How AI Tools Are Reshaping the Coding Workforce | Hacker News Reader

How AI Tools Are Reshaping the Coding Workforce

wsj.com

17 pointsbookofjoe14 comments

> “We can get through more [coding] quicker and do more tests and learn quicker,” Lu said. “Like, how much time do you spend debugging because you put the bracket in the wrong place? That’s the sort of time spent that’s unnecessary,” she said.

Pretty much never? Do people actually struggle with that?

The quote is from Yang Lu, the CIO of Coach and Kate Spade owner Tapestry. Based on that quote I'm going to assume the person has never once written computer software or only did it once more than a decade ago. The differentiation of syntax and semantics and compiling vs. debugging is completely absent in that quote.

The same individual also said “We’re training developers to think more from a prompting perspective versus the traditional programming perspective". As if we're all writing device drivers from scratch each time someone needs the styling on an HTML element updated

If it’s a bracket in the wrong place that is a syntax error, sure, that’s easily detected and fixed. A bracket in the wrong place could be a logic error though. If you need examples of misplaced brackets leading to logic bugs just ask ChatGPT.

Years and years ago, some. However, editors which indicate where the matching bracket is are... how old? First one I remember using was in the late 90s, though I'm sure there was an emacs extension for it long before that.

From the stuff they say, I get the impression that a lot of "AI revolutionises programming" people have never used modern development tooling, mind you.

> the CIO of Coach and Kate Spade owner Tapestry about GenAI coding tools.

This is... a weird role to ask about this. Cynically, I would wonder did the author work down a list of people until they found someone willing to give them the quote that they wanted.

If you read through the piece it is filled with unsubstantiated claims. This piece reads much more like an advertisement. Looking at recent publications from the author, most of the work looks like copy writing for business press releases and very little of it appears to be journalism.

AI can do amazing things... and they pick syntax checking as an example? It's almost like people hyping this stuff have no idea what they're talking about.

Am I just using the wrong model and stack?

Because the Copilot story with elixir leaves a lot to be desired.

At best, it will complete the occasional map keys or 2-3 lines here and there.

It very rarely writes a whole function correctly

But that’s it.

It also hasn’t been terribly impressive with NextJS.

I also feel like I’m in another reality. I use cursor and aider every day and now grok also. If I didn’t have years and years of experience I wouldn’t be able to fix shit code it regularly produces or figure it out when it can’t (and that happens a lot).

Also learning-wise I don’t feel like I get much from LLMs versus traditional doc reading and lecture / YouTube watching. So you need the knowledge already also.

I don’t get it. Are people just lying or is there a secret tool that is 100x better than anything I can find?

It definitely depends on what language you’re using and the complexity. But Claude 3.5 and now 3.7 are far superior in my experience for coding tasks. It’s like the difference between ChatGPT 3.5 and 4. It’s far and away more useful and less error-prone for my use cases than other sota models. Cursor + Claude 3.7 in Agent mode is my goto.

Does cursor support vscode type extensions and LSP etc, or am I thinking about this the wrong way?

Yes, I believe it’s a fork of VS Code, so all your favorite extensions and settings are portable. It will even ask to import your VS Code settings on first launch.

Just set it up and it was incredibly smooth. As you said, it's a fork. So it even offered to copy over all my settings/extensions. Let's see how it goes.

> I don’t get it. Are people just lying or is there a secret tool that is 100x better than anything I can find?

They are just lying. They have to sell their product some way and the CEOs and sales people are the perfect suckers because they have no idea what coding is.

https://archive.ph/S4Nn8

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