AI coding is gambling

https://notes.visaint.space/ai-coding-is-gambling/

by speckx • 4 months ago

352 431 4 months ago

notes.visaint.space

How often do you have to win before it's no longer gambling?

Retr0id5• 4 months ago

I don't know where I'd draw the line personally, but wherever you draw it there's a problem. If you give increasingly more advanced tasks to it, you will eventually cross the line.

margalabargala• 4 months ago

How is this any different from assigning increasingly more advanced tasks to an employee?

tonymet2• 4 months ago

we're winning so much we started complaining "I can't handle so much winning"

flaterkk2• 4 months ago

Suffering from Success - Studio album by DJ Khaled ‧ 2013

Applies here? :D

operatingthetan• 4 months ago

Exactly. It's not gambling if you win most of the time. This is like saying driving a car is gambling. I mean sure, I guess if you think any amount of risk equals gambling.

apitman• 4 months ago

minimaxir2• 4 months ago

The gambling metaphor often applied to vibecoding implies that the outcome cannot be fully controlled or influenced, such as a slot machine. Opus 4.5 and beyond show that it not only can be very much can be influenced, but also it can give better results more consistently with the proper checks and balances.

Retr0id5• 4 months ago

Poker is a skill-based game where your actions influence your success, but many people who play it are gambling.

bensyverson4• 4 months ago

And that's why poker is a poor metaphor for agentic coding.

c_e• 4 months ago

everybody who's playing poker is gambling, skilled or not.

bigstrat20038• 4 months ago

Poker has elements of both luck and skill. The luck element + wagering money is what makes it gambling.

jatins• 4 months ago

Yeah, I don't think the metaphor applies exactly but I definitely see similarities from my personal experience

1/ Dependency -- Once I got used to agentic coding, I almost always reached out to it even for small changes (e.g. update a yaml config)

2/ Addiction -- In the initial euphoria phase, many people experience not wanting to "waste" any time agent idle and they'd try to assign AI agents task before they go to sleep

3/ You trust your judgement less and less as agent takes over your code

4/ "Slot machine" behavior -- running multiple AI agents parallel on same task in hope of getting some valuable insight from either

5/ Psychosis -- We have all met crypto traders who'd tell you how your 9-5 is stupid and you could be making so much trading NFTs. Social media if full of similar anecodotes these days in regards to vibecoding with people boasting their Claude spend, LOC and what not

ambicapter3• 4 months ago

Slot machines have very controlled results. They are regulated to a high precision of reliability.

Terr_5• 4 months ago

I don't think that difference matters to the comparison.

It's not an inherent feature to slot machines, it's something we enforce because people got angry about the outcomes (i.e. fraud) when they didn't operate that way.

It doesn't matter because a dodgy slot-machine is still a slot machine, and the person using it would still be a gambler.

Terr_5• 4 months ago

The gambling metaphor often applied to vibecoding implies that the outcome

The important part of the not-really-a-metaphor is the relationship between user and machine, and how it affects the user's mind.

What the machine outputs on "wins" doesn't matter as much, addictive gambling can still happen even when the payouts are dumb.

reaperducer• 4 months ago

it can give better results more consistently with the proper checks and balances.

You can get more consistent results from a slot machine with a bunch of magnets and some swift kicks. It's still gambling.

davidkhess• 4 months ago

One way it works is if you think of cognitive debt as the "house". As in "the house always wins".

samschooler2• 4 months ago

I think there are levels to this.

- One shot or "spray and pray" prompt only vibe coding: gambling.

- Spec driven TDD AI vibe coding: more akin to poker.

- Normal coding (maybe with tab auto complete): eating veggies/work.

Notably though gambling has the massive downside of losing your entire life and life savings. Being in the "vibe coding" bucket's worse case is being insufferable to your friends and family, wasting your time, and spending $200/month on a max plan.

parliament32• 4 months ago

You remind me of those guys who swear they have a "system" at the casino.

samschooler2• 4 months ago

I'm not saying I have a system. I'm saying there are levels to this stuff. It's not a binary "gambling" or "not gambling".

xnx• 4 months ago

...and the payouts are fantastic.

Retr0id5• 4 months ago

But now either the AI can handle it or it can pretend to handle it. Frankly it's pretending both times, but often it's enough to get the result we need.

This has been how I think about it, too. The success rates are going up, but I still view the AI as an adversary that is trying to trick me into thinking it's being useful. Often the act is good enough to be actually useful, too.

mjburgess2• 4 months ago

The first anthropomorphization of AI which is actually useful.

Retr0id5• 4 months ago

It's not even an anthropomorphization, the reward function in RLHF-like scenarios is usually quite literally "did the user think the output was good"

simonw8• 4 months ago

Assigning work to an intern is gambling: they're inherently non-deterministic and it's a roll of the dice whether the work they do will be good enough or you'll have to give them feedback in order to get to what you need.

Fellshard• 4 months ago

An intern can be taught. If you try to 'teach' a craps table, they'll drag you out of the casino.

skepticATX• 4 months ago

You generally don’t assign work to an intern just for the output, though.

sarchertech2• 4 months ago

That’s very true. But interns aren’t supposed to be doing useful work. The purpose of interns is training interns and identifying people who might become useful at a later date.

I’ve never worked anywhere where the interns had net productivity on average.

simonw8• 4 months ago

Replace "intern" with "coworker" and my comment still holds.

mathrawka• 4 months ago

As someone who has worked with interns for year, expect feedback and reiterations always, be surprised if they get it the first time... which merits feedback as well!

But looks like the intern mafia is bombarding you with downvotes.

lunar_mycroft2• 4 months ago

1. Interns learn. LLMs only get better when a new model comes out, which will happen (or not) regardless of whether you use them now.

2. Who here thinks that having interns write all/almost all of your code and moving all your mid level and senior developers to exclusively reviewing their work and managing them is a good idea?

simonw8• 4 months ago

I don't know that the "humans learn, LLMs don't" argument holds any more with coding agents.

Coding agents look at existing text in the codebase before they act. If they previously used a pattern you dislike and you tell them how to do differently, the next time they run they'll see the new pattern and are much more likely to follow that example.

There are fancier ways of having them "learn" - self-updating CLAUDE.md files, taking notes in a notes/ folder etc - but just the code that they write (and can later read in future sessions) feels close-enough to "learning" to me that I don't think it makes sense to say they don't learn any more.

james2doyle2• 4 months ago

The only similarity is that they both say "you’re absolutely right" when you point out their obvious mistakes

sidrag22• 4 months ago

exactly where my mind went as well. There aren't really levels to pulling a lever on a slot machine, other than the ability for each pull to result in more "plays" of the same potential outcome.

The reason i think this metaphor keeps popping up, is because of how easy it is to just hit a wall and constantly prompt "its not working please fix it" and sometimes that will actually result in a positive outcome. So you can choose to gamble very easily, and receive the gambling feedback very quickly unlike with an intern where the feedback loop is considerably delayed, and the delayed interns output might simply be them screaming that they don't understand.

bluefirebrand6• 4 months ago

Drawing parallels between AI and interns just shows you're a misanthrope

You should value assigning tasks to human interns more than AI because they are human

throw48472852• 4 months ago

There are two major mistakes here.

The first is equating human and LLM intelligence. Note that I am not saying that humans are smarter than LLMs. But I do believe that LLMs represent an alien intelligence with a linguistic layer that obscures the differences. The thought processes are very different. At top AI firms, they have the equivalent of Asimov's Susan Calvin trying to understand how these programs think, because it does not resemble human cognition despite the similar outputs.

The second and more important is the feedback loop. What makes gambling gambling is you can smash that lever over and over again and immediately learn if you lost or got a jackpot. The slowness and imprecision of human communication creates a totally different dynamic.

To reiterate, I am not saying interns are superior to LLMs. I'm just saying they are fundamentally different.

And, if we're being honest, the way people talk about interns is weirdly dehumanizing, and the fact that they are always trotted out in these AI debates is depressing.

simonw8• 4 months ago

And, if we're being honest, the way people talk about interns is weirdly dehumanizing, and the fact that they are always trotted out in these AI debates is depressing.

Yeah, I agree with that.

That thought crossed my mind as I was posting this comment, but I decided to go with it anyway because I think this is one of those cases where I think the comparison is genuinely useful.

We delegate work to humans all the time without thinking "this is gambling, these collaborators are unreliable and non-deterministic".

capitalsigma• 4 months ago

People don't write blog posts about how they wake up at 3AM to assign new tasks to their intern, nor do they build "orchestration frameworks" that involve N layers of interns passing tasks down between eachother

rvz2• 4 months ago

It is indeed gambling. You are spending more tokens hoping that the agent aligns with your desired output from your prompt. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't.

Watching vibe gamblers hooked onto coding agents who can't solve fizz buzz in Rust are given promotional offers by Anthropic [0] for free token allowances that are the equivalent in the casino of free $20 bets or free spins at the casino to win until March 27, 2026.

The house (Anthropic) always wins.

[0] https://support.claude.com/en/articles/14063676-claude-march...

halotrope• 4 months ago

idk it works for me it build stuff that would have taken weeks in hours ymmv

dwa35923• 4 months ago

few thoughts on this- it's not gambling if the most expected outcome actually occurs.

It also depends on what you're coding with;

- If you're coding with opus4.6, then it's not gambling for a while.

- If you'r coding with gemini3-flash, then yeah.

One thing I have noticed though is- you have to spend a lot of tokens to keep the error/hallucination rate low as your codebase increases in size. The math of this problem makes sense; as the code base has increased, there's physically more surface where something could go wrong. To avoid that you have to consistently and efficiently make the surface and all it's features visible to the model. If you have coded with a model for a week and it has produced some code, the model is not more intelligent after that week- it still has the same layers and parameters, so keeping the context relevant is a moving target as the codebase increases (and that's why it probably feels like gambling to some people).

Planktonne• 4 months ago

it's not gambling if the most expected outcome actually occurs.
you have to spend a lot of tokens to keep the error/hallucination rate low

Ironically, I find your comment more effective at convincing me AI coding is gambling than the original article. You're talking about it the exact same way that gamblers do about their games.

dwa35923• 4 months ago

lol that's interesting. care to explain why?

dwa35923• 4 months ago

so your whole argument is that you are convinced that ai coding is gambling because according to you i am talking about it like gamblers talk about gambling?

- Was there anymore intelligence that you wanted to add to your argument?

bensyverson4• 4 months ago

This "slot machine" metaphor is played out. If you're just entering a coin's worth of information and nudging it over and over in the hopes of getting something good, that's a you problem, not a Claude problem.

If, on the other hand, you treat it like a hyper-competent collaborator, and follow good project management and development practices, you're golden.

rustyhancock3• 4 months ago

Life is full of variable reward schemes. Probably why we evolved to be so enamoured by them.

In a healthy environment. We are harmed more by being totally risk adverse. Than by accepting risk as part of life and work.

james2doyle2• 4 months ago

_hyper-competent collaborator who may completely make things up occasionally and will sometimes give different answers to the same question*_

bensyverson4• 4 months ago

So, indistinguishable from a human then

ctoth2• 4 months ago

If, on the other hand, you treat it like a hyper-competent collaborator, and follow good project management and development practices, you're golden.

I am consistently using 100% of my weekly $200 max plan. I know how this thing works, I know how to get value out of it, and I wish what you said were true.

If you do all of these things? You are in a better spot. You are in a far better spot than if you hadn't! Setting up hooks to ensure notes get written? Massive win! Red-green TDD? Yes, please! But in terms of just ... well, being able to rely on the damn thing?

https://github.com/ctoth/claude-failures

rustyhancock3• 4 months ago

Life is full of variable reward schemes. Probably why we evolved to be so enamoured by them.

Sometimes I think we put the Carr before the horse. We gamble because evolution promotes that approach.

Yes I could go for the reliable option. But taking a punt is worth a shot if the cost is low.

The cost of AI is low.

What is a problem is people getting wrapped up in just one more pull of the slot machine handle.

I use AI often. But fairly often I simply bin its reponse and get to work on my own. A decent amount of the time I can work with the response given to make a decent result.

Sometimes, rarely, it gives me what I need right off the bat.

hirako20003• 4 months ago

I doubt gambling is in nature. Investments based on reason pay off. Evolution shapes for sensical moves.

Humans invented gambling as a rigged game that mimics what's in nature, perversed for profit.

rustyhancock3• 4 months ago

The "natural" form of gambling is this.

You need to collect food, do you go to where you know there are berries (low value but high likelihood of finding), or scout off to find a herd of deer? (High value but low likelihood of finding).

Looking for deer wouldnt be walking off in a random direction. You check water holes, known clearings, known fields.

Each of these is an operation (walk to X and look), each has a low probability of meeting a deer.

This is a variable reward scheme.

The result is optmize foraging practices - you mostly hunt for deer then fall back to berries. In larger groups some will gather berries some will hunt.

Contrary to popular thought hunter and gatherer were not separate occupations.

glial• 4 months ago

Broadly speaking, gambling is just making decisions without knowing the future. It's everywhere.

bluefirebrand6• 4 months ago

The cost of AI is low

If we're only talking about money spent on prompting AI, maybe. The damage to online trust is massive imo. So is the damage done by looting the commons to build them.

Typical privatize the profits socialize the costs bullshit

Barrin92• 4 months ago

Life is full of variable reward schemes. Probably why we evolved to be so enamoured by them.

Important to point out that that every high culture produced restrictions on exactly those behaviors, gambling was a universal vice when that concept still mattered.

America in particular had a work culture that favored well, work and technical excellence. Now work is for suckers, thinking is for suckers, precision not worth it when you can have some machine do it half-right.

"Yes I could go for the reliable option. But taking a punt is worth a shot if the cost is low.", might as well be the national slogan from vibe-coding to the department of defense. Even the venture capital industry that excels at slot machine sectors was itself already a slot machine.

jsLavaGoat2• 4 months ago

Everything is "fast, cheap, good--pick two." This is no different.

smlacy• 4 months ago

I like the analogy but which 2 is AI coding?

Fast & Cheap (but not Good?) - I wouldn't really say that AI coding is "cheap"

Cheap & Good (but not Fast) - Again, not really "cheap"

Fast & Good (but not Cheap) - This seems like maybe where we're at? Is this a bad place?

ambicapter3• 4 months ago

The proper idiom is "You can only pick two". It doesn't say that everything is two of them, or even one.

bigstrat20038• 4 months ago

It's not cheap or good, it's just fast.

flaterkk2• 4 months ago

It's hitting all three, right _now_.

Eventually, it will be just Fast and Good. It won't be cheap, as companies start moving towards profitability.

Remember when Uber was super cheap? I do. They're fast and good though.

CraftingLinks5• 4 months ago

I see whole teams pushed by c- level going full in with spec driven + tdd development. The devs hate it because they are literally forbidden to touch a single line if code. but the results speak for themselves, it just works and the pressure has shifted to the product people to keep up. The whole tooling to enable this had to be worked out first. All Cursor and extreme use of a tool called Speckit, connected to Notion to pump documentation and Jira.

RealityVoid• 4 months ago

literally forbidden to touch a single line if code.

That is extremely stupid. What does that ban get you? I reqct to this because a friend mentioned exactly this. And I was dumbfounded.

comboy2• 4 months ago

That is extremely stupid. What does that ban get you?

confidence in firing coders I presume..

ryandrake2• 4 months ago

It seems like just a CxO dick measuring exercise.

CEO1: "We allow our engineers to use AI for all work."

CEO2: "Oh yea? We mandate our engineers use AI for at least N% of their work!"

CEO3: "You think that's good? We mandate our engineers use AI for all code!!"

CEO4: "Pfff, amateurs. We don't even allow our engineers to open source code editors or even look at the LLM output..."

CraftingLinks5• 4 months ago

I don't think it's implemented that harsh or enforced so hostile, but they have these rict procedures now on how the code is to be developed. That procedure they follow is all centered around automated code generation. So they simply... don't anymore in practice, it is not part of the job description so to speak. He wasn't happy I can tell, but also acknowledged it was working very well.

bigstrat20038• 4 months ago

but the results speak for themselves, it just works

The results do speak for themselves, but it doesn't work.

rsoto24• 4 months ago

yeah i'm not gonna be an AI company's guinea pig just because the c-suite wants to sign me up. "the results" you mean AI-psychosis and dunning-kruger syndrome?

CraftingLinks5• 4 months ago

Like I said, devs don't like it. He said productivity went up 3-4x. "It works". There was no question of denying that as far as he was concerned. At the same time he was going to look for another job as it was just painful to work like that.

CodingJeebus4• 4 months ago

For me, the feedback loop accelerating the way that AI now permits is so addictive in my day-to-day flows. I've had a really hard time stepping away from work at a reasonable hour because I get dopamine hits seeing Claude build things so fast.

Addiction and recovery is part of my story, so I've done quite a bit of work around that part of my life. I don't gamble, but I can confidently say that using LLMs has been an incredible boost in my productivity while completely destroying my good habits around setting boundaries, not working until 2AM, etc.

In that sense, it feels very much like gambling.

aderix• 4 months ago

Sometimes I feel that subsidising these packages (vs cost via API) is meant to make more and more people increasingly addicted

Terr_5• 4 months ago

I'd emphasize that prompting LLMs to generate code isn't just metaphorical gambling in the sense of "taking a risk", the scary part is the more-literal gambling involving addictive behaviors and how those affect the way the user interacts with the machine and the world.

Heck, this technology also offers a parasocial relationship at the same time! Plopping tokens into a slot-machine which also projects a holographic "best friend" that gives you "encouragement" would fit fine in any cyberpunk dystopia.

interestpiqued• 4 months ago

I think AI literally makes even being wrong feel like getting something done. And that is the addictive part for people.

rsoto24• 4 months ago

Look at all this text I have! It can't be worthless right?!

cyanydeez2• 4 months ago

"Near-Miss" effect: https://harprehab.com/blogs/the-psychology-of-risk-why-gambl...

I believe that's the strongest pattern in LLM gambling. Was listening the Syntax and they described that "Even though theLLM did it wrong 4 times, that 5th time could be right, so why not just go!"; paraphrased of course.

It also explains the meta-LLM business, where all these CEO types put in some question and because the LLM just knows all these words, they believe it's valuable because it's "almost" correct, even when that last correction might be forever elusive because these machines arn't thinking, they're patterning a highly regularized language beneath the more loose descriptions.

There'll definitely be a winner in the AI bubble, but it'll be seen after it pops.

RhythmFox3• 4 months ago

Having used agents some I think 'addictive behavior' is really the closest thing to the feeling it gives me as well. I don't find it engaging my critical thinking brain, and in fact it often subverts that in favor of 'get the next dopamine hit faster' behavior (ie just rerun it, leading to the metaphor the OP is using). It takes a conscious effort for me to get back out of that cycle and start thinking of the fine details of what the code really does, or why I wanted it to do that in the first place. I have called it 'smoking vibes' and 'chasing rAInbows' in my sillier moments. It really does feel good... too good :P

lasgawe• 4 months ago

haha.. I agree with the points mentioned in the article. Literally every model does this. It feels like this even with skills and other buzzword files

amw-zero• 4 months ago

So is human coding.

thisisbrians• 4 months ago

It is and will always be about: 1) properly defining the spec 2) ensuring the implementation satisfies said spec

rawgabbit• 4 months ago

I had a CIO tell me 15 years ago with Agile I was wasting my time with specs and design documents.

vidarh• 4 months ago

I was in a call just today where specs were presented as a new thing.

ambicapter3• 4 months ago

Then pulling the lever until it works! You can also code up a little helper to continuously pull the lever until it works!

SV_BubbleTime• 4 months ago

We have a monkeys and typewriters thing for this already.

Just instead of hitting keys, they’re hitting words, and the words have probability links to each other.

Who the hell thinks this is ready to make important decisions?

raizer88• 4 months ago

AI: "Yes, the specs are perfectly clear and architectural standards are fully respected."

[Imports the completely fabricated library docker_quantum_telepathy.js and calls the resolve_all_bugs_and_make_coffee() method, magically compiling the code on an unplugged Raspberry Pi]

AI: "Done! The production deployment was successful, zero errors in the logs, and the app works flawlessly on the first try!"

stitched2gethr2• 4 months ago

We're way past that.

CodingJeebus4• 4 months ago

Personally, I get a huge rush of dopamine seeing LLMs build out complex features very quickly to the point that it will keep me up all night wanting to push further and further.

That's where the gambling metaphor really resonates. It's not whether or not the output is correct, I've been building software for many years and I know how direct LLMs pretty well at this point. But I'm also an alcoholic in recovery and I know that my brain is wired differently than most. And using LLMs has tested my ability to self-regulate in ways that I haven't dealt with since I deleted social media years ago.

natpalmer1776• 4 months ago

It also doesn’t help that producing features is also wired to a sense of monetary compensation. More-so if you’re building a product to sell that might finally be your ticket to whatever your perception of socio-economic victory is.

acedTrex• 4 months ago

Personally, I get a huge rush of dopamine seeing LLMs build out complex features very quickly

I dont think i've read a sentence on this website i can relate to less.

I watch the LLM build things and it feels completely numb, i may as well be watching paint dry. It means nothing to me.

dgxyz• 4 months ago

Well it’s more how much we care about those.

Which with the advent of LLMs just lowered our standards so we can claim success.

bwestergard• 4 months ago

That can't be the whole story, right? Because there are an arbitrarily large number of (e.g.) Rust programs that will implement any given spec given in terms of unit tests, types, and perhaps some performance benchmarks.

But even accounting for all these "hard" constraints and metrics, there are clearly reasons to prefer some possible programs over others even when they all satisfy the same constraints and perform equally on all relevant metrics.

We do treat programs as efficient causes[1] of side effects in computing systems: a file is written, a block of memory is updated, etc. and the program is the cause of this.

But we also treat them as statements of a theory of the problem being solved[2]. And this latter treatment is often more important socially and economically. It is irrational to be indifferent to the theory of the problem the program expresses.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_causes#Efficient

[2] https://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~remzi/Naur.pdf

MeetingsBrowser5• 4 months ago

there are clearly reasons to prefer some possible programs over others even when they all satisfy the same constraints

Maintainability is a big one missing from the current LLM/agentic workflow.

When business needs change, you need to be able to add on to the existing program.

We create feedback loops via tests to ensure programs behave according to the spec, but little to nothing in the way of code quality or maintainability.

nickjj3• 4 months ago

properly defining the spec

Why do you often need to re-prompt things like "can you simplify this and make it more human readable without sacrificing performance?". No amount of specification addresses this on the first shot unless you already know the exact implementation details in which case you might as well write it yourself directly.

I often have to put in a prompt like this 5-10 times before the code resembles something I'd even consider using as a 1st draft base to refactor into something I would consider worthy of being git commit.

I sometimes use AI for tiny standalone functions or scripts so we're not talking about a lot of deeply nested complexity here.

seanmcdirmid3• 4 months ago

I often have to put in a prompt like this 5-10 times before the code resembles something I'd even consider using as a 1st draft base to refactor into something I would consider worth of being git commit.

Are you stuck entering your prompts in manually or do you have it setup like a feedback loop like "beautify -> check beauty -> in not beautiful enough beautify again"? I can't imagine why everyone things AIs can just one shot everything like correctness, optimization, and readability, humans can't one shot these either.

giancarlostoro• 4 months ago

There's two secret sauces to making Claude Code your b* (please forgive me future AI overlords), one is to create a spec, the other is to not prompt merely "what" you want and only what you want, but what you want, HOW you want it done (you can get insanely detailed or just vague enough), and even in some cases the why is useful to know and understand, WHO its for sometimes as well. Give it the context you know, don't know anything about the code? Ask it to read it, all of it, you've got 1 million tokens, go for it.

I have one shot prompted projects from empty folder to full feature web app with accounts, login, profiles, you name it, insanely stable, maybe and oops here or there, but for a non-spec single prompt shot, that's impressive.

When I don't use a tool to handle the task management I have Claude build up a markdown spec file for me and specify everything I can think of. Output is always better when you specify technology you want to use, design patterns.

BurningFrog• 4 months ago

That was always the easy part.

The endless next steps of "and add this feature" or "this part needs to work differently" or "this seems like a bug?" or "we must speed up this part!" is where 98% of the effort always was.

Is it different with AI coding?

krupan7• 4 months ago

Good sir, have you heard the Good Word of the Waterfall development process? It sounds like that's what you are describing

QuadrupleA• 4 months ago

Side note, everyone's talking about having AI agents "conform to the spec" these days. Am I in my own bubble, or - who the hell these days gets The Spec as a well-formed document? Let alone a good document, something that can be formally verified, thouroughly test-cased, can christen the software "complete" when all its boxes are ticked, etc.?

This seems like 1980's corporate waterfall thinking, doesn't jibe with the messy reality I've seen with customers, unclear ideas, changing market and technical environments, the need for iteration and experimentation, mid-course correction, etc.

Aurornis3• 4 months ago

who the hell these days gets The Spec as a well-formed document?

The PMs asked ChatGPT to write a well-formed spec.

Sadly, true in too many companies right now.

I do agree with your general point that The Spec can become a crutch for washing your hands of any responsibility for knowing the product, the goals, the company's business, and other contexts. I like to defuse these ideas by reminding the engineers that The Spec is a living document and they are partially responsible for it, too. Once everyone learns that The Spec isn't a crutch for shifting all blame to the product manager, they become more involved in making sure it's right.

rob_c• 4 months ago

So.

Is.

Life.

You've discovered probability, there was an 80% change of that. Roll a dice and do not pass go.

Again. The output from llm is a probable solution, not right, not wrong.

yoyohello132• 4 months ago

I was just thinking about this. I was reading those tweets about the SV party were people were going home early to “check on their agents” or the “token anxiety” people are having over whether they are optimizing their agent usage. This is all giving me addiction vibes. Especially at the end of the day it seems like there is not much to show for it.

ryandrake2• 4 months ago

Addiction for the mere purpose of satisfying a compulsion, rather than to achieve a reward or physical "high."

duskdozer2• 4 months ago

Maybe they just wanted to leave early, and everyone's now required to maintain the AI hype-up so that's a nice excuse. Surely they'd be able to ssh in on their phone for a couple minutes if needed?

LetsGetTechnicl• 4 months ago

Yes, that's literally how LLM's work, they're probabilistic.

copypaper2• 4 months ago

You got to know when to Ship it,

Know when to Re-prompt,

Know when to Clear the Context,

And know when to RLHF.

You never trust the Output,

When you’re staring at the diff view,

There’ll (not) be time enough for Fixing,

When the Tokens are all spent.

sedawkgrep• 4 months ago

You're a gamblin' man, I see...

niccl• 4 months ago

thank you. I knew there was something I was missing

koolba• 4 months ago

When you’re staring at the diff view,

Bold assumption that people are looking at the diffs at all. They leave that for their coworkers agents.

zephen2• 4 months ago

Will the diffs be small enough for people to even usefully wade through them?

krupan7• 4 months ago

I really hope that was your creativity and not AI

copypaper2• 4 months ago

Indeed it was (I was listening to it while stumbling across this post). Also, fun fact: The Gambler was written by Don Schlitz while working as a Computer Operator in 76' which makes it all the more relevant [1].

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20230130060050/https://www.rolli...

tonymet2• 4 months ago

As always, scope the changes to no larger than you can verify. AI changes the scale, but not the strategy.

Now you have more resources to test, reduce permissions scope, to build a test bench & procedure. All of the excuses you once had for not doing the job right are now gone.

You can write 10k + lines of test code in a few minutes. What is the gamble? The old world was a bigger gamble.

__MatrixMan__• 4 months ago

Inductive reasoning of any kind (e.g. the scientific method) is gambling.

wagwang• 4 months ago

I divide my tasks into good for the soul and bad for it. Coding generally goes into good for the soul, even when I do it poorly.

Lmk how you feel when you're constantly build integrations with legacy software by hand.

comboy2• 4 months ago

Fascinating how HN is torn about vibe coding still. Everybody pretty much agrees that it works for some use cases, yet there is a flamewar (I mean, cultured, HN-type one) every time. People seem to be more comfortable in a binary mindset.

pgwhalen• 4 months ago

It’s just how discussion on the internet works, for basically anything at all worth discussing. It’s exhausting, but I can hardly blame HN specifically.

zer00eyz2• 4 months ago

VIM vs Emacs vs IDE vs..., Tabs vs Spaces, Procedural vs OOP vs Functional.

We love a good holy war for sure.

The nuance is lost, and the conversations we should be having never happen (requirements, hiring/skills, developer experience).

minimaxir2• 4 months ago

Everybody pretty much agrees that it works for some use cases

That isn't true, which is the exact reason why people have a binary mindset. More than once on Hacker News I've had people accuse me of being an AI booster just because I said I had success with agents and they did not.

mpalmer2• 4 months ago

For my part at least, I get the most riled up against the binary thinkers!

szatkus• 4 months ago

This. A lot of people on HN acts as you can only write code manually (almost, generators and snippets are allowed, because we are used to them) or vibe coding the whole project through a WhatsApp conversation. As if there was nothing in between and the same approach should work for all kinds of projects.

Personally I use coding agents for boring parts (I really don't enjoy putting the same piece of string to 20 different classes just to register a new component) and they work quite well, I'm going to use them for foreseeable future, because they make coding much more enjoyable for me. On the other hand I don't have an OpenClaw box burning billions of tokens weekly for me, because I usually don't have ideas that could be clearly specified.

hext4• 4 months ago

If you enjoy the flamewar, check out /r/SelfHosted which has been losing it's mind over the last few months. The heavy heavy majority of that community is somehow incredibly anti AI despite the fact that the previous "spammy" posts (before ai assisted projects) were all "what is wrong with my docker compose file"??

ApolloFortyNine• 4 months ago

I had to unsub from that subreddit when I saw a cool new application and the top comments were just dogging it for the signs of Claude Code (claude.md).

This is a subreddit about selfhosting things others built for free. Honestly, often for piracy purposes. It's insane how entitled people have become.

artursapek• 4 months ago

“hiring people is gambling”

1234letshaveatw• 4 months ago

Is using a calculator gambling?

himata4113• 4 months ago

I really hate when people write about the AI of the past, opus 4.6 and gpt 5.4 [not as much imo, it's really boring and uncreative] have increased in capabilities so much that it's honestly mind numbing compared to what we had LESS than a year ago.

Opus specifically from 4.1 to 4.5 was such a major leap that some take it for granted, it went from getting stuck in loops, generally getting lost constantly, needing so so much attention to keep it going to being able to get a prompt, understand it from minimal context and produce what you wanted it to do. Opus 4.6 was a slight downgrade since it has issues with respecting what the user has to say.

extr• 4 months ago

I mean, this completely falls apart when you're trying to do something "real". I am building a trading engine right now with Claude/Codex. I have not written a line of code myself. However I care deeply about making sure everything works well because it's my money on the line. I have to weight carefully the prospect of landing a change that I don't fully understand.

Sometimes I can get away with 3K LoC PRs, sometimes I take a really long time on a +80 -25 change. You have to be intellectually honest with yourself about where to spend your time.

Gagarin19172• 4 months ago

Trying to decide whether to refinance now or not feels like gambling too. Yet it’s financially beneficial to make some bet.

Defining “Gambling” like isn’t really helpful.

gs17• 4 months ago

If I said I had a machine where I put in "tokens", watch it spin, and either get nothing or something valuable (with which I get being largely chance), you'd presume it's some kind of slot machine. The important things IMO are the random chance of getting something and being able to keep retrying so rapidly.

You can't keep paying to play the "refinancing game" until you get a good rate (at least not like pulling the lever again and again, you have to wait a long time, you won't call the same bank again and again, and suddenly they have an amazing rate), it's a different experience and the psychology is different.

Gagarin19172• 4 months ago

If the definition of slot machine is so vague that it includes LLMs then it’s not really meaningful.

If someone only ever paid $20 a month on slot machines AND typically came out ahead, that wouldn’t be any kind of gambling issue.

Playing real slot machines is only really a problem if you regularly put in too much because the odds are literally set against you. Not true with LLMs, both you and the AI company would become more successful the more helpful their tool is.

1970-01-01• 4 months ago

"60% of the time, it works every time"

nativeit• 4 months ago

I have had very similar experiences. I am not a professional software developer, but have been a Linux sysadmin for over a decade, a web developer for much longer than that, and generally know enough to hack on other people’s projects to make them suit my own purposes.

When I have Claude create something from scratch, it all appears very competent, even impressive, and it usually will build/function successfully…on the surface. I have noticed on several occasions that Claude has effectively coded the aesthetics of what I want, but left the substance out. A feature will appear to have been implemented exactly as I asked, but when I dig into the details, it’s a lot of very brittle logic that will almost certainly become a problem in future.

This is why I refuse to release anything it makes for me. I know that it’s not good enough, that I won’t be able to properly maintain it, and that such a product would likely harm my reputation, sooner or later. What frightens me is there are a LOT of people who either don’t know enough to recognize this, or who simply don’t care and are looking for a quick buck. It’s already getting significantly more difficult to search for software projects without getting miles of slop. I don’t know how this will ultimately shake out, but if it’s this bad at the thing it’s supposedly good at, I can only imagine the kinds of military applications being leveraged right now…

cmiles8• 4 months ago

It’s like any powerful tool. If you use it right it’s amazing. If you get careless or don’t watch it closely you’ll get hurt really badly.

Overall I’m a fan, but yes there are things to watch for. It doesn’t replace skilled humans but it does help skilled humans work faster if used right.

The labor replacement story is bullshit mostly, but that doesn’t mean it’s all bad.

dzink• 4 months ago

It’s variable rewards and even with large models the same question can lead to dramatically different answers. Possibly because they route your request through different models. Possibly because the model has more time to dig through the problem. Nonetheless we have some illusion of control over the output (you we wouldn’t be playing it) but it is just the quality of the model itself that leads to better outcomes - not your input. If you can’t let go of the feeling thought, it’s definitely addictive. And as I look back, it’s a fast iteration on the building cycle we had before AI. But the brain really likes low latency - it is addicted to the fast reward for its actions. So AI, if it gets fast enough (sub 400ms) it will likely become irreversibly addictive to humans in general, as the brain will see is at part of itself. Hope it has our interest at heart by then.

krupan7• 4 months ago

Well said! My only qualm with this is saying you hope "it" has our interests at heart. "It" is a machine made by humans that work for corporations. I would correct your hope to, "I hope they have our interest at heart by then."

zephen2• 4 months ago

This is being overlooked, downplayed, or simply not understood, by many commenters.

It is exactly like the proverbial monkey or rat pressing a bar for a food pellet to come out.

If the pellet unerringly drops, and is always tasty and nutritious, the rat stops when it's no longer hungry.

Otherwise, an inordinate amount of time is spent pressing the bar.

markhahn• 4 months ago

This (variable rewards -> gambling, illusion of control) is really important.

I'm not an expert in the psych/neuro literature on addiction, but I suspect latency isn't that critical. But is that just because it's things like fruit-machines that have been studied? Gambling (poker, racehorses) are quite long-latency. OTOH, scrolling is closer to 400ms, and that's certainly the modern addition...

itsgrimetime2• 4 months ago

All of this new capability has made me realize that the reason i love programming _isn't_ the same as the OP. I used to think (and tell others) that I loved understanding something deeply, wading through the details to figure out a tough problem. but actually, being able to will anything I can think of into existence is what I love about programming. I do feel for the people who were able to make careers out of falling in love w/ and getting good at picking problems & systems apart, breaking them down, and understanding them fully. I respect the discipline, curiosity, and intellect they have. but I also am elated w/ where things are at/going. this feels absurd to say, but I finally feel like I'm _good_ at programming, which is insane, because I literally haven't written a line of code myself in months, but having tools that can finally match the speed my ideas come to me is intoxicating

bluefirebrand6• 4 months ago

but I finally feel like I'm _good_ at programming, which is insane, because I literally haven't written a line of code myself in months

This is exactly the sort of mentality that makes me hate this technology

You finally feel good at programming despite admitting that you aren't actually doing it

Please explain why anyone should take this seriously?

pdntspa11• 4 months ago

Because the programming is and was always a means to an end. Obsessing over the specific mechanical act of programming is taking the forest for the trees.

I agree with gp that the speed in which I am able to execute my vision is exhilarating. It is making me love programming again. My side projects, which have been hanging on the wall for years, are actually getting done. And quickly!

The actual act of keying in code is drudgery for me. I've written so much code in so many languages that it is hard not to hate them all. Why the fuck is it a hash in ruby but a dict in python? How the hell do I get the current unixtime in this language again?!? Why the fuck do I need to learn yet another stupid vocabulary for what is essentially databinding? Who cares, let the AI handle it

thendrill• 4 months ago

I see alot of people get really confused between the act of writing code VS. programming...

Programming is willing the machine to do something... Writing code is just that writing code, yes sometimes you write code to make the machine do something and other times you write code just to write code ( for example refactoring, or splitting logic from presentation etc.)

Think about it like this... Everyone can write words. But writing words does not make you a book writer.

What always gets me is that the act of writing code by itself has no real value. Programming is what solves problems and brings value. Everyone can write code, not everyone can "program"....

orsorna3• 4 months ago

Well for one, programming actually sucks. Punching cards sucks. Copywriting sucks. Why? Well, implementation for the sake of implementation is nothing more than self-gratifying, and sole focus on it is an academic pursuit. The classic debate of which programming language is better is an argument of the best way to translate human ideas of logic into something that works. Sure programming is fun but I don't want to do it. What I do want to do is transform data or information into other kinds of information, and computing is a very, very convenient platform to do so, and programming allows manipulation of a substrate to perform such transformations.

I agree with OP because the journey itself rarely helps you focus on system architecture, deliverable products and how your downstream consumers use your product. And not just product in the commercial sense, but FOSS stuff or shareware I slap together because I want to share a solution to a problem with other people.

The gambling fallacy is tiresome as someone who, at least I believe, can question the bullshit models try to do sometimes. It is very much gambling for CEOs, idea men who do not have a technical floor to question model outputs.

If LLMs were /slow/ at getting a working product together combined with my human judgement, I wouldn't use them.

So, when I encounter someone who doesn't pin value into building something that performs useful work, only the actual journey of it, regardless of usefulness of said work, I take them as seriously as an old man playing with hobby trains. Not to disparage hobby trains, because model trains are awesome, but they are hubris.

wmeredith• 4 months ago

I think this is a semantics thing. I feel the same way, but I wouldn't say that I feel like I'm good at programming. I'm most certainly not. What I am good at is product design and development, and LLM tech has made it so that I can concentrate on features, business models, and users.

MattGaiser• 4 months ago

Different definitions of programming.

OP defines it as getting the machine to do as he wants.

You define it as the actual act of writing the detailed instructions.

poszlem• 4 months ago

Why do you feel good about programming despite not writing in machine code?

throwawaytea2• 4 months ago

I know how to build a house for the most part. But I don't have time to build a house.

If I get a robot someday and manage it daily before I leave for work to slowly build a house, when it's done, I gotta be honest and admit I'll consider myself a home builder.

Otherwise, who is a home builder? Very few people do every single part themselves, even if they technically could.

reverius42• 4 months ago

This is like saying you can accomplish a lot "in assembly" if you write C++ instead of hand-writing assembly. I think I agree that similarly to "this is not hand written assembly", for the use of LLMs to generate high level code, "this is not programming" is also true.

It didn't mean we shouldn't use C++ and stop hand-writing (almost all) assembly. I don't think it means we should't use LLMs and stop hand-writing C++ either.

strangattractor• 4 months ago

One size never fits all. I am old enough to remember what a game changer Spreadsheets (VisiCalc) where. They made the personal computer into a SwissArmy knife for many people that could not justify investing large sums of money into software to solve a niche problem. Until that time PCs simply were not a big thing.

I believe AI will do something similar for programming. The level of complexity in modern apps is high and requires the use of many technologies that most of us cannot remotely claim to be expert in. Getting an idea and getting a prototype will definitely be easier. Production Code is another beast. Dealing with legacy systems etc will still require experts at least for the near future IMHO.

hungryhobbit• 4 months ago

I remember when my dev team included some people using Emacs, some using Eclipse (this was pre-VS Code), and some using IntelliJ.

Developers will always disagree on the best tool for X ... but we should all fear the Luddites who refuse to even try new tools, like AI. That personality type doesn't at all mesh with my idea of a "good programmer".

mskogly• 4 months ago

I agree. I remember working as a front end web developer years ago and needing to parse and transform xml/xslt from an api, and spending days and days trying to get it to work. The problem was the version of the IIs web server, version of xslt parser, and version format of the xslt etc. spent days on stack overflow trying to get a working solution. With ai I would have solved that idiotic problem in 1 minute.

Ai is tool, that lets us do what we want to do.

I also remember trying to create my first iOS app in Xcode and thinking «this is simply beyond me». Wouldn’t say app coding is trivial with ai, but its at least feasible now.

The bad part that none of us have a competitive edge anymore, and are close to unemployable. We can’t all be self taught founders who starts our own businesses. It’s going to get weird.

applfanboysbgon3• 4 months ago

but I finally feel like I'm _good_ at programming, which is insane

Yes, it is insane. You couldn't torture this confession out of me. But that's the drug they're selling you, isn't it? You don't even write code, but you're getting a self-inflated sense of worth. It must be addicting! Of course, whether or not the programs you prompt are actually good surely has no relation to whether you feel they're good, since you're not the one writing them, and apparently were not capable of writing them before so are not qualified to review them very much.

having tools that can finally match the speed my ideas come to me

Anyone can be an "ideas guy". We laughed at those people, because having ideas is not the hard part. The hard part was in all of the hundreds and thousands of little details that go into building the ideas into something actually worthwhile, and that hasn't changed. LLMs can build an idea into a prototype in a weekend. I am still waiting to see LLMs build an idea into something other people use at scale, once, ever, other than LLM wrappers. Either every person who is all-in on vibes only has ideas that consist of making .md files and publishing them as a "meta agent framework", or LLMs are not actually doing a great job of translating ideas into tangibly useful software.

542458• 4 months ago

Anyone can be an "ideas guy".

I disagree with this. I've worked with amazing "ideas guys" who just cranked out customer insights and interesting concepts, and I've worked with lousy ones, who just kinda meandered and never had a focused vision beyond a milquetoast copy of the last thing they saw. There's a real skill to forming good concepts, and it's not a skill everyone has!

supern0va2• 4 months ago

Anyone can be an "ideas guy".

I think there's way more nuance to this than you're willing to admit here. There's a significant difference between the guy who thinks "I'm going to make X app to do Y and get loaded." and the person who really understands the details of what they want to create and has a concrete vision of how to shape it.

I think that product shaping and detail oriented vision of how something should work and be used by people is genuinely challenging, wholly aside from the lower level technical skills required to execute it.

This is part of the reason why I wouldn't be surprised at all to see product manager types getting more hands-on, or seeing the software engineering profession evolve into more of a PM/SDE hybrid.

jmuguy• 4 months ago

A lot of this is also missing understanding the software we're creating. I have a deep knowledge of our SaaS because I've spent years working on coding it. If I had been prompting an LLM this entire time, I can't imagine I would actually have near the same understanding. That is assuming purely planning and prompting could actually result in a product that's in active use for years and not just a pile of prototypes which apparently desperately needed to be created and were just waiting for AI to come along to make it possible.

I've been using AI tools more but this idea of never actually writing any code seems way too black and white to be serious.

thunky2• 4 months ago

Anyone can be an "ideas guy". We laughed at those people, because having ideas is not the hard part.

Sure it's easy to create bad ideas. Not easy at all to create good ones.

awesome_dude• 4 months ago

because having ideas is not the hard part.

I agree. It's the "buy in" from the market.

The biggest names in Software Products have (other peoples) ideas to sell, they're selling the buggy versions of those ideas - Microsoft, Salesforce, even early Facebook, these weren't triumphs of 'monk-like discipline' in the code. They were triumphs of market buy in and timing.

paultendo• 4 months ago

Anyone can be an "ideas guy", very few are good at it.

"I am still waiting to see LLMs build an idea into something other people use at scale" - so Microsoft using Claude Code doesn't count?

thangalin3• 4 months ago

LLMs are not actually doing a great job of translating ideas into tangibly useful software

Here is the source code for a greenfield, zero-dependency, 100% pure PHP raw Git repository viewer made for self-hosted or shared environments that is 99.9% vibe-coded and has had ~10k hits and ~7k viewers of late, with 0 errors reported in the logs over the last 24 hours:

https://repo.autonoma.ca/repo/treetrek

xg15• 4 months ago

LLMs can build an idea into a prototype in a weekend

Just to nitpick, because I think the difference is relevant: "Idea to prototype in a weekend" was possible for a spirited coder already before LLMs.

Now it's "Idea to prototype in a few minutes".

bartread• 4 months ago

You don't even write code, but you're getting a self-inflated sense of worth.

That’s because when it comes to delivering value, code doesn’t matter: outcomes do.

If I spend 10 hours hand coding something versus prompting an LLM to create a solution that delivers the same outcome in a few minutes, and I can get that solution into production in under an hour from the moment my fingers first touch the keyboard to start writing the prompt, well, whilst these solutions might both deliver the same value, the ROI differs significantly.

manmal• 4 months ago

I've felt this exact same way until very recently. But in the end, it's slop that never quite does what it's supposed to. Anthropic is proud of themselves that they brute-forced the world's crappiest C compiler into existence. Guess what, nobody will use it.

bakugo5• 4 months ago

Going to McDonalds made me realize that the reason I love cooking isn't the actual cooking itself. Being able to order a food at McDonalds and getting it without doing anything myself is the best part about cooking! Now that I only eat McDonalds, I feel like I'm _good_ at cooking.

You do not like and have never liked programming. You wanted to be a manager. They are completely different things.

itsgrimetime2• 4 months ago

a lot of the replies on here (not just yours, I just picked yours to respond to) make it clear I didn't articulate what I was meaning to very well - I'm still doing the "engineering". I used "programming" in a more general sense: building stuff with computers. I still go through the same motions. I try something, hit some failure mode, have to think of and (with the help of claude) execute on that, evaluate it, decide if its better or not, identify when the agent is off track or deviating from the vision I have, etc.

it seems you and others took my words a bit more literally than I intended for them to come across. it's not like I'm just one-shotting all my ideas directly into existence, I still need to understand how to use the tool to do it. it's just a different tool. one that's allowing me to build way more than I ever have, while having a ton of fun doing it.

and sure, your analogy seems reasonable if I was simply buying the code w/ my tokens. that wouldn't be fun or fulfilling at all - it's more like there is some new "cooking" tool that immediately spawns 90% of the ingredients pre-cut & prepped (maybe the other 10% isn't exactly what I asked for but I can improvise with it) and gives me a decent recipe based on the idea of what I wanted to cook in the first place that fills in (and gives me a starting point to learn about) the gaps that I didn't even realize I was missing. I see it more as: "All this time I thought I loved chopping onions and setting up the grill, but actually I just loved cooking".

you weren't wrong about the mcdonalds though. I do love mcdonalds

Finbel• 4 months ago

That's silly, they don't want to manage people, they prefer to build actually useful things. I've recently learned how many programmers actually don't care about building things.

They love the craft, for all they care they could be working in a black box in a void as long as it fed them interesting problems to solve.

They don't see any actual benifit in the AI increasing the velocity of how fast they build useful things. That was never of value to them, all they see is the problems becoming more boring to solve.

maplethorpe3• 4 months ago

If there was a website called InfiniteAppStore, which contained every app imaginable, and where you could type in your search and it would return the code for that app, would you find that as satisfying to use as Claude Code?

On the surface this does not sound as satisfying, because it more resembles shopping than coding. But once Claude Code is finally tuned to do its job perfectly, you will essentially be using that infinite app store. You're actually using it right now, every time you use Claude Code — just an imperfect version of it.

If you enjoy using AI because it allows you to "will anything into existence", it's because the process is currently imperfect. Using Claude Code is closer to shopping than coding, but because the process is obfuscated, it feels like you're the one making the products in the shopping catalogue every time you place an order.

jondwillis• 4 months ago

If there was an infinite App Store, we wouldn't have scarcity and I'd be doing literally anything else other than selling my time for money. I'd also be killed because there's no point to my owners/the world keeping me around anymore in that scenario, except, maybe for my winning personality/companionship.

Apocryphon• 4 months ago

To be fair, the shoppers of the InfiniteAppStore can still bikeshed endlessly about the merchandise.

gpt52• 4 months ago

In that scenario the 'joy of creation' would just shift to the 'joy of discovery'. Both of which are innate to humans.

satyrnein• 4 months ago

For folks who are not familiar, this is "The Library of Babel" by Borges. There is no creating, just selecting among characters sequences we already knew were possible.

Robotbeat• 4 months ago

I dunno, browsing McMaster-Carr feels like both shopping and creating at the same time.

Typing is just choosing from the latent space something special, too. Could just be random words, or, even fewer, random grammatically correct sentences.

IAmGraydon• 4 months ago

But once Claude Code is finally tuned to do its job perfectly, you will essentially be using that infinite app store

You really believe that? What has lead you to the conclusion that LLMs will ever be capable of that?

estimator7292• 4 months ago

For me the joy comes from the understanding that the answer to "Is xyz possible?" is always, always "yes". It might be difficult, expensive, or take a long time, but my stance as an engineer is that anything is possible.

Hyperbole, yes, many things are in fact, not possible. But most people have the size of the two categories confused. The number of things that are categorically impossible is less than a rounding error compared to how many things are possible.

The joy and wonder of being an engineer is in taking problems deemed "impossible" and creating possibilities. It's in extracting a solution from infinite possibilities and redefining what possible even is.

the_af6• 4 months ago

What's the basis for this assertion? It seems wild:

The number of things that are categorically impossible is less than a rounding error compared to how many things are possible.

If it's just a case of keeping a positive attitude and self-help, I can accept it. A sort of white lie one tells themselves.

jarjoura• 4 months ago

I'd say, you are at the phase of this journey where you're feeling empowered.

It's just one step along the path of AI adoption to execute on an idea and see in near real-time the idea you had baked in your head come alive in front of you. Most of us get to this point and become the biggest evangelists of the tech. I see no reason you should feel guilty for the excitement you're feeling right now, and you should enjoy the journey. You're definitely paying for it in tokens, that's for sure.

However, there will come a point at which you will have successfully willed into existence a novel thing that you always wanted, and there it is, exactly as you dreamed, but by then, you'll be left with a weird empty feeling you won't really have the words for. Maybe it's a feeling of not earning the thing you built, or maybe it's just, your idea is finished and now you have to think of another idea. Certainly, this was your idea though, and it proves you were right, or at least on to something, and it is valuable, to you.

Yet, you didn't go on the journey to get there. You didn't bump up against limitations of the programming language or system and think about workarounds while you were showering or commuting to the office. You basically bought the finished product from the dynamic template marketplace of Anthropic (or whereever), and that's cool that it does what you need. It just isn't really programming, or being a software engineer in the traditional sense.

What used to be something you could potentially leave your day job for to go create a startup with a cofounder over, or maybe sell off to a buyer, or just open source and share with the world, isn't going to have the same meaning. It's a black box of code that you'll need a coding agent to continue working on, keeping that money flowing to Anthropic or whereever.

Anyway, I think the Slot Machine question is where a lot of early adopters are now at in this journey, and once more of us are there, then we can start asking the hard questions. Right now too many of us are where you're at, and it's impossible to know where things will end up in a year or so.

devanil2• 4 months ago

Don't you think that's overreacting? I know it's an important moment for us, but your speech sounds kind of theological. Almost condemning him to hell for "feeling pleasure."

ThrowawayTestr• 4 months ago

you'll be left with a weird empty feeling you won't really have the words for

I want computers to do work for me. Any barrier between me and the result I want is an annoyance.

riantogo• 4 months ago

Exactly this for me as well. When I was a SWE I thought what I loved was problem solving. So after many years of doing that I decided to move upsteam and took Product roles so that I can identify and address big business problems. It was only after I switched that I realized that I was not in love with problem solving. I was in love with art. Programming was art of me.

I kept at it on the side as a hobby. But stacks evolved and I was left behind. Now with AI it's back on.

em-bee4• 4 months ago

do i read that right, you didn't enjoy addressing big business problems?

i learned programming in high school and i enjoyed it, then while starting computer science i did and internship at a software company, and i hated it, and i thought i hated programming and wanted to give up studying computer science, but when i discovered programming MUDs and then web development with the same language i loved it again. turns out i always loved programming, what i didn't like was the corporate work environment, 9-5, using CASE tools (remember those?) on windows, maybe the feeling of inferiority as an untrained intern among everyone else.

what i hate about LLMs is the tediousness, the unreliability, having to try over and over to get a result.

i often work with customers directly, less technical ones too. seeing their satisfaction when i solve a problem for them (no matter how) is what allowed me to keep going doing even non-programming work, though i admit that i prefer programming if that customer interaction is missing. so i too love the art, but i still love problem solving if there is someone who appreciates the solution.

so maybe it wasn't problem solving that was your problem, but the big business environment, and how it constrained your role and didn't give you the feedback you needed?

sublinear2• 4 months ago

That's a lot of words just to say you never liked programming.

You could just as easily make claims about carpentry or cooking because you discovered Ikea or microwave meals. They serve a purpose and technically satisfy the needs of anyone, yet they aren't a good enough solution for anything important. That's where we're at with this tech.

ctoth2• 4 months ago

I'm building a Klatt-style formant speech synthesizer targeting behavioral compatibility with a specific commercial synthesizer. The architecture is driven by hundreds of academic papers, uses declarative YAML with CEL expressions for phased rule execution, and every parameter is citation-backed to specific phonetics research[0].

Nobody is selling this off a shelf. The market for "Eloquence-compatible formant synthesizer with a citation-backed parameter space" is approximately me.

I could not have built this without AI coding tools, and I've been a professional developer for 15+ years. I wrote the specs, I chose the architecture, I read the papers, I know what the output needs to sound like. The sheer surface area of translating hundreds of papers worth of acoustic phonetics into a working runtime would have taken me years solo. With Claude Code it's taken months, and I'm still the one catching when it misinterprets a Klatt coefficient or botches a formant transition rule, because you have to actually know the domain to do that.

Reducing what you do not understand to "Ikea or microwave meals?" Because you don't like it? or aren't familiar with it? Is saying a thing about you. Not about people who know how to use the tools.

[0] https://github.com/ctoth/Qlatt/

zurtri• 4 months ago

I'm the same, it's about the "Act of Creation".

possiblydrunk• 4 months ago

Fair assessment, but you seem to love "creating" rather than "programming", not that there's anything wrong with that! Pondering the merits of AI has made me realize the opposite -- I love the process and challenge of creating (the programming) even more than the final product. AI is undoubtedly helpful, but when it solves my problem for me I'm not nearly as satisfied? as if I'd solved it myself. It's like copy-pasting an answer from StackOverflow, but for a whole program. I doubt my employer will share my feelings, and I'll have to use increasingly more AI to keep up the productivity.

raxxorraxor• 4 months ago

I heavily use AI for coding, but you cannot skip the understanding part. At some point it falls apart and then you need someone to wade through the results. If you understand the architecture, server and service configuration and how they interact, you can use AI to be quite productive. But you still need the deep level understanding.

DiscourseFan• 4 months ago

When a code doesn't compile, it doesn't kill anyone. But if a Waymo suddenly veers off the road, it creates a real threat. Waymos had to be safer than real human drivers for people to begin to trust them. Coding tools did not have to be better than humans for them to be adopted first. Its entirely possible for a human to make a catastrophic error. I imagine in the future, it will be more likely that a human makes such errors, just like its more likely that a human will make more errors driving a car.

Verdex• 4 months ago

My understanding is that waymo has gone on the record to say that they have human operators that remotely drive the vehicle in scenarios where their automated system is confused.

Which I assert is semantically equivalent to saying: Human drivers (even when operating at the diminished capacity of not even being present in the car) are less likely to make errors driving a car than AIs.

krupan7• 4 months ago

This is getting off topic but they did not say the remote humans drive the cars. The cars always drive themselves, the remote humans provide guidance when the car is not confident in any of the decisions it could make. The humans define a new route or tell the car it's ok to proceed forward

post-it• 4 months ago

But this doesn't really resemble coding. An act that requires a lot of thinking and writing long detailed code.

Does it? It did in the past. Now it doesn't. Maybe "add a button to display a colour selector" really is the canonical way to code that feature, and the 100+ lines of generated code are just a machine language artifact like binary.

But it robs me of the part that’s best for the soul. Figuring out how this works for me, finding the clever fix or conversion and getting it working. My job went from connecting these two things being the hard and reward part, to just mopping up how poorly they’ve been connected.

Skill issue. Two nights ago, I used Claude to write an iOS app to convert Live Photos into gifs. No other app does it well. I'm going to publish it as my first app. I wouldn't have bothered to do it without AI, and my soul feels a lot better with it.

watzon• 4 months ago

I think this article makes a valid point. However, if AI coding is considered gambling, then being a project manager overseeing multiple developers could also be seen as a form of gambling to a certain degree. In reality, there isn't much difference between the two. AI models are non-deterministic, and humans are also non-deterministic. You could assign the same task to two different developers and end up with entirely different results.

MeetingsBrowser5• 4 months ago

You (in theory) have more control over the quality of the team you are managing, than the quality of the models you are using.

And the quality of code models puts out is, in general, well below the average output of a professional developer.

It is however much faster, which makes the gambling loop feel better. Buying and holding a stock for a few months doesn't feel the same as playing a slot machine.

PaulHoule2• 4 months ago

One difference is those developers are moral subjects who feel bad if they screw up whereas a computer is not a moral subject and can never be held accountable.

https://simonwillison.net/2025/Feb/3/a-computer-can-never-be...

est31• 4 months ago

You have a lot of control over LLM quality. There is different models available. Even with different effort settings of those models you have different outcomes.

E.g. look at the "SWE-Bench Pro (public)" heading in this page: https://openai.com/index/introducing-gpt-5-4/ , showing reasoning efforts from none to high.

Of course, they don't learn like humans so you can't do the trick of hiring someone less senior but with great potential and then mentor them. Instead it's more of an up front price you have to pay. The top models at the highest settings obviously form a ceiling though.

tossandthrow7• 4 months ago

What theory is that?

My experience is the absolute opposite. I am much more in control of quality with Ai agents.

I am never letting junior to midlevels into my team again.

In fact, I am not sure I will allow any form of manual programming in a year or so.

underlipton• 4 months ago

As a human, you generally have the opportunity make decent headway in understanding the other humans that you're working with and adjusting your instructions to better anticipate the outputs that they'll return to you. This is almost impossible with AI because of a combination of several factors:

You are not an AI and do not know how an AI "thinks".
Even if you come to be able to anticipate an AI's output, you will be undermined by the constant and uncontrollable update schedule imposed on you by AI platforms. Humans only make drastic changes like this under uncommon circumstances, like when they're going through large changes in their life, not as a matter of course.
However, without this update schedule, problems that were once intractable will likely stay so forever. Humans, on the other hand, can grow without becoming completely unpredictable.

It's a Catch-22. AI is way closer to gambling.

m00x• 4 months ago

AI coding is gambling on slot machines, managing developers is betting on race horses.

bazmattaz• 4 months ago

Dam this is so accurate. As a project manager turned product manager this is so true. You need to estimate a project based on the “pedigree” of your engineers

SkyPuncher3• 4 months ago

Only if your AI coding approach is the slot machine approach.

I've ended up with a process that produces very, very high quality outputs. Often needing little to no correct from me.

I think of it like an Age of Empires map. If you go into battle surrounded by undiscovered parts of the map, you're in for a rude surprise. Winning a battle means having clarity on both the battle itself and risks next to the battle.

edu• 4 months ago

Great analogy, I’m saving it!

cko• 4 months ago

What is it with you guys and stallions?

munk-a4• 4 months ago

Would it make us uncomfortable to reword the above example to

AI coding is gambling on slot machines, managing developers is gambling on the stock market.

Because I feel like that is a much more apt analogy.

QuantumGood• 4 months ago

Framing anything with a common blanket concept usually fails to apply the same framing to related areas. A lot of things include some gambling, you need to compare how it was also 'gambling' before, and how 'not using AI' is also 'gambling', etc.

As @m00x points out "coding is gambling on slot machines, managing developers is betting on race horses."

runarberg• 4 months ago

I don‘t think so. A project manager can give feedback, train their staff, etc. An AI coding model is all you get, and you have to wait until your provider trains a new model before you might see an improvement.

yoyohello132• 4 months ago

I think the addiction angle seems to make AI coding more similar to gambling. Some people seem to be disturbingly addicted to agentic coding. Much more so than traditional programming. To the point of doing destructive things like waking up in the middle of the night to check agents. Or giving an agent access to their bank account.

deadbabe2• 4 months ago

I know at least one case where the obsession with agents ruined a marriage.

shepherdjerred• 4 months ago

I mean, it’s just so fun. Claude wrote a native macOS app for me today.

I don’t think I’d describe my behavior as destructive though

rvz2• 4 months ago

AI models are non-deterministic, and humans are also non-deterministic. You could assign the same task to two different developers and end up with entirely different results.

Except, one can explain themselves (humans) and their actions can be held to account in the case of any legal issue whereas an AI cannot; making such an entity completely unsuitable for high risk situations.

This typical AI booster comparison has got to stop.

tossandthrow7• 4 months ago

Love that you needed to make it clear that it is humans that can explain themselves..

Employees can only be held accountable with severe malice.

There is a good chance that the person actually responsible (eg. The ceo or someone delegated to be responsible) will soon prefer to have AIs do the work as their quality can be quantified.

thunky2• 4 months ago

Except, one can explain themselves (humans) and their actions can be held to account in the case of any legal issue whereas an AI cannot

You "own" the software it creates which means you're responsible for it. If you use AI to commit crimes you'll go to jail, not the AI.

ares623• 4 months ago

This must be it. So many of our colleagues have been burnt by bad coworkers that they would rather burn everything down than spend another day working with them.

krupan7• 4 months ago

I ssk an AI to play hangman with me and looked at it's reasoning. It didn't just pick a secret word and play a straightforward game of hangman. It continually adjusted the secret word based on the letters I guessed, providing me the "perfect" game of hangman. Not too many of my guesses were "right" and not too many "wrong" and I after a little struggle and almost losing, I won in the end.

It wasn't a real game of hangman, it was flat out manipulation, engagement farming. Do you think it's possible that AI does that in any other situations?

lcampbell• 4 months ago

The reasoning generally isn't kept in the context, so after choosing the secret word in the first reasoning block, the LLM will have completely forgotten it in the second and subsequent requests.

So, it technically didn't change the secret word so much as it was trying to infer what its own secret word might have been, based on your guesses.

ModernMech2• 4 months ago

That says more about how you see developers than whether or not managers are in a sense gamblers.

ChiefTinkeer• 4 months ago

I think this is a very good point. We have a natural bias toward human output as there is an illusion of full control - in reality even just from a solo dev perspective you've still got a load of hidden illogical persuasions that are influencing your code and how you approach a problem. AI has its own biases that come out of the nature its training on large unknowable data sets, but I'd argue the 'black box' thinking that comes out that isn't too different to the black box of the human mind. That's not at all to say that AI isn't worse (even if quicker) than top developer talent today writing handwritten code - just that the barrier to getting that level of quality isn't as insurmountable as it might appear.

Spooky23• 4 months ago

It absolutely is. I did some consulting work for an environment where they have to churn out code to meet certain unchanging schedules, usually you can dumb down the process to make it more deterministic.

These guys had to manage very complex calculation engine based on we’ll just let it changes every year had to be correct had to be delivered by a certain date every year.

They had an army (100-200 people depending on various factors) of marginally skilled coding drones that were able to turn out the Java, COBOL or whatever it was predictably on that schedule without necessarily understanding any of the big picture or have any having any hope of so. Basically a software factory. There was about a dozen people who actually understood everything.

nkrisc• 4 months ago

Only if you consider generative AI and human beings to be effectively equivalent.

Being a project manager is more or less something humans have been doing since the dawn of time.

Generative AI takes money as input and gives some output. If you don’t like the output, more money goes in. It’s far more akin to gambling than organizing human labor.

fuzzythinker• 4 months ago

No. Addiction for the mass comes from instant gratification. The outcome from developers takes too long for instant gratification to take into effect. So overseeing developers is not a form of gambling.

visaint2• 4 months ago

Yes, but the gambling comes from the speed, the obsession, the lack of constraint, the credits spent, the just one more pull and maybe I’ll get what I want drive that captures you and keeps you going way past what you planned or should.

ryoshu• 4 months ago

Like video gaming, but similar.

PaulHoule2• 4 months ago

I think somebody like Nate Silver might say “everything is gambling” if you really pressed them.

A big theme of software development for me has been finishing things other people couldn’t finish and the key to that is “control variance and the mean will take care of itself”

Alternately the junior dev thinks he has a mean of 5 min but the variance is really 5 weeks. The senior dev has mean of 5 hours and a variance of 5 hours.

zzzeek2• 4 months ago

coding with an LLM works if the model you are following is: you have the role of architect and/or senior developer, and you have the smartest junior programmer in the world working for you. You watch everything it does, check its conclusions, challenge it, call it out on things it didnt get quite right

it's really extremely similar to working with a junior programmer

so in this post, where does this go wrong?

I am not your average developer. I’ve never worked on large teams and I’ve barely started a project from scratch. The internet is filled with code and ideas, most of it freely available for you to fork and change.

Because this describes a cut-and-paster, not a software architect. Hence the LLM is a gambling machine for someone like this since they lack the wisdom to really know how to do things.

There's of course a huge issue which is that how are we going to get more senior/architect programmers in the pipeline if everyone junior is also doing everything with LLMs now. I can't answer that and this might be the asteroid that wipes out the dinosaurs....but in the meantime, if you DO know how to write from scratch and have some experience managing teams of programmers, the LLMs are super useful.

bigstrat20038• 4 months ago

it's really extremely similar to working with a junior programmer

Right, which is why LLMs aren't useful if you actually know what you're doing. It's a drain on your time to have to carefully check everything a junior writes, but you do it because he will learn and eventually return on that investment. With an LLM, there is no such long term payoff.

zzzeek2• 4 months ago

It's nuclear powered autocomplete . You can have it spit out pages of boilerplate chainsaw tests for kunernetes , fix sql queries the way you tell it to, it's enormously helpful for automating all kinds of things you previously have typed by hand 4000 times. I've put many changes from LLMs into production and there is no issue. An actual junior programmer makes way more mistakes in my experience.

luckydata• 4 months ago

it's gambling until you learn how to set up proper harnesses then it just becomes normal administration. It's no different than running a team, humans make mistakes too, that's why we have CI pipelines, automated testing etc... AI assisted coding "JUST" requires you to be extra good at that part of the job.

NickNaraghi• 4 months ago

It's only "gambling" for now...

The odds of success feel like gambling. 60%, or 40%, or worse. This is downstream of model quality.

Soon, 80%, 95%, 99%, 99.99%. Then, it won't be "gambling" anymore.

krupan7• 4 months ago

Have you ever heard of an extrapolation like that being incorrect?

7777332215• 4 months ago

The problem with AI coding is that you no longer own the foundational tools.

rsoto24• 4 months ago

What?? Surely once these companies have locked in their Claude workflows claude wouldn't somehow raise the price. Or steal inventions like Amazon does. Surely.

quikoa• 4 months ago

Surely they aren't selling subscriptions at a loss to gain market share either.

spacechild1• 4 months ago

Actually, this is one of my biggest concerns about agentic coding because I don't really feel comfortable putting myself in the hands of a few big companies. After all, that's why I'm mostly using open source tools!

The idea that I would only be able to work with an internet connection and a subscription to a big LLM provider is not very appealing to me. And I'm not even talking about the ethical concerns...

anal_reactor• 4 months ago

An idea just occurred to me: why not tell AI to code in Coq? AFAIK the selling point of that language is that if it compiles, then it's guaranteed to work. It's just that it's PITA to write code in Coq, but AI won't get annoyed and quit.

FL4TLiN3• 4 months ago

In my corner of the world, average software developers at Tokyo companies, not that many people are actually using Claude Code for their day-to-day work yet. Their employers have rolled it out and actively encourage adoption, but nobody wants to change how they work.

This probably won't surprise anyone familiar with Japanese corporate culture: external pressure to boost productivity just doesn't land the same way here. People nod, and then keep doing what they've always done.

It's a strange scene to witness, but honestly, I'm grateful for it. I've also been watching plenty of developers elsewhere get their spirits genuinely crushed by coding agents, burning out chasing the slot machine the author describes. So for now, I'm thankful I still get to see this pastoral little landscape where people just... write their own code.

cyanydeez2• 4 months ago

y/eah, I here all the podcasters describing how they're building things; and when it comes to something like translating a package from one language to another and that package has tests, it's a meandering but fruitful adventure. Because, of course, when you can sane tests you can always loop through. I did this with a package dependency I had, and it got 90% of the way there, but then one of the tests I expanded upon just refused. It ended up seeming like it was just a failed dependency.

But where there are no tests, and you're the one defining whats correct, you're definitely encroaching on the slot machine hoping it'll spit out something faster than you could do it yourself.

Then there's some vague unease in whether spending the time to prompt will actuall result in a properly integrated software in a large existing code base with idiosyncratic code use.

Overall, I don't see the ROI business gets from forcing people into these tools; however, as an individual, it's definitely worth understanding what they can do. Mostly, I see the efficient copy/past/find/replace of existing code to be very good.

hodder• 4 months ago

Depending on anyone for anything is gambling.

wolandomny• 4 months ago

Obviously the following isn't a completely original take, but it's worth stating that AI coding is just a fundamentally different job than "traditional" or "manual" coding. The previous job was to spec something out to a comfortable degree without spending all of your time on a spec when there are so many unknowns that will come up during the engineering stage. Then, the job was to engineer at a snail's pace (compared to today) and adjust the spec.

Now, the job is to nail the spec and test HARD against that spec. Let the AI develop it and question it along the way to make sure it's not repeating itself all over the place (even this I'm sure is super necessary anymore...). Find a process that helps you feel comfortable doing this and you can get the engineering part done at lightning speed.

Both jobs are scary in different ways. I find this way more fun, however.

dragonwriter• 4 months ago

I don’t know that that's true. Iterating on the spec and development together as in traditional agile development seems to work well with AI. The pace is different (an iteration might be hours instead of weeks) and the human role is mostly as a combined architect/analyst/lead dev/product owner, but the issue that real requirements are rarely clear before software hits the hands of users doesn't go away just because an AI wiped more of the code.

vermilingua• 4 months ago

Not only is it gambling, it has the full force of the industry that built the attention market behind it. I find it extremely hard to believe that these tools have not been optimised to keep developers prompting the same way tiktok keeps people scrolling.

mpalmer2• 4 months ago

I do not think "AI coding" - as distinct from the human who drives it - is gambling. More like a delayed footgun for the uneducated. I don't mean that disparagingly, but I do mean it literally.

    I’ve certainly been spending more time coding. But is it because it’s making me more efficient and smarter or is it because I’m just gambling on what I want to see?

Is this really a difficult question to answer for oneself? If you can't tell if you're learning anything, or getting more confident describing what you want, I would suggest that you cannot be thinking that deeply about the code you're producing.

    Am I just pulling the lever until I reach jackpot?

And even then, will you know you've won?

At the very least, a gambler knows when they have hit jackpot. Here, you start off assuming you've won the jackpot every time, and maybe there'll be an unpleasant surprise down the line. Maybe that's still gambling, but it's pretty backwards.

darrinm• 4 months ago

I hear it a lot but this gambling analogy breaks when you look at actual outcomes. If you went to Vegas and after a few pulls on a one-armed bandit could _reliably_ walk away with the jackpot we wouldn’t even call it gambling anymore.

cjlm• 4 months ago

Totally agree, wrote something similar last year: https://cjlm.ca/posts/it-feels-like-gambling/

cadamsdotcom• 4 months ago

My job went from connecting these two things being the hard and reward part, to just mopping up how poorly they’ve been connected.

That’s only half of the transition.

The other half - and when you know you’ve made it through the “AI sux” phase - is when you learn to automate the mopping up. Give the agent the info it needs to know if it did good work - and if it didn’t do good work, give it information so it knows what to fix. Trust that it wants to fix those things. Automate how that info is provided (using code!) and suddenly you are out of the loop. The amount of code needed is surprisingly small and your agent can write it! Hook a few hundred lines of script up to your harness at key moments, and you will never see dumb AI mistakes again (because it fixed them before presenting the work to you, because your script told it about the mistakes while you were off doing something else)

Think of it like linting but far more advanced - your script can walk the code AST and assess anything, or use regex - your agent will make that call when you ask for the script. If the script has an exit code of 2, stderr is shown to the agent! So you (via your script) can print to stderr what the agent did wrong - what line, what file, wha mistake.

It’s what I do every day and it works (200k LOC codebase, 99.5% AI-coded) - there’s info and ideas here: https://codeleash.dev/docs/code-quality-checks

This is just another technique to engineer quality outcomes; you’re just working from a different starting point.

selixe_• 4 months ago

I think "gambling" is a bit too strong, but there is a real shift in how we evaluate correctness. With traditional coding, you reason step by step and with AI-assisted code, you're often validating outputs after the fact.

The risk isn't randomness per se it's over trusting something that looks correct. The skill ceiling is moving from "can you write it" to "can you reliably verify it"

lll-o-lll• 4 months ago

But “reliably verify it” was always the critical difference between high and low quality engineering efforts.

Good programmers might have made things that “performed well”, and had “few bugs”, without this step, but it was not robust to changes over time. If we end up in a place where every project has solid automated verification, perhaps things get better overall.

fittingopposite• 4 months ago

Background image makes the website fairly hard/unpleasant to read (in mobile view)

wolttam• 4 months ago

I used to write code by hand.

AI has removed some of the tedium, and freed up more of my bandwidth to think about the problems I’m trying to solve and what the actual best ways to solve those problems are.

Only once I have a good feel for the problem I am solving do I go to the AI for help implementing.

My style of prompting usually leads to code that is very close to what I would have manually typed. I review it and tweak it until it is effectively identical to what I would have typed.

The speed up is significant. YMMV.

batuhandumani• 4 months ago

Life is a gamble

apf6• 4 months ago

Hiring a human is gambling too.

macinjosh• 4 months ago

I disagree. I have a successful software product that I vibe coded using claude code starting last June. It does something novel and useful that wasn't yet offered on the App Store or any app on Android.

I am not going to say what it is because all of the AI haters will immediately flock to leave it bad reviews and overwhelm my support systems with bad faith requests (something that has already happened).

I've been writing software for 25 years, I know what I am doing. Every bug I shipped was my fault either because I didn't test well enough or I did not possess enough platform knowledge to know myself the right way to do things. "Unknown unknowns"

But I have also learned better ways to do things and fixed every bug using AI tools. I don't read the code. I may scan it to gain context and then tweak a single value myself, but beyond that I don't write or read code anymore.

Its not a magical few shot prompt then reap profits machine. I just feel like a solopreneur ditch digger who just got a lease on a new CAT excavator. I can get work done faster I can also do damage faster if I am not careful.

Beyond this concern,

6thbit2• 4 months ago

Come on now. I pull the slot machine every time I ask my coworker Digbert to work on a ticket.

Will Digbert be able to handle it or will he pretend to handle it? Or will he handle it in a way that it will break again in six weeks and will evolve into his full time job for a year?

If this is gambling, middle management has been gambling for too long.

muwtyhg• 4 months ago

You know there is a difference between a tool being unable to predictably accomplish its task, and asking employees to do work and them failing to do so. The accountability alone is leagues apart.

6thbit2• 4 months ago

Digbert is also unable to predictably accomplish the task.

I'm not arguing against accountability, only against gambling.

abcde666777• 4 months ago

Bespoke suits are still a thing. Meaning where the highest quality is desired or valued, things still get handmade, and the rest of the time it happens on a factory line.

I suppose what's happening with software development is we're exploring where the line between the two is going to land. It's pretty clear that something like a simple and generic website can be reliably vibecoded, but on the other extreme I wouldn't expect the software for something like a space shuttle to be vibe coded due to the stringent safety requirements.

asaiacai• 4 months ago

it's the perfect drug. You don't know how to code something up. Ask AI to implement it. It's broken? Ask AI to fix it for you. Will people become unable to fix things without it?

QuiEgo• 4 months ago

If I were going to make a gambling analogy, I'd imagine a casino game as follows: draw a card from a standard playing card deck. If it's a spade you lose. Otherwise you win.

For any one hand you may win or lose, but on average you should still take the "gamble" every time, because the odds are so good you'll win. That's what using AI is like right now.

This is a new state of things - a year ago, the analogy would have been reversed.

AbstractH24• 4 months ago

To an extent entrusting anyone to do something other than yourself is gambling.

But you can't survive alone on an island. So you need to determine where to make gambles and where not.

visaint2• 4 months ago

This really blew up and I'm just now seeing it (The Author Vi Saint). I have a lot of replies to sift through, most of them here. Thank you to everyone who read my piece, even if you disagree or read too much into it.

AI coding is gambling

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