AI coding made me faster, but I can't code to music anymore

https://www.praf.me/ai-coding

by _praf • 11 months ago

242 256 11 months ago

fearface• 11 months ago

I let the AI first generate a outline of how it would do it as markdown. I adapt this and then let it add details into additional markdown files about technical stuff, eg how to use a certain sdk and so on. I correct these all. And then I let the AI generate the classes of the outline one by one.

johnfn• 11 months ago

I'm curious which models the OP is using that produce code so quickly and accurately? I mostly use Claude Code, which is accurate, but it isn't very fast. I certainly don't feel like I'm producing piles of code with it.

nxpnsv2• 11 months ago

If the price is music, then it’s too expensive.

bravetraveler3• 11 months ago

This is why I reject every Teams call

nxpnsv2• 11 months ago

they can't hear if it is them or music on my phones...

hn_throw20252• 11 months ago

I use Zoom rather than Teams, but have no problems playing background music with Spotify. Just have to make sure that “share computer audio” is not enabled when sharing your screen. Also, when I was using the mic of my bluetooth headphones, any music played would be mono and lower quality due to bluetooth bandwidth. Since moving to using a dedicated mic on my desk, the bluetooth headphones are output only and back to good quality stereo (MacOSX and Bose QC35).

codr77• 11 months ago

Robots don't listen to music, I'm pretty sure that's the longer term plan.

triyambakam• 11 months ago

I dunno, it is a bit different leveraging a model, but I still listen to music coding. It does depend on the music. I need to listen to really brutal stuff (Arsis, Thyrfing, Dissection, etc.) to focus, though

p0w3n3d2• 11 months ago

  Absolutely—I feel like I can ship at a crazy velocity now, like I have a team of interns at my disposal to code up my every silly demand.

It reminds me this scene:

  `Cut my eggs`
  `Your eggs are cut sir!'
  `Cut my milk'
  `I can't sir, it's liquid'
  `Imbecile! Freeze it, then cut it!'

zwnow2• 11 months ago

Absolutely—I feel like I can ship at a crazy velocity now, like I have a team of interns at my disposal to code up my every silly demand.

I also wonder what type of simple CRUD apps people build that have such a performance gain? They must be building well understood projects or be incredible slow developers for LLMs to have such an impact, as I cant relate to this at all.

shermantanktop2• 11 months ago

Different people have different jobs doing different things? Doesn’t seem shocking to me.

But I certainly wouldn’t assume that other people’s jobs are simple or boring just because they don’t look like yours.

winrid2• 11 months ago

There are people using Claude to make entire 3d MMO games, so ...

duncanfwalker• 11 months ago

I wonder whether we'll be able to look back on this period in 10 years time and save definitively whether the wide spectrum of responses to LLMs was perception or real feature of our differing jobs.

october8140• 11 months ago

What kind of projects are people doing that are feeling the increased velocity?

elros• 11 months ago

Whenever I need some sort of quick data pipeline to modify some sort of file into another format, or do some batch transformation, or transform some sort of interface description into another syntax, or things like that, that would normally require me to craft a grep, awk, tr, etc pipeline, I can normally simply paste a sample of the data and with a human language description get what I need. If it’s not working well I can break up the steps in smaller steps.

In my experience, it seems the people who have bad results have been trying to get the AI to do the reasoning. I feel like if I do the reasoning, I can offload menial tasks to the AI, and little annoying things that would take one or two hours start to take a few minutes.

That very quickly adds up to some real savings.

theshrike798• 11 months ago

AI is a force multiplier for experienced people.

The ones who know what they want to do, how it should be done, but can't really be arsed to read the man pages or API docs of all the tools required.

These people can craft a prompt (prompt engineering :P) for the LLM that gets good results pretty much directly.

LLMs are garbage in garbage out. Sometimes the statistical average is enough, sometimes you need to give it more details to use the available tools correctly.

Like the fact that `fd` has the `-exec` and `--exec-batch` parameters, there's no need to use xargs or pipes with it.

staticautomatic• 11 months ago

I’m building a moderately complex system with FastAPI + PG + Prefect executing stuff on Cloud Run, and so long as I invest in getting the architecture and specs right, it’s really a dream how much of the heavy lifting and grunt work I can leave to Claude Code. And thank god I don’t have to manage Alembic by myself.

energy1234• 11 months ago

I'm slowed down (but perhaps sped up overall due to lower rewrites/maintenance costs) on important bits because the space of possibilities/capabilities is expanded, and I'm choosing to make use of that for some load bearing pieces that need to be durable and high quality (along the metrics that I care about). It takes extra time to search that space properly rather than accept the first thing that compiles and passes tests. So arguably equal or even lower velocity, but definitely improved results compared to what I used to be capable of, and I'm making that trade-off consciously for certain bits. However that's the current state of affairs, who knows what it'll look like in 1-2 years.

cluckindan• 11 months ago

How do you know they’re durable and high quality?

gonzo41• 11 months ago

CRUD work, Boilerplate config for network stuff, converting lots of oracle stored procedures. It's saving me days.

martin_a• 11 months ago

Pretty much what somebody else said: AI takes over simple tasks, the "fluff" around the business logic, error handling, stuff like that, so I can focus on doing the harder stuff at the core.

theshrike798• 11 months ago

Exactly!

90% of what the average (or median) coder does isn't in any way novel or innovative. It's just API Glue in one form or another.

The AI knows the patterns and can replicate the same endpoints and simple queries easily.

Now you have more time to focus on the 10% that isn't just rehashing the same CRUD pattern.

CalRobert• 11 months ago

Random example:

I set up a model in DBT that has 100 columns. I need to generate a schema for it (old tools could do this) with appropriate tests and likely data types (old tools struggled with this). AI is really good at this sort of thing.

Shorel• 11 months ago

And many tools which are not AI are also really good at this sort of thing.

stavros3• 11 months ago

Every kind of project is faster with AI, because it writes the code faster.

Then you have to QA it for ages to discover the bugs it wrote, but the initial perception of speed never leaves you.

I think I'm overall slower with AI, but I could be faster if I had it write simple functions that I could review one by one, and have the AI compose them the way I wanted. Unfortunately, I'm too lazy to be faster.

theshrike798• 11 months ago

It's like working with a junior coder or an offshore consultant that always says yes.

Of course you need to check their work, but also the better your initial project plan and specifications are, the better the result.

For stuff with deterministic outputs it's easy to verify without reading every single line of code.

theshrike798• 11 months ago

There's a local website that sells actual physical Blu-rays. Their webshite is a horror show of Javascript.

I had Claude Code build me a Playwright+python -based scraper that goes through their movie section and stores the data locally to an sqlite database + a web UI for me to watchlist specific movies + add price ranges to be alerted when it changes.

Took me maybe a total of 30 minutes of "active" time (4-5 hours real-time, I was doing other shit at the same time) to get it to a point where I can actually use it.

Basically small utilities for limited release (personal, team, company-internal) is what AI coding excels at.

Like grabbing results from a survey tool, adding them to a google sheet, summarising the data to another tab with formulas. Maybe calling an LLM for sentiment analysis on the free text fields.

Half a day max from zero to Good Enough. I didn't even have to open the API docs.

Is it perfect? Of course not. But the previous state was one person spending half a day for _each_ survey doing that manually. Now the automation runs in a minute or so, depending on whether Google Sheets API is having a day or not =)

guappa2• 11 months ago

Where I work there are like 2x as many front end developers as there is need for. They spend an insane amount of time doing meetings, they require approval of 2 different people for every simple CSS change.

Their job is to do meetings, and occasionally add a couple of items to the HTML, which has been mostly unchanged for the past 10 years, save for changing the CSS and updating the js framework they use.

nbaugh12• 11 months ago

Greenfield development of small web apps. I’m familiar enough with everything that I can get something up and running on my own, but I don’t do it regularly so I need to read a lot of docs to be up to date. I can describe the basic design and requirements of an app and have something like Claude Code spit out a prototype in a couple of hours

8note• 11 months ago

i just had it do a "set up the company styled auth, following a few wikis and a lot of trial and error until you get to the right thing"

in the olden days, id imagine getting that right to take about a week and a half and something everyone hated about spinning up a new service

with the LLM, i gave it a feedback loop of being able to do an initial sign in, integration test running steps with log reading on the client side, and a deploy and log reading mechanism for the server side.

i was going to write out an over-seer-y script for another LLM to trigger the trial and error script, but i ended up just doing that myself. What i skipped was the needing to run any one of the steps, and instead i got nicely parsed errors, so i could go look for wikis on what parts of the auth process i was missing and feed in those wiki links and such to the trial and error bot. i skipped all the log reading/parsing to get to what the next actionable chunk is, and instead, i got to hang around in the sun for a bit while the LLM churned on test calls and edits.

im now on a cleanup step to turn the working code into nicely written code that id actually want commited, but getting to the working code stage took very little of my own effort; only the problem solving and learning about how the auth works

shmerl• 11 months ago

Do things the way you like instead of saying "I miss it".

excalibur• 11 months ago

The answers are in the footnote, switching to frontend is the way.

globular-toast• 11 months ago

I don't listen to music while doing code reviews either. It also happens to be my least favourite part of the job. The LLM agents just make it feel like I'm constantly code reviewing and I don't think it makes me more productive overall.

icetank• 11 months ago

My theory as a none scientist is that you need a different part of the brain to think about AI prompts compared to coding yourself. Or maybe that whatever though process you need for coding intersects with the part that enjoys listening to music. And because of that intersection you can't focus on both at the same time.

DevKoala• 11 months ago

I’d probably drop GenAI before I dropped the music that allows me to focus. Also, at this stage of my career, I mainly code for fun, and blasting music across the house is part of it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DrA8Pi6nol8

ai_assisted_dev3• 11 months ago

It definitely changed how I get into flow state for me. But music still works, if not even better when coding with AI (listening to: techno, electro, edm). Generally my flow is to sit down, make a small plan of what I will work on, fire off 2 agents to work on different parts of the code that are lower hanging fruits (takes 2-10 mins for them to complete). Then while this is busy, map out some bigger tasks.

Agents finish, I queue them up with new low hanging fruits, while I architect the much bigger tasks, then fire that off -> Review smaller tasks. It really is a dance, but flow is much easier achieved when I do get into it; hours really just melt together. The important thing to do is to put my phone away, and block all and any social media or sites I frequent, because its easy to get distracted when agents aren just producing code and you're sitting on the sidelines.

AaronAPU2• 11 months ago

I did that for 2 hours yesterday and then scrapped everything the agents did because it didn’t work and left everything in disarray.

ai_assisted_dev3• 11 months ago

It takes quite the practice. At least I have been shipping stuff to users like this for the entire year.

imiric2• 11 months ago

That's not the same flow state experienced by programmers.

While programming, it's possible to get into a trance-like state where the program's logic is fully loaded and visible in your mind, and your fingers become an extension of your mind that wire you directly to the machine. This allows you to modify the program essentially at the speed of thought, with practically zero chance of producing buggy code. The programmer effectively becomes a self-correcting human interpreter.

Interrupting someone in this state is incredibly disruptive, since all the context and momentum is lost, and getting back into the state takes time and focus.

What you're describing is a general workflow. You can be focused on what you're doing, but there's no state loaded into memory that makes you more efficient. Interruptions are not disruptive, and you can pick up exactly where you left off with ease. In fact, you're constantly being interrupted by those agents running in the background, when they finish and you give them more work. This is a multitasking state, not flow.

So the article is correct. It's not possible to get into a flow state while working with ML tools. This is because it is an entirely different activity from programming that triggers different neural pathways.

ai_assisted_dev3• 11 months ago

Nice way of gatekeeping "flow state of programmers", considering I have been a software engineer for the past 2 decades. So I have experienced quite some flow states in my life, and this is no different.

drmpeg• 11 months ago

I've never bothered listening to music while coding. If I'm in the zone, it's entirely extraneous and I don't even hear it.

At my first job in Silicon Valley, I used to code right on the production floor totally oblivious to what was going on.

sublinear• 11 months ago

For frontend code and my side projects, AI coding seems to be even more effective and actually reduces the cognitive load, winning in all dimensions.

Can we see this frontend code? For research purposes, of course.

mac-mc• 11 months ago

I found I couldn't listen to music with words in them while coding. Maybe try wordless music, or music that is in a language you don't understand.

mckn1ght2• 11 months ago

Exactly, came here to say this, it happened long ago for me. Classical, jazz, electronica… all great for coding and vibing alike, for me.

winrid2• 11 months ago

JimTV on YT has great programming music.

_9ptr• 11 months ago

That's why metal works well here.

iamflimflam1• 11 months ago

He’s talking about being in a state of flow - it’s a lovely feeling when you can get into it.

randcraw• 11 months ago

CAN you get into a state of flow when directing an LLM? I don't have a lot of experience using LLMs to code, but it always feels like I'm coaching a junior staff member. No way to flow that, IMHO.

bluefirebrand10• 11 months ago

I tend to agree. Even the LLM autocomplete in Cursor feels so intrusive that I cannot get into flow when it is turned on

conductr• 11 months ago

It’s the opposite for me. I’ve never been able to listen to music while coding as my thoughts would drown it out or it would keep me from thinking so I’d shut it off. However if I am vibe coding my brain is basically idle and can handle some music

energy1234• 11 months ago

writing a blurb that contains the same mental model

Good nugget. Effective prompting, aside from context curation, is about providing the LLM with an approximation of your world model and theory, not just a local task description. This includes all your unstated assumptions, interaction between system and world, open questions, edge cases, intents, best practices, and so on. Basically distill the shape of the problem from all possible perspectives, so there's an all-domain robustness to the understanding of what you want. A simple stream of thoughts in xml tags that you type out in a quasi-delirium over 2 minutes can be sufficient. I find this especially important with gpt-5, which is good at following instructions to the point of pedantry. Without it, the model can tunnel vision on a particular part of the task request.

ForHackernews2• 11 months ago

Hard to tell if this is parody or not but I chuckled at the idea of replacing tedious programming with a "simple stream" of handwritten XML.

energy1234• 11 months ago

It's not parody. I'm trying to provide the LLM with what's missing, which is a theory of how the system fits into the world: https://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~remzi/Naur.pdf

Without this it defaults to being ignorant about the trade-offs that you care about, or the relevant assumptions you're making which you think are obvious but really aren't.

The "simple stream" aspect is that each task I give to the LLM is narrowly scoped, and I don't want to put all aspects of the relevant theory that pertains just to that one narrow task into a more formal centralized doc. It's better off as an ephemeral part of the prompt that I can delete after the task is done. But I also do have more formal docs that describe the shared parts of the theory that every prompt will need access to, which is fed in as part of the normal context.

foo42• 11 months ago

The tradeoff of higher velocity for less enjoyment may feel less welcome when it becomes the new baseline and the expectation of employers / customers. The excitement of getting a day's work done in an hour* (for example) is likely to fade once the expectation is to produce 8 of such old-days output per day.

I suspect it doesn't matter how we feel about it mind you. If it's going to happen it will, whether we enjoy the gains first or not.

* setting aside whether this is currently possible, or whether we're actually trading away more quality that we realise.

darkwater• 11 months ago

The tradeoff of higher velocity for less enjoyment may feel less welcome when it becomes the new baseline and the expectation of employers / customers. The excitement of getting a day's work done in an hour* (for example) is likely to fade once the expectation is to produce 8 of such old-days output per day.

That's why we should be against it but hey, we can provide more value to shareholders!

latexr• 11 months ago

The excitement of getting a day's work done in an hour* (for example) is likely to fade once the expectation is to produce 8 of such old-days output per day.

That dumb attitude (which I understand you’re criticising) of “more more more” always reminds me of Lenny from the Simpsons moving fast through the yellow light, with nowhere to go.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QR10t-B9nYY

I suspect it doesn't matter how we feel about it mind you. If it's going to happen it will, whether we enjoy the gains first or not.

That is quite the defeatist attitude. Society becoming shittier isn’t inevitable, though inaction and giving up certainly helps that along.

furyofantares3• 11 months ago

That is quite the defeatist attitude. Society becoming shittier isn’t inevitable, though inaction and giving up certainly helps that along.

The hypothetical that we're 8x as productive but the work isn't as fun isn't "society becoming shittier".

popcorncowboy• 11 months ago

"If it's going to happen it will" - That is quite the defeatist attitude. Society becoming shittier isn’t inevitable

You're right in general, but I don't think that'll save you/us from OP's statement. This is simple economic incentives at play. If AI-coding is even marginally more economically efficient (i.e. more for less) the "old way" will be swept aside at breathtaking pace (as we're seeing). The "from my cold dead hands" hand-coding crowd may be right, but they're a transitional historical footnote. Coding was always blue-collar white-collar work. No-one outside of coders will weep for what was lost.

bigfudge• 11 months ago

That is quite the defeatist attitude. Society becoming shittier isn’t inevitable, though inaction and giving up certainly helps that along.

This feels like kicking someone when they’re down! Given the current state of corporate and political America, it doesn’t look likely there will be any pressure for anything but enshittification to me. Telling people at the coal face to stay cheerful seems unlikely to help. What mechanism do you see for not giving up to actually change the experience of people in 10 ish years time?

atoav2• 11 months ago

That is quite the defeatist attitude. Society becoming shittier isn’t inevitable, though inaction and giving up certainly helps that along.

Correct. But it becoming shittier is the strong default, with forces that you constantly have to fight against.

And the reason is very simple: Someone profits from it being shittier and they have a lot of patience and resources.

creesch3• 11 months ago

That dumb attitude (which I understand you’re criticising) of “more more more” always reminds me of Lenny from the Simpsons moving fast through the yellow light, with nowhere to go.

Realizing that attitude in myself at times has given me so much more peace of mind. Just in general, not everything needs to be as fast and efficient as possible.

Not to mention the times where in the end I spend a lot of time and energy in trying to be faster only to end up with this xkcd: https://xkcd.com/1319/

As far as LLM use goes, I don't need moar velocity! so I don't try to min max my agentic workflow just to squeeze out X amount more lines code.

In fact, I don't really work with agentic workflows to begin with. I more or less still use LLMs as tools external to the process. Using them as interactive rubber duckies. Things like deciphering spaghetti code, do a sanity check on code I wrote (and being very critical of the suggestions they come up with), getting a quick jump start on stuff I haven't used again (how do I get started with X of Y again?), that sort of stuff.

Using LLMs in the IDE and other agentic use is something I have worked with. But to me it falls under what I call "lazy use" where you are further and further removed from the creation of code, the reasoning behind it, etc. I know it is a highly popular approach with many people on HN. But in my experience, it is an approach that makes skills of experienced developers atrophy and makes sure junior developers are less likely to pick them up. Making both overly reliant on tools that have been shown to be less than reliable when the output isn't properly reviewed.

I get the firm feeling that velocity crowd works in environments where they are judged by the amount of tickets closed. Basically "feature complete, test green, merged, move on!". In that context, it isn't really "important" that the tests that are green are also refactored by the thing itself, just that they are green. It is a symptom of a corporate environment where the focus is on these "productivity" metrics. From that perspective I can fully see the appeal for LLM heavy workflows as they most certainly will have an impact on metrics like "tickets closed" or "lines of code written".

zdragnar2• 11 months ago

“more more more”

If you're a salaried or hourly employee, you aren't paid for your output, you are paid for your time, with minimum expectations of productivity.

If you complete all your work in an hour... you still owe seven hours based on the expectations of your employment agreement, in order to earn your salary and benefits.

If you'd rather work in an output based capacity, you'll want to move to running your own contacting business in a fixed-bid type capacity.

dfxm12• 11 months ago

moving fast through the yellow light, with nowhere to go.

My company has been preparing for this for a while now, I guess, as my backlog clearly has years' worth of work in it and positions of people who have left the org remain unfilled. My colleagues at other companies are in a similar situation. Considering round after round of layoffs, if I got ahead a little bit and found that I had nothing else to do, I'd be worried for my job.

Society becoming shittier isn’t inevitable

Yes, I agree, but the deck is usually stacked against the worker, especially in America. I doubt this will be the issue that promotes any sort of collectivism.

brailsafe• 11 months ago

That is quite the defeatist attitude. Society becoming shittier isn’t inevitable, though inaction and giving up certainly helps that along.

If the structures and systems that are in-place only facilitate life getting more difficult in some way, then it probably will, unless it doesn't.

Housing getting nearly unownable is a symptom of that. Climate change is another.

theshrike798• 11 months ago

The trick is not telling anyone you spent an hour to do 7 hours of work.

That's stupid and detrimental to your mental health.

You do it in an hour, spend maybe 1-2 hours to make it even better and prettier and then relax. Do all that menial shit you've got lined up anyway.

creesch3• 11 months ago

The trick is not telling anyone you spent an hour to do 7 hours of work.

I wish that the hype crowd would do that. It would make a for a much more enjoyable and sane experience on platforms like this. It's extremely difficult to have actual conversations subjects when there are crowds of fans involved who don't want to hear anything negative.

Yes, I also do realize there are people completely on the other side as well. But to honest, I can see why they are annoyed by the fan crowd.

pavel_lishin2• 11 months ago

Until your coworkers who've never heard of work-life balance start bragging about it, and volunteering to spend 8 hours to do 56 hours of work, or maybe spending 11 hours to impress the boss.

willtemperley2• 11 months ago

Short-term, automated tech debt creation will yield gains.

Long term the craftsperson writing excellent code will win. It is now easier than ever to write excellent code, for those that are able to choose their pace.

pureliquidhw2• 11 months ago

Given it's 2025 and companies saddled with tech debt continue to prioritize speed of delivery over quality, I doubt the craftperson will win.

If anything we'll see disposable systems (or parts) and the job of an SE will become even more like a plumber, connecting prebuilt business logic to prebuilt systems libraries. When one of those fails, have AI whip up a brand new one instead of troubleshooting the existing one(s). After all, for business leader it's the output that matters, not the code.

For 20+ years business leaders have been eager to shed the high overhead of developers via any means necessary while ignoring their most expensive employees' input. Anyone remember Dilbert? It was funny as a kid, and is now tragic in its timeless accuracy a generation later.

AstroBen• 11 months ago

Can you give an example that's playing out today?

specproc• 11 months ago

The most challenging thing I'm finding about working with LLM-based tools is the reduction in enjoyment. I'm in this business because I love it, and I'm worried about that going forward.

r_lee• 11 months ago

Yup. not sure if it's just me but the trend seems to be just ship slop as fast as you can, nothing else matters, just ship ship ship

insane_dreamer• 11 months ago

My daughter who switching from engineering to software because she enjoyed coding expressed that LLMs are taking away everything she found enjoyable about the job and reducing her to QA. She hates it and if the trend continues I won’t be surprised if she switches industries.

a_bonobo• 11 months ago

For the longest time, IT workers were 'protected' from Marx's alienation of labor by the rarity of your skill, but now it's coming for you/us, too. Claude Code is to programmers what textile machines were to textile workers.

In the capitalist mode of production, the generation of products (goods and services) is accomplished with an endless sequence of discrete, repetitive motions that offer the worker little psychological satisfaction for "a job well done." By means of commodification, the labour power of the worker is reduced to wages (an exchange value); the psychological estrangement (Entfremdung) of the worker results from the unmediated relation between his productive labour and the wages paid to him for the labour.

Less often discussed is Marx's view of social alienation in this context: i.e., workers used to take pride in who they are based on their occupation. 'I am the best blacksmith in town.' Automation destroyed that for workers, and it'll come for you/us, too.

codr77• 11 months ago

Nope, not until AI is writing high quality, maintainable software; and no one knows if that's even possible yet.

hnfsfdsd• 11 months ago

Exactly, maybe "prompt engineering" is really a skill, but the reward for getting better at this is just pumping out more features at a low skill grade. What's excited about this ? Unless I want to spend all my time building minimum viable product.

Cthulhu_2• 11 months ago

Prompt engineering is just writing acceptance criteria; it's moving from someone who writes code to someone who writes higher level feature descriptions. Or user stories, if you will.

Thing is though, many people don't know how to do that (user stories / acceptance criteria) properly, and it's been up to software developers to poke holes and fill in the blanks that the writer didn't think about.

pdntspa2• 11 months ago

That is certainly how it played out for me. Give your employers an inch and they will take a mile.

deadbabe• 11 months ago

If there are 8 days per day worth of work to be done (which I doubt), why wouldn’t you want to have it done ASAP? You’re going to have to do it eventually, so why not just do it now? Doesn’t make sense. You act like they’re just making up new work for you to do when previously there wouldn’t have been any.

lvnfg• 11 months ago

Yes, work will expand to fill all your available hours due to unaligned incentives between who does the work (the SWE in this example) and who decide the quantity, timeline, and cost of work.

If the SWE can finish his work faster, 8x faster in this case, then backlogs will also be pushed to complete 8x faster by the project manager. If there are no backlogs, new features will be required at 8x faster / more by sales team / clients. If no new features are needed, pressures will be made until costs are 8x lower by finance. If there are no legal, moral, competitive, or physical constraints, the process should continue until either there’s only a single dev working on all his available time, or less time but for considerably less salary.

guappa2• 11 months ago

The reward for being faster is to do more work.

ramesh31• 11 months ago

The tradeoff of higher velocity for less enjoyment may feel less welcome when it becomes the new baseline and the expectation of employers / customers.

This is precisely the question that scares me now. It is always so satisfying when a revolution occurs to hold hands and hug each other in the streets and shout "death to the old order". But what happens the next morning? Will we capture this monumental gain for labor or will we cede it to capital? My money is on the latter. Why wouldn't it be? Did they let us go home early when the punch card looms weaved months worth of hand work in a day? No, they made us work twice as hard for half the pay.

Aeolun• 11 months ago

What would this gain for labor even look like? Four hour workdays?

never_inline• 11 months ago

The excitement of getting a day's work done in an hour* (for example) is likely to fade once the expectation is to produce 8 of such old-days output per day.

It's not really about excitement or enjoyment of work.

It's the fear about the __8x output__ being considered as __8x productivity__.

The increase in `output/productivity` factor has various negative implications. I would not say everything out loud. But the wise can read between the lines.

shiandow• 11 months ago

I always feel most productive when I remove more code than I add.

an0malous• 11 months ago

You won’t enjoy any of the gains, the company will be worth 10x and you’ll get a 10% raise to match inflation

cmiles74• 11 months ago

Even if the developer is keeping the quality of the LLM generated code high (by constant close reading of the output, rejecting low quality work and steering with prompts) does this mean the project as a whole is improving? I have my doubts! I'm also skeptical that this developer has increased their velocity as much as they believe, IMHO this has long been a difficult thing to measure.

Overall, is this even a good thing? With this increase in output, I suspect we'll need to apply more pressure to people requesting features to ensure those requests are high quality. When each feature takes half the time to implement, I bet it's easy to agree to more features without spending as much time evaluating their worth.

antonvs• 11 months ago

The tradeoff of higher velocity for less enjoyment

I'm enjoying exactly what the author describes, so it's different strokes for different folks.

I always found the "code monkey" aspect of software development utterly boring and tedious, and have spent a lot of my career automating that away with various kinds of code generators, DSLs, and so on. \

Using an LLM as a general-purpose automated code monkey is a near-ideal scenario for me, and I enjoy the work more. It's especially useful for languages like Go or Java where repetitive boilerplate is endemic.

I also find it helps with procrastination, because I can just ask an LLM to start something for me and get over the initial hump.

whether we're actually trading away more quality that we realise.

This is completely up to the people using it.

jodosha• 11 months ago

The tradeoff of higher velocity for less enjoyment may feel less welcome when it becomes the new baseline and the expectation of employers / customers

This is what happens with big technological advancements. Technology that enables productivity won’t free people time, but only set higher expectations of getting more work done in a day.

mckn1ght2• 11 months ago

It’s a lot more high-level executive functioning now, instead of grinding through endless syntax and boilerplate. Easy to mindlessly code to music, much harder to think about what you want to do next, and evaluate if the result you just got is what you really wanted.

ahoka• 11 months ago

From the masterpiece, Tragedy of the Man, describing the future where everything is done in the name of efficiency:

THE GREYBEARD You left your workroom in great disarray.

MICHELANGELO Because I had to fabricate the chair-legs To the quality as poor as it can be. I appeal’d for long, let me modificate, Let me engrave some ornaments on it.

They did not permit. I wanted as a chance The chair-back to change but all was in vain. I was very close to be a madman And I left the pains and my workroom, too. (stands back)

THE GREYBEARD You get house arrest for this disorder And will not enjoy this nice and warm day.

danielscrubs• 11 months ago

Can you explain why it is a masterpiece? Im just curious.

grugagag• 11 months ago

Killed all the fun?

tamimio• 11 months ago

That's an argument I had with a friend last year. I told him generative AI will make writing code easier, but the life of whoever is writing it far worse. Because writing code without using AI is done with some sort of due diligence: you memorize some stuff, look up other stuff in the docs or online, and you take some time actually solving the problem you have. If you succeed, you would've spent the needed time at YOUR pace, with an intrinsic reward of feeling good that you achieved something. With AI, on the other hand, you are in semi-cheat mode, throwing prompts after prompts and now you are trying to catch someone/something else's pace, zero reward, and more mentally exhausted.

The best approach is to use AI only when you are stuck and looking for potential solutions, but we all know that is not going to happen unless you have extreme self-control.

daemin• 11 months ago

Kind of sounds like using LLMs to generate code is like eating USA junk/fast food. It is quick and tasty, and you get a dopamine rush from that sugar and fat in your body, but it leaves you feeling unsatisfied and unsatiated.

jwr• 11 months ago

In my experience, listening to music engages the creative part of your brain and severely limits what you can do, but this is not readily apparent.

If I listen to music, I can spend an hour CODING YEAH! and be all smug and satisfied, until I turn the music off and discover that everything I've coded is unnecessary and there is an easier way to achieve the same goal. I just didn't see it, because the creative part of my brain was busy listening to music.

From the post, it sounds like the author discovered the same thing: if you use AI to perform menial tasks (like coding), all that is left is thinking creatively, and you can't do that while listening to music.

shaan7• 11 months ago

I describe it slightly differently. Similar to what the author described, I'll first plan and solve the problem in my head, lay out a broad action plan, and then put on music to implement it. But, for me the music serves something akin to clocks in microcontrollers (and even CPUs), it provides a flow that my brain syncs to. I'm not even paying attention to the music itself, but it stops me from getting distracted and focus on the task at hand.

leptons• 11 months ago

I'm sorry but that's nonsense. Listening to music is not a creative process, it does not at all take away creativity from somewhere else.

I've never, ever, ever once in 40 years of coding listened to music while coding and later found the code "unnecessary" or anything of the sort.

I engage in many creative pursuits outside of coding, always while listening to music, and I can confidently say that music has never once interfered in the process or limited the result in any way.

sfn422• 11 months ago

I just think it's distracting. I get caught up listening to the lyrics and kind of mentally singing along, stuff like that which disrupts my thought and distracts from what I actually want to be thinking about.

I think this is individual, I have the same problem in social settings - if I'm having a conversation and a song I like is playing in the background I some times stop listening to the conversation and focus on the music instead, unintentionally.

My solution is to listen to music without vocals when I need to focus. I've had phases where I listen to classical music, electronic stuff, and lately I've been using an app I found called brain.fm which I think just plays AI generated lo-fi or whatever and there's some binaural beats thing going on as well that's supposed to enhance focus, creativity etc. I like it but some times I go back to regular music just because I miss listening to something I actually like.

bogtog• 11 months ago

Same here on all fronts about distractions. I can't tell whether when people talk about listening to music while working/studying: (1) they mean music with no lyrics, (2) they are unserious and okay with their work being constantly interrupted, or (3) they can resist thinking about the lyrics.

Some work may allow for seamless pivoting between work vs. enjoyable distraction, e.g., a clerk, but I often hear about people listening to music in other contexts.

Cthulhu_2• 11 months ago

I don't think that's down to music per se, but a more generalized thing. Software developers love being in a flow state, some of them pursue it all the time (...guilty) and get frustrated when their job changes (e.g. moving towards management) so they spend less time in that flow state.

But also, this can create waste, in that people write the Best Code Ever in their flow state (while listening music or not), but... it wasn't necessary in the first place and the time spent was a waste. This can waste anything from an hour to six months of work (honestly, I had a "CTO" once who led a team of three dozen people or so who actually went into his batcave at home for six months to write a C# framework of sorts that the whole company should use. He then quit and became self-employed so the company had to re-hire him to make sense of the framework he wrote. I'm sure he enjoyed it very much though.)

elliottkember• 11 months ago

discover that everything I've coded is unnecessary and there is an easier way to achieve the same goal

In my experience, there is no good shortcut to this realization. Doing it wrong first is part of the journey. You might as well enjoy the necessary mistakes along the way. The third time’s the charm!

freehorse• 11 months ago

There is no “creative part of the brain” and even if there was listening to music would have nothing to do with it.

You may be experiencing getting to different understanding of sth when you switch context. Similar to when you are stack it may be better to go for a walk than keep your head on top of a piece of paper or screen. I have had many of my breakthroughs while taking a shit in the toilet in the midst of working. Others experience similar with showers and whatever.

Afaik most ppl listen to music during certain tasks because it helps focusing. Esp when working in a busy office it really helps me to listen to certain kinds of predictable music to keep me from getting distracted. It creates a sort of entrainment that helps with attention.

Some people find music itself distracting, I myself find some kinds of music distracting, or during certain types of tasks. Then it obviously it does not fill its purpose.

bdhcuidbebe2• 11 months ago

Your experience suffers from confirmation bias.

saurik• 11 months ago

This was actually studied at some point (at least 15-20 decades ago, as I remember learning about this in college): they gave the same programming problem to a bunch of developers and had some listen to music while they did the task while others worked in silence. There was no real difference between how long it took to do the task between the same group... but the people who listened to music were much much less likely to realize that the entire task was a red herring and the code reduced down to return 0;.

dakiol• 11 months ago

What happened to coding for joy in your free time? At work I do whatever the company wants as long as I get my money at the end of the month. Java? Sure boss. Golang? Let’s do it. LLMs? Whatever you want. TDD? Yep.

At home I still plan and devise my own worlds with joy. I may use LLMs for boring or repetitive tasks, or help or explanation; but I still can code better than the day before.

As usual, work != career.

stuaxo• 11 months ago

Even in the fun stuff there's dog work to do and the LLMs can definitely help there.

dexterlagan• 11 months ago

This resonates with me, a lot. Few months ago I wrote about my initial thoughts here: https://www.cleverthinkingsoftware.com/programmers-will-be-r... Things have changed quite a bit since, but I'm glad they changed for the better. Or so it seems.

nemoniac• 11 months ago

The line that stood out for me was that "a 4-hour session of AI coding is more cognitively intense than a 4-hour session of non-AI coding."

Many programmers are rejecting AI coding because they miss the challenge they enjoy getting from conventional programming but this author finds it even more challenging. Or perhaps challenging in a different way?

kitku• 11 months ago

There is a distinction I believe between challenging and focusing. The difference lies in difficulty (the former being more dificult) and workload (the latter being more intellectualy labor intensive), which is an interesting approach to intellectual menial labor as distinct from intellectual craft.

sfn422• 11 months ago

I think there are (at least) two types of programmer - I am the kind of programmer who wants everything done right. Others don't care as long as it works and the boss is happy.

I suspect that the type of programmer who enjoys vibe coding is the latter. For me it's pretty tiring to explain everything in excruciating detail, it's often easier to just write the code myself rather than explain in English how to write it.

It feels like I am just doing the hard part of programming all the time - deciding how the app should work and how the code should be structured etc, and I never get those breaks where I just implement my plan.

bluefirebrand10• 11 months ago

I suspect the difference lies in people who think in code versus people who translate their thoughts into code

I think in code and programming concepts when I am writing software . I don't really know how to explain that, but I don't often feel like there is any friction between my thoughts and the code I make

I think that many coders do not have this. They have an extra "translation" step that introduces friction into their workflow

I don't experience this friction, so LLM coding introduces new friction that I don't like

They do experience this friction, so LLM coding doesn't introduce new friction for them, it may transform their previous friction into a new form that is easier for them to navigate

I don't know. Maybe I'm talking out my ass, this is just a random theory based on no real evidence

Grimblewald3• 11 months ago

If you know how to do it well, you just do it well, its hard work but dooable. What is harder is learning to understand why what was written, that looks good, is actually bad. Usually something small, tucked away, or an issue arising from multiple things spanning distinct functions that culminate in a werid issue. That kind of detective work is draining and time consuming. It doesnt come with the emotional boost of looking at your work and feeling pride. Instead you look at something that finally works and feel releif that its over. That alone paves the way to a totally different emotional and cognitive relationship with your work. That is why for me, at least, it is more cogntiviely intense.

satisfice• 11 months ago

Who is testing your code? No one? You?

This is a other “trust me” post about AI.

TrietNg• 11 months ago

I encounter a problem which is my social media usage increase. The time when you wait for the agent to write code is kinda silly :) You can not switch to do other things as it will make your focus shift away from the code. So usually I just dumb scroll for 1 minute

whatamidoingyo• 11 months ago

For me, it's 1 minute bullet chess.

djmips• 11 months ago

You're expected to run several projects in parallel with latency hiding like a human GPU. No downtime!

mythrwy• 11 months ago

It's hard to get in the zone with an LLM doing crazy stuff.

For instance this week when setting up a Django/Wagtail project GPT helpfully went ahead and created migration files in text instead of "makemigrations". Otherwise it did a bang up job and saved me a couple of hours.

Just no way I can get in the zone wrangling that kind of thing all day.

But I'm not sure getting in the coding zone frequently was all that mentally healthy so oh well.

Narciss• 11 months ago

Fun fact: “praf” (seen in the website domain, praf.me) in Romanian means dust.

If you say “you are praf” in Romanian it means that you are f*cked, wasted, done for, etc.

lioeters• 11 months ago

The same word is "prach" in Czech: dust, powder. The "ch" sounds like "kh" (soft k?). In Czech slang prachy means cash, money.

pona-a• 11 months ago

In Russian прах means ashes.

zachwills• 11 months ago

I actually still listen to music heavily when in the zone with AI coding. Totally agree that the focus time feels much more intense now than it did before AI.

milly171002• 11 months ago

I like vibe coding, and I also enjoy listening to music.

cainxinth• 11 months ago

I can work to music anytime as long as it has no lyrics.

alex1138• 11 months ago

Play techno with high BPM and watch your commits skyrocket

codr77• 11 months ago

Doing things faster comes way down the priority list where I work. We spend a lot of resources on understanding and improving the code, as well as breaking knowledge silos.

Because the people running the show are experienced software devs, not AI clowns.

jeomon27• 11 months ago

Coding is an art

Mikhail_Edoshin• 11 months ago

I cannot code to music at all. I miss either the music or the code or keep switching and get tired. I can do a mechanical job, e.g. adding records to a database.

(I also find AI repulsive and have no intention to engage in anything AI-related. Recently I turned off AI "help" in DDG.)

dep_b• 11 months ago

I cannot run or code to music. I might be playing music while doing so, but it's super distracting and it's basically just me working at 50% while enjoying myself. I worked with a bunch of guys that always always always had a web radio pumping cheesy hard style stuff all day long.

Got nothing done.

mulhoon• 11 months ago

Same. I’ve been a coder over 25 years. I love music and am a musician, but I can’t listen to music while coding, I need silence. Too distracting. In fact music is often distracting for me during conversations, if it’s on in the background, say in a shop or bar.

neebz• 11 months ago

Finally someone emphasized upon the cognitive load of AI-assisted coding.

It definitely makes me faster but it's consistent prompt->code-review->prompt->code-review->scratch->prompt-code->review cycle which just requires extreme focus.

barrenko• 11 months ago

You are now an engineering manager. Enjoy!

hollowturtle• 11 months ago

Another one promoting himself

stgr_codes• 11 months ago

I think that we should start to doubt the idea that "AI made people code faster", that's not the case for a lot of people, if you know the requisites and have an idea in mind music make you code faster because it help focus.

sneak• 11 months ago

My take on this is that, while it’s harder to read code than it is to write it - it’s still faster to read code than to write it (it’s just not as much fun).

gyosko2• 11 months ago

I really don't get it.

While letting the AI write some code can be cool and fascinating, I really can't undersand how:

- write the prompt(and you need do be precise and think and express carefully what you have in mind)

- check/try the code

- repeat

is better than writing the code by myself. AI coding like this feels like a nightmare to me and it's 100x more exhausting.

david-gpu3• 11 months ago

I bet some people felt the same way when we collectively moved from assembly to compilers.

gyosko2• 11 months ago

Yeah, if not only for the small fact that you are leaving a well defined set of rules for pure chaos and randomness this time around.

ModernMech4• 11 months ago

To some degree you're correct -- LLMs can be viewed as the kind of "sufficiently advanced" compiler we've always dreamed of. Our dreams didn't include the compiler lying to us though, so we have not achieved utopia.

LLMs are more like DNA transcription, where some percentage of the time it just injects a random mutation into the transcript, either causing am evolutionary advantage, or a terminal disease.

This whole AI industry right now is trying to figure out how to always get the good mutation, and I don't think it's something that can be controlled that way. It will probably turn out that on a long enough timescale, left unattended, LLMs are guaranteed to give your codebase cancer.

jplusequalt• 11 months ago

In the previous scenario, programmers were still writing the code themselves. The compilers, if they were any good, generated deterministic code.

In our current scenario, programmers are merely describing what they think the code should do, and another program takes their description and then stochastically generates code based on it.

Rinum• 11 months ago

It's a change in mindset. AI is like having your own junior developer. If you've never had direct reports before where you have to give them detailed instruction and validate their code then you're right, it might end up more exhausting than just doing the work yourself.

nbaugh12• 11 months ago

For me, on small personal projects, I can get a project to a point in about 4 hours where previous to new AI tools it would’ve taken about 40. At work, there is a huge difference due to the complexity of the code base and services. Using agents to code for me in these cases as 100% been the loop of iterating on something so often, I would’ve been better off with a more hands on approach, essentially just reviewing PRs written by AI.

ModernMech4• 11 months ago

It's not. And people are realizing that, which is causing them to bring back and reinvent aspects of software engineering to AI coding to make it more tolerable. People once questioned whether AI will replace all programming languages with natural language interfaces, it now looks like programming languages will be reinvented in the context of AI to make their natural language interface more tool-like.

broast• 11 months ago

So basically what an engineering manager or product manager enjoys doing

pavel_lishin2• 11 months ago

It definitely feels like a move towards management, which is something I've avoided for my entire career.

It's a perfectly cromulent approach and skillset - but it's a wildly different one.

thatjoeoverthr• 11 months ago

Same. Part of the old experience of building applications is the typing. You have some notion in your head of what you want, and now you've got to go _type_ for six hours to get some effect. This becomes a kind of "manual skill" and you can do it with music. Like running.

That's gone.

My impression of myself is the high leverage strategic work was always subconscious, but I never had to notice; my hands were busy so it felt like I'm "working".

And with the AI typing for me, it doesn't necessarily go that much faster. I've got to go lift weights, play my favourite vintage racing slop (Rush 2) or take a long shower. At some point the plan is revealed to me and I've got to poke the computer and make it do the next thing.

Very strange experience. All of it.

time0ut• 11 months ago

For me, it just requires different genres of music.

Brainstorming with LLM? Literal background noise like distant thunderstorm.

Pairing with LLM? Classical.

Solo? Still technical death metal.

Buttons840• 11 months ago

I think AIs should be combined with some sort of spaced-repetition or tutoring software.

This way we can allow AIs to do our work, but the AI can also tutor us and teach us the things necessary to verify their work.

glitchc• 11 months ago

I have a solution: Ask the AI to play music while it codes for you.

blueboo• 11 months ago

Coding to music was a flag you were just twiddling. People confuse flow with a pleasant surface engagement. Deep problem solving is when you sit forward, turn the music down, and bring up the big cognitive guns.

ori_b• 11 months ago

AI coding is the worst part of management without any of the rewards.

bdhcuidbebe2• 11 months ago

I never could code to music.

nowittyusername• 11 months ago

Chill instrumental and lo-fi are your friends now. I also noticed I couldn't listen to music anymore but that's only because of vocals. Anything without language works just fine, especially at low volume.

redog• 11 months ago

Listen to dance music or classical without the lyrics....I've NEVER been able to code/work and listen to music with language/lyrics. Words overwhelm my mental bandwidth. Same shit happens to me with the piano. Please don't speak while I try to play.

dexter_it• 11 months ago

Optimistic about AI or not, this is sad.

footlose_3815• 11 months ago

Not sure if it's been declared generally yet, but debugging is harder with AI.

Once your requests start to veer away from the direction you wanted (Especially if at-any-point, you transition to Cursor's "Free" mode, and it misunderstands and bulldozes all your previously-working features)

Not only is it harder, the physical stress caused by debugging with AI is something new. It gets some requests so-incredibly-wrong and follows directions totally-contrary, your brain forgets it's talking to a computer, and reacts in a way you would to a person who did all the wrong things here.

Version control has never been so important. I never use cursor without it. And even then, sometimes I just open the client, and a bunch of files changed.

erelong• 11 months ago

I've seen multiple posts like this

I still stand by my previous response, which is about flow:

flow happens when your skills meet a sufficient challenge

AI has disrupted this by basically increasing your skills

when you have too many skills but not enough of a challenge, you feel boredom

if you have too much of a challenge and not enough skills, you feel anxiety

so you'd need a bigger challenge to feel like you're in flow if you have increased your skill ability

AI coding made me faster, but I can't code to music anymore

Related Stories