs can speed you along at certain tasks, though be careful you don't let your skills atrophy.

This isn't a concern. Ice-cutting skills no longer have value, and cursive writing is mostly a 20th century memory. Not only have I let my assembly language skills atrophy, but I'll happily bid farewell to all of my useless CS-related skills. In 10 years, if "app developer" still involves manual coding by then, we'll talk about coding without an AI partner like we talk about coding with punch cards.

d0liver5• 1 year ago

I need some information/advice -> I feed that into an imprecise aggregator/generator of some kind -> I apply my engineering judgement to evaluate the result and save time by reusing someone's existing work

This _is_ something that you can do with AI, but it's something that a search engine is better suited to because the search engine provides context that helps you do the evaluation, and it doesn't smash up results in weird and unpredictable ways.

Y'all think that AI is "thinking" because it's right sometimes, but it ain't thinking.

If I search for "refactor <something> to <something else>" and I get good results, that doesn't make the search engine capable of abstract thought.

andybak2• 1 year ago

AI is usually a better search engine than a search engine.

senordevnyc4• 1 year ago

This seems like a great example of someone reasoning from first principles that X is impossible, while someone else doing some simple experiments with an open mind can easily see that X is both possible and easily demonstrated to be so.

Y'all think that AI is "thinking" because it's right sometimes, but it ain't thinking.

I know the principles of how LLMs work, I know the difference between anthropomorphizing them and not. It's not complicated. And yet I still find them wildly useful.

YMMV, but it's just lazy to declare that anyone who sees it differently than you just doesn't understand how LLMs work.

Anyway, I could care less if others avoid coding with LLMs, I'll just keep getting shit done.

dymk3• 1 year ago

And yet I keep meeting programmers who say AI coding assistants are saving them tons of time or helping them work through problems they otherwise wouldn't have been able to tackle. I count myself among that group at this point. Maybe that means I'm just not a very good programmer if I need the assistance, but I'd like to think my work speaks for itself at this point.

Some things where I've found AI coding assistants to be fantastic time savers:

  - Searching a codebase with natural language
  - Quickly groking the purpose of a function or file or module
  - Rubber duck debugging some particularly tricky code
  - Coming up with tests exercising functionality I hadn't yet considered
  - Getting up to speed with popular libraries and APIs

WhitneyLand• 1 year ago

If it’s of such little value, does he really want to compete against developers trying to do the same thing he is but that have the benefit of it?

minimaxir• 1 year ago

But AI doesn't think -- it predicts patterns in language.

Boilerplate code is a pattern, and code is a language. That's part of why AI-generated code is especially effective for simple tasks.

It's when you get into more complicated apps that the pros/cons of AI coding start to be more apparent.

permo-w6• 1 year ago

not even necessarily complicated, but also obscure

gersh• 1 year ago

It seems like the traditional way to develop good judgement is by getting experience with hands-on coding. If that is all automated, how will people get the experience to have good judgement? Will fewer people get the experiences necessary to have good judgement?

nico• 1 year ago

Compilers, for the most part, made it unnecessary for programmers to check the assembly code. There are still compiler programmers that do need to deal with that, but most programmers get to benefit from just trusting that the compilers, and by extension the compiler programmers, are doing a good job

We are in a transition period now. But eventually, most programmers will probably just get to trust the AIs and the code they generate, maybe do some debugging here and there at the most. Essentially AIs are becoming the English -> Code compilers

asadotzler2• 1 year ago

In my experience, compilers are far more predictable and consistent than LLMs, making them suitable for their purpose in important ways that LLMs are not.

permo-w6• 1 year ago

I honestly think people are so massively panicking over nothing with AI. even wrt graphic design, which I think people are most worried about, the main, central skill of a graphic designer is not the actual graft of sitting down and drawing the design, it's having the taste and skill and knowledge to make design choices that are worthwhile and useful and aesthetically pleasing. I can fart around all day on Stable Diffusion or telling an LLM to design a website, but I don't know shit about UI/UX design or colour theory or simply what appeals to people visually, and I doubt an AI can teach me it to any real degree.

yes there are now likely going to be less billable hours and perhaps less joy in the work, but at the same time I suspect that managers who decide they can forgo graphic designers and just get programmers to do it are going to lose a competitive advantage

Falimonda4• 1 year ago

I fear this will not age well.

Which models have you tried to date? Can you come up with a top 3 ranking among popular models based on your definition of value?

What can be said about the ability of an LLM to translate your thinking represented in natural language to working code at rates exceeding 5-10x your typing speed?

Mark my words: Every single business that has a need for SWEs will obligate their SWEs to use AI coding assistants by the end of 2026, if not by the end of 2025. It will not be optional like it is today. Now is the time you should be exploring which models are better at "thinking" than others, and discerning which thinking you should be doing vs. which thinking you can leave up to ever-advancing LLMs.

jdiff5• 1 year ago

I've had to yank tokens out of the mouths of too many thinking models stuck in loops of (internally, within their own chain of thought) rephrasing the same broken function over and over again, realizing each time that it doesn't meet constraints, and trying the same thing again. Meanwhile, I was sat staring at an opaque spinner wondering if it would have been easier to just write it myself. This was with Gemini 2.5 Pro for reference.

Drop me a message on New Year's Day 2027. I'm betting I'll still be using them optionally.

Falimonda4• 1 year ago

I've experienced gemini get stuck as you describe a handful of times. With that said, my predication is made on the observation that these tools are already force multipliers, and they're only getting better each passing quarter.

You'll of course be free to use them optionally in your free time and on personal projects. It won't be the case at your place of employment.

I will mark my calendar!

marcusb2• 1 year ago

This reminds me of the story a few days ago about "what is your best prompt to stump LLMs", and many of the second level replies were links to current chat transcripts where the LLM handled the prompt without issue.

I think there are a couple of problems at play: 1) people who don't want the tools to have value, for various reasons, and have therefore decided the tools don't have value; 2) people who tried the tools six months or a year ago and had a bad experience and gave up; and 3) people who haven't figured out how to make good use of the tools to improve their productivity (this one seems to be heavily impacted by various grifters who overstate what the coding assistants can do, and people underestimating the effort they have to put in to get good at getting good output from the models.)

skydhash9• 1 year ago

4) People that likes having reliable tools which frees them from "reviewing" the output of these tools to see if the tool didn't make an error.

Using AI is like driving a car that decides to turn even if you keep the steering wheel straight. Randomly. At various degree. If you like this because some times it let you turn in a curve without you having to steer, you do you. But some people do prefer having a car turn when and only when they turn the wheel.

jimbob45• 1 year ago

Every single business that has a need for SWEs will obligate their SWEs to use AI coding assistants by the end of 2026, if not by the end of 2025.

If businesses mandated speed like that, then we’d all have been forced to use emacs decades ago. Businesses mandate correctness and AI doesn’t as clearly help to that end.

Falimonda4• 1 year ago

There's nothing natural about using emacs in the way that an LLM can convert natural language to working code and productivity gains.

For better or worse, you won't find correctness on any business' income statement. Sure, it's a latent variable, but so is efficiency.

ghuntley• 1 year ago

Every single business that has a need for SWEs will obligate their SWEs to use AI coding assistants by the end of 2026, if not by the end of 2025.

Exactly why I authored https://ghuntley.com/ngmi - it's already happening...

Falimonda4• 1 year ago

I was rooting for the strawberry. You delivered!

tomschwiha• 1 year ago

One point AI helps me with is to keep going.

Does it do things wrong (compared to what I have in my mind?). Of course. But it helps to have code quicker on screen. Editing / rolling back feels faster than typing everything myself.

rcarmo2• 1 year ago

4 lines of JS. A screenful of “reasoning”. Not much I can agree with.

Meanwhile I just asked Gemini in VS Code Agent Mode to build an HTTP-like router using a trie and then refactor it as a Python decorator, and other than a somewhat dumb corner case it failed at, it generated a pretty useful piece of code that saved me a couple of hours (I had actually done this before a few years ago, so I knew exactly what I wanted).

Replace programmers? No. Well, except front-end (that kind of code is just too formulaic, transactional and often boring to do), and my experiments with React and Vue were pretty much “just add CSS”.

Add value? Heck yes - although I am still very wary of letting LLM-written code into production without a thorough review.

jdiff5• 1 year ago

Not even front end, unless it literally is a dumb thin wrapper around a back end. If you are processing anything on that front end, AI is likely to fall flat as quickly as it would on the backend.

permo-w6• 1 year ago

based on what?

jolt42• 1 year ago

that kind of code is just too formulaic, transactional and often boring to do

No offense, but that sounds like every programmer that hasn't done front-end development to me. Maybe for some class of front-ends (the same stuff that Ruby on Rails could generate), but past that things tend to get not boring real fast.

rcarmo2• 1 year ago

I do a fair amount of dashboards and data handling stuff. I don’t really want to deal with React/Vue at all, and AÍ takes most of the annoyance away.

nottorp• 1 year ago

I had actually done this before a few years ago, so I knew exactly what I wanted

Oh :) LLMs do work sometimes when you already know what you want them to write.

d0liver5• 1 year ago

I had actually done this before a few years ago, so I knew exactly what I wanted

Why not just use the one you already wrote?

xnx2• 1 year ago

Why not just use the one you already wrote?

Might be owned by a previous employer.

greatpostman• 1 year ago

Honestly, o3 has completely blown my mind in terms of ability to come up with useful abstractions beyond what I would normally build. Most people claiming LLMs are limited just arent using the tools enough, and cant see the trajectory of increasing ability

quesera13• 1 year ago

Most people claiming LLMs are limited just rent using the tools enough

The old quote might apply:

~"XML is like violence. If it's not working for you, you need to use more of it".

(I think this is from Tim Bray -- it was certainly in his .signature for a while -- but oddly a quick web search doesn't give me anything authoritative. I asked Gemma3, which suggests Drew Conroy instead)

chuckadams• 1 year ago

Last I heard the phrase, it was attributed to Jamie Zawinski.

meander_water• 1 year ago

A programmers job is to provide value to the business. Thinking is certainly a part of the process, but not the job in itself.

I agree with the initial point he's making here - that code takes time to parse mentally, but that does not naturally lead to the conclusion that this _is_ the job.

kristopolous2• 1 year ago

It's the "Day-50" problem.

On Day-0, AI is great but by Day-50 there's preferences and nuance that aren't captured through textual evidence. The productivity gains mostly vanish.

Ultimately AI coding efficacy is an HCI relationship and you need different relationships (workflows) at different points in time.

That's why, currently, as time progresses you use AI less and less on any feature and fall back to human. Your workflow isn't flexible enough.

So the real problem isn't the Day-0 solution, it's solving the HCI workflow problem to get productivity gains at Day-50.

Smarter AI isn't going to solve this. Large enough code becomes internally contradictory, documentation becomes dated, tickets become invalid, design docs are based on older conceptions. Devin, plandex, aider, goose, claude desktop, openai codex, these are all Day-0 relationships. The best might be a Day-10 solution, but none are Day-50.

Day-50 productivity is ultimately a user-interface problem - a relationship negotiation and a fundamentally dynamic relationship. The future world of GPT-5 and Sonnet-4 still won't read your thoughts.

I talked about what I'm doing to empower new workflows over here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43814203

Bengalilol• 1 year ago

You pinpoint a truly important thing, even though I cannot put words onto it, I think that getting lost with AI coding assistants is far worse than getting lost as a programmer. It is like doing vanilla code or trying to make a framework suit your needs.

AI coding assistants provide 90% of the time more value than the good old google search. Nothing more, nothing less. But I don't use AI to code for me, I just use it to optimize very small fractions (ie: methods/functions at most).

The future world of GPT-5 and Sonnet-4 still won't read your thoughts. Chills ahead. For sure, it will happen some day. And there won't be any reason to not embrace it (although I am, for now, absolutely reluctant to such idea).

kristopolous2• 1 year ago

It's why these no-code/vibe-code solutions like bolt, lovable, and replit are great at hackathons, demos, or basic front-ends but there's a giant cliff past there.

Scroll through things like https://www.yourware.so/ which is a no-code gallery of apps.

There's this utility threshold due to a 1967 observation by Melvin Conway:

[O]rganizations which design systems (in the broad sense used here) are constrained to produce designs which are copies of the communication structures of these organizations.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway%27s_law

The next step only comes from the next structure.

Lovable's multiplayer mode (https://lovable.dev/blog/lovable-2-0) combined with Agno teams (https://github.com/agno-agi/agno) might be a suitable solution if you can define the roles right. Some can be non or "semi"-human (if you can get the dynamic workflow right)

ChrisMarshallNY• 1 year ago

I haven't been using AI for coding assistance. I use it like someone I can spin around in my chair, and ask for any ideas.

Like some knucklehead sitting behind me, sometimes, it has given me good ideas. Other times ... not so much.

I have to carefully consider the advice and code that I get. Sometimes, it works, but it does not work well. I don't think that I've ever used suggested code verbatim. I always need to modify it; sometimes, heavily.

So I still have to think.

calf• 1 year ago

Do non-AI coding assistants provide value?

moshegramovsky• 1 year ago

It doesn't seem like the author has ever used AI to write code. You definitely can ask it to refactor. Both ChatGPT and Gemini have done excellent work for me on refactors, and they have also made mistakes. It seems like they are both quite good at making lengthy, high-quality suggestions about how to refactor code.

His argument about debugging is absolutely asinine. I use both GDB and Visual Studio at work. I hate Visual Studio except for the debugger. GDB is definitely better than nothing, but only just. I am way, way, way more productive debugging in Visual Studio.

Using a good debugger can absolutely help you understand the code better and faster. Sorry but that's true whether the author likes it or not.

robertclaus• 1 year ago

In the past I've worked at startups that hired way too many bright junior developers and at companies that insisted on only hiring senior developers. The arguments for/against AI coding assistants feel very reminiscent of the arguments that occur around what seniority balance we want on an engineering team. In my experience it's a matter of balancing between doing complex work yourself and handing off simple work.

bastawhiz• 1 year ago

I have not had the same experience as the author. The code I have my tools write is not long. I write a little bit at a time, and I know what I expect it to generate before it generates it. If what it generates isn't what I expect, that's a good hint to me that I haven't been descriptive enough with my comments or naming or method signatures.

I use Cursor not because I want it to think for me, but because I can only type so fast. I get out of it exactly the amount of value that I expect to get out of it. I can tell it to go through a file and perform a purely mechanical reformatting (like converting camel case to snake case) and it's faster to review the results than it is for me to try some clever regexp and screw it up five or six times.

And quite honestly, for me that's the dream. Reducing the friction of human-machine interaction is exactly the goal of designing good tools. If there was no meaningful value to be had from being able to get my ideas into the machine faster, nobody would buy fancy keyboards or (non-accessibility) dictation software.

doug_durham2• 1 year ago

This is exactly the way I succeed. I ask it to do little bits at a time. I think that people have issues when they point the tools at a large code base and say "make it better". That's not the current sweet spot of the tools. Getting rid of boiler plate has been a game changer for me.

skydhash9• 1 year ago

I think my currently average code writing speed is 1 keyword per hour or something as nearly all my time coding is spent either reading the doc (to check my assumptions) or copy-pasting another block of code I have. The very short bust of writing code like I would write prose is done so rarely I don't even bother remembering them.

I've never written boilerplate. I copy them from old projects (the first time was not boilerplate, it was learning the technology) or other files, and do some fast editing (vim is great for this).

theshrike797• 1 year ago

I'm like 80% sure people complaining about AI doing a shit job are just plain holding it wrong.

The LLM doesn't magically know stuff you don't tell it. They CAN kinda-sorta fetch new information by reading the code or via MCP, but you still need to have a set of rules and documentation in place so that you don't spend half your credits on the LLM figuring out how to do something in your project.

namaria3• 1 year ago

You do understand that 'you're holding it wrong' is a cop out about some brittle system?

flowerthoughts• 1 year ago

I was wanting to build a wire routing for a string of lights on a panel. Looked up TSP, and learned of Christofides herustic. Asked Claude to implement Christofides. Went on to do stuff I enjoy more than mapping Wikipedia pseudo code to runnable code.

Sure, it would be really bad if everyone just assumes that the current state of the art is the best it will ever be, so we stop using our brains. The thing is, I'm very unlikely to come up with a better approximation to TSP, so I might as well use my limited brain power to focus on domains where I do have a chance to make a difference.

mrtksn• 1 year ago

Software ate the world, it's time for AI to eat the software :)

Anything methodical is exactly what the current gen AI can do. Its phenomenal in translations, be it human language to human language or an algorithm description into computer language.

People like to make fun with the "vibe coding" but that's actually a purification process where humans are getting rid of the toolset that we used to master to be able to make the computer do what we tell it to do.

Most of todays AI developer tools are misguided because they are trying to orchestrate tools that were created to help people write and manage software.

IMHO the next-gen tools will write code that is not intended for human consumption. All the frameworks, version management, coding paradigms etc will be relics of the past. Curiosities for people who are fascinated for that kind of things, not production material.

beernet• 1 year ago

Call it AI, ML, Data Mining, it does not matter. Truth is these tools have been disrupting the SWE market and will continue to do so. People working with it will simply be more effective. Until even them are obsolete. Don't hate the player, hate the game.

throw546445322• 1 year ago

This is becoming even more of a consensus now as in it feels like the tech is somewhat already there, or just about to come out.

As a software professional what makes it more interesting is that the "trick" (reasoning RL in models) that unlocked disruption of the software industry isn't really translating to other knowledge work professions. The disruption of AI is uneven. I'm not seeing in my circles other engineers (e.g. EE's, Construction/Civil, etc), lawyers, finance professionals, anything else get disrupted as significantly as software development.

The respect of the profession has significantly gone down as well. From "wow you do that! that's pretty cool..." to "even my X standard job has a future; what are you planning to do instead?" within a 3 year period. I'm not even in SV, NY or any major tech hubs.

androng• 1 year ago

If AI coding assistants provide little value then why is Cursor IDE a 300m company and why does this study say it makes people more 37% more productive?

https://exec.mit.edu/s/blog-post/the-productivity-effects-of...

hooloovoo_zoo• 1 year ago

That study shows nothing of the sort. It essentially showed ChatGPT is better at pumping out boilerplate than humans. Here are the tasks: https://www.science.org/action/downloadSupplement?doi=10.112...

einpoklum• 1 year ago

Reading just the title:

It is _because_ a programmer's job is to think that AI Coding assistants may provide value. They would (and perhaps already do) complete the boiler plate, and perhaps help you access information faster. They also have detriments, may atrophy some of your capabilities, may tempt you to go down more simplistic paths etc., but still.

Reading the post as well: It didn't change my mind. As for what it actually says, my reaction is a shrug, "whatever".

tangotaylor• 1 year ago

I think there's some truth here in that AI can be used as a band-aid to sweep issues of bad abstractions or terse syntax under the rug.

For example, I often find myself reaching for Cursor/ChatGPT to help me with simple things in bash scripts (like argument parsing, looping through arrays, associative maps, handling spaces in inputs) because the syntax just isn't intuitive to me. But I can easily do these things in Python without asking an AI.

I'm not a web developer but I imagine issues of boilerplate or awkward syntax could be solved with more "thinking" instead of using the AI as a better abstraction to the bad abstractions in your codebase.

WillPostForFood• 1 year ago

engineering workflows should be more about thinking and discussing than writing code

This is also the best case for using AI. You think, you discuss, then instruct the AI to write, then you review.

Velorivox• 1 year ago

Title is a bit provocative and begs the question (is thinking the part being replaced?), but the bigger issue is what “little” means here. Little in absolute terms? I think that’s harsh. Little in relation to how it’s touted? That’s a rational conclusion, I think.

You need three things to use LLM based tools effectively: 1) an understanding of what the tool is good at and what it isn’t good at; 2) enough context and experience to input a well formulated query; and 3) the ability to carefully verify the output and discard it if necessary.

This is the same skillset we’ve been using with search engines for years, and we know that not everyone has the same degree of Google-fu. There’s a lot of subjectivity to the “value”.

rashidae• 1 year ago

I believe we need to take a more participatory approach to intelligence orchestration.

It’s not humans vs machines.

henning• 1 year ago

I am the first to criticize LLMs and dumb AI hype. there is no nothing wrong with using an LSP, and a coding assistant is just an enhanced LSP if that is all you want it to be. my job is to solve problems, and AI can slightly speed that up.

rybosworld• 1 year ago

This is a tired viewpoint.

There's a percentage of developers, who due to fear/ego/whatever, are refusing to understand how to use AI tooling. I used to debate but I've started to realize that these arguments are mostly not coming from a rational place.

SkyPuncher• 1 year ago

I get massive value out of Agentic coding.

I no longer need to worry about a massive amount of annoying, but largely meaningless implementation details. I don’t need to pick a random variable/method/class name out of thin air. I don’t need to plan ahead on how to DRY up a method. I don’t need to consider every single edge case up front.

Sure, I still need to tweak and correct things but we’re talking about paint by number instead of starting with a blank canvas. It’s such a massive reduction in mental load.

I also find it reductionist to say LLM don’t think because they’re simply predicting patterns. Predicting patterns is thinking. With the right context, there is little difference between complex pattern matching and actual thinking. Heck, a massive amount of my actual, professional software development work is figuring out how to pattern matching my idea into an existing code base. There’s a LOT of value in consistency.

merizian• 1 year ago

I prefer a more nuanced take. If I can’t reliably delegate away a task, then it’s usually not worth delegating. The time to review the code needs to be less than the time it takes to write it myself. This is true for people and AI.

And there are now many tasks which I can confidently delegate away to AI, and that set of tasks is growing.

So I agree with the author for most of the programming tasks I can think of. But disagree for some.

gamescr• 1 year ago

Some problems require using a different kind of modeling other than language:

https://medium.com/@lively_burlywood_cheetah_472/ai-cant-sol...

jawns• 1 year ago

A programmer's JOB is not to think. It's to deliver value to their employer or customers. That's why programmers get paid. Yes, thinking hard about how to deliver that value with software is important, but when it comes to a job, it's not the thought that counts; it's the results.

So if I, with AI augmentation, can deliver the same value as a colleague with 20% less thought and 80% less time, guess whose job is more secure?

I know, I know, AI tools aren't on par with skilled human programmers (yet), but a skilled human programmer who uses AI tools effectively to augment (not entirely replace) their efforts can create value faster while still maintaining quality.

skydhash9• 1 year ago

The value is in working and shipped features. This value increase when there's no technical debt dragging it down. Do the 20% less thought and 80% less time still hold?

knowitnone• 1 year ago

programmer's job is to think, AI coding assistant's job is to do?

xnx2• 1 year ago

It's nice that the author was kind enough to make his obviously wrong thesis righ in the title.

If you write code professionally, you're really doing yourself a disservice if you aren't evaluating and incorporating AI coding tools into your process.

If you've tried them before, try them again. The difference between Gemini 2.5 Pro and what came before is as different as between GPT 3.5 and 4.

If you're a hobbyist, do whatever you want: use a handsaw, type code in notepad, mill your own flour, etc.

geor9e• 1 year ago

"Writing code is easy"

If you're the 1% of Earth's population for which this is true, then this headline makes sense. If you're the 99% for which this isn't at all true, then don't bother reading this, because AI coding assistance will change your life.

skydhash9• 1 year ago

"Writing code is easy" once you learn the tools and have thought through the design. But most people are skipping the latter two and complain about the first one.

It's like doing math proofs. It's easy when you know maths and have a theoretical solution. So, the first steps is always learning maths and think about a solution. Not jump head first into doing proofs.

crtified• 1 year ago

The term "assistant" is key.

In any given field of expertise, the assistant isn't supposed to be doing the professional thinking.

Nonetheless, the value that a professional can extract from an assistant can vary from little, to quite significant.

linsomniac2• 1 year ago

But AI doesn't think -- it predicts patterns in language.

We've moved well beyond that. The above sentence tells me you haven't used the tools recently. That's a useful way to picture what's happening, to remove the magic so you can temper your expectations.

The new tooling will "predict patterns" at a higher level, a planning level, then start "predicting patterns" in the form of strategy, etc... This all, when you start reading the output of "thinking" phases. They sound a lot likea conversation I'd have with a colleague about the problem, actually.

linsomniac2• 1 year ago

This is a funny opinion, because tools like Claude Code and Aider let the programmer spend more of their time thinking. The more time I spend diddling the keyboard, the less time I have available to be thinking about the high-level concerns.

If I can just thinking "Implement a web-delivered app that runs in the browser and uses local storage to store state, and then presents a form for this questionnaire, another page that lists results, and another page that graphs the results of the responses over time", and that's ALL I have to think about, I now have time to think about all sorts of other problems.

That's literally all I had to do recently. I have chronic sinusitis, and wanted to start tracking a number of metrics from day to day, using the nicely named "SNOT-22" (Sino-Nasal Outcome Test, I'm not kidding here). In literally 5 minutes I had a tool I could use to track my symptoms from day to day. https://snot-22.linsomniac.com/

I asked a few follow-ups ("make it prettier", "let me delete entries in the history", "remember the graph settings"). I'm not a front-end guy at all, but I've been programming for 40 years.

I love the craft of programming, but I also love having an idea take shape. I'm 5-7 years from retirement (knock on wood), and I'm going to spend as much time thinking, and as little time typing in code, as possible.

I think that's the difference between "software engineer" and "programmer". ;-)

credit_guy• 1 year ago

On the contrary. Just yesterday, we've had here on HN one of the numerous reposts of "Notation as a tool of thought" by Ken Iverson, the creator of APL.

Think of AI bots as a tool of thought.

throw546445322• 1 year ago

As a SWE the comments on this page scare me if I'm being honest. If we can't define the value of a programmer vs an AI in a forum such as this then the obvious question is there to ask from an employer's perspective - in the world of AI is a programmer/SWE no longer worth employing/investing in long term? This equally applies to any jobs in tech where the job is "to do" vs "to own" (e.g. DevOps, Testing, etc etc)

Many defenders of AI tools in this thread are basically arguing against the end conclusion of the article which is that "to think" is no longer the moat it once was. I don't buy into the argument either that "people who know how to use AI tools" will somehow be safe - logically that's just a usability problem that has a lot of people seem to be interested in solving.

The impression I'm getting is that even the skill of "using/programming LLM's" is only a transitory skill and another form of cope from developers pro AI - if AI is smart enough you won't need to "know how to use it" - it will help you. That's what commoditization of intelligence is by definition - anything like "learning/intelligence/skills" is no longer required since the point is to artificially create this.

To a lay person reading this thread - in a few years (maybe two) there won't be a point of doing CS/SWE anymore.

never_inline• 1 year ago

I am very sceptical and cautious user of AI tools, but this sounds like someone who didn't figure out a workflow which works for himself:

Nothing indicates how this should be run.

That's why I usually ask it to write a well defined function or class, with type annotations and all that. I already know how to call it.

Also you can ask for calling examples.

... are not functions whose definitions are available within the script. Without external context, we don't know what they do.

Are already solved by having proper IDE or LSP.

run in E environments with V versions

Fair enough, stick to "standard" libraries which don't change often. Use boring technology.

The handler implicitly ignores arguments

Because you probably didn't specify how arguments are to be handled.

In general, AI is very helpful to reduce tedium in writing common pieces of logic.

In ideal world, programming languages and libraries are as expressive as natural language, and we don't need AI. We can marshal our thoughts into code as fast as we marshal it into english, and as succinctly.

But until that happens "AI" helps with tedious logic and looking up information. You will still have to confirm the code, so being at least a bit familiar with the stack is a good thing.

singularity2001• 1 year ago

non sequitur:

Truth: AI Coding assistants provide much value since they give a programmer more time to think

motbus3• 1 year ago

My experience has been quite mixed. For creating small automation tools and tests for my day it saves lot of time. For creating code, it depends. If it is something very common it work fairly well, but I need to be sure to read it carefully. If it is something more complex or uncommon it fails usually making me loose more time than if I did that myself. For bug fix it is not helpful at all.

It is helpful for things that I would need to ask someone else to do for me. Now I have a set of tools that give me insights during my work.

Not sure if it made me more efficient on average tbh

AI Coding assistants provide little value because a programmer's job is to think

Related Stories