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Comment by liszper | Hacker News Reader

With all due respect, you sound like someone who is just getting familiar with these tools. 100 more hours spent with AI coding and you will be much more productive. Coding with AI is a slightly different skill from coding, similar how managing software engineers is different from writing software.

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liszper:

> most SWE folks still have no idea how big the difference is between the coding agents they tried a year ago and declared as useless and chatgpt 5 paired with Codex or Cursor today

Also liszper: oh, you tried the current approach and don’t agree with me? Well you just don’t know what you are doing.

Funnily enough the same kind of approach you get from Lisp advocates and the more annoying faction of Linux advocacy (which isn't as prevalent these days, it seems)

I'm also a lisper, yes.

> the same kind of approach you get from Lisp

In what way? Lisp (Common Lisp) is the most stable and unchanging language out there. If you learned it anytime after the late 80s, you still know it, and will know it until the end of time. Meanwhile, here, we hear that "a year ago" is so much time that everything changed (for the better, of course).

Or is it about needing some serious time investment to get comfortable with Lisp? Even then, once you do spend enough time that s-exprs stop being a problem, that's it; there's nothing else to be getting comfortable with, and certainly, you won't need to relearn any of that a year into the future.

I don't think AI coding and Lisp are comparable, even considering just the tone of messages on the topic (as far as I can see, "smug lisp weenies" are a thing of the ancient past).

Yes, exactly. Learning new things is hard. Personally it took me about 200 hours to get started, and since then ~2500 hours to get familiar with the advanced techniques, and now I'm very happy with the results, managing extremely large codebases with LLM in production.

For context before that I had ~15 years of experience coding the traditional way.

How many users is production and how large is extremely large.

200k DAU, 7 million registered, ~50 microservices, large monorepo

You have 50 microservices for 200k daily users?

Let me guess this has something to do with AI?

No, It has something to do with experience. The system is highly integrated to other platforms and have to stay afloat during burst loads.

.. what is this thing and can we see it?

you can OSINT me pretty easily, not going to post it here for the sake of anonymity against crawlers who train models on our conversations. today's HN comments are tomorrow's coding LLMs

Has anyone else noticed the extreme dichotomy of developers using AI agents? Either AI agents essentially don't work, or they are apparently running legions of agents to produce some nebulous gigantic estate.

I think the crucial difference is that I do actually see evidence (ie the codebase) posted sometimes for the former, the latter could well be entirely mythos -- a 24 day old account evangelizing for the legion of agents story does kind of fit the theme.

You should write a blog post about your learnings. If you could even give some high level highlights here that’d be really helpful.

Lol, what is up with everyone assuming there's no learning curve to these things? If you applied this argument to literally any other tool you would be laughed at, for good reason.

Probably because "there's no learning curve they are just magic tools" is how they are marketed and how our managers are expecting them to work

Sure, but people are allowed to have their own opinions too.

> Be kind. Don't be snarky. Converse curiously; don't cross-examine. Edit out swipes.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

I'm starting to kind of dig C.C. but you're right, it definitely feels like a very confident, very ambitious high schooler level developer with infinite energy. You really have to give it very small tasks and be constantly steering its direction. At the end of the day, I'm not sure I'm really saving that much time coaching Claude to do the job right vs. just writing the code myself, but it's definitely a neat trick.

The difference from an actual junior developer, of course, is that the human junior developer learns from his mistakes and gets better, but Claude seems to be stuck at the level of expertise of its model, and you have to wait for the model to improve before Claude improves.

The thing I am calling BS on is that there's much productivity gain in giving it very small tasks and constantly steering its direction. For 80% of code, I'm faster than it if that's what I have to do. For debugging? For telling it to integrate a new tool? Port my legacy build system to something better? It's great at that, removes some important barriers to entry.

Bingo. All my experience is on Linux, and I've never written anything for Windows. So recently when I needed to port a small C program to Windows, I told ChatGPT "Hey, port this to Windows for me". I wouldn't trust the result, I'd rewrite it myself, but it let me find out which Win32 API functions I'd be calling, and why I'd be calling them, faster than searching MSDN would have done.

I think it has more to do with the kind of software I write and their requirements then it has to do with spending more time with this current tool. For some things it's great, but it's been a net productivity loss for me on my core coding responsibilities.

ah, they are holding it wrong.

I am always so skeptical of this style of response. Because if it takes hundreds of hours to learn to use something, how can it really be the silver bullet everyone was claiming earlier? Surely they were all in the midst of the 100 hours. And what else could we do if we spent 100 hours learning something? It's a lot of time, a huge investment, all on faith that things will get better.

How many hours do you have mastering git or your IDE or your library of choice for UX?

Then, it's the job of someone else to use these tools, not developers

I agree with your point. I think this is the reason why most developers still don't get it, because AI coding ultimately requires a "higher level" methodology.

"Hacker culture never took root in the 'AI' gold rush because the LLM 'coders' saw themselves not as hackers and explorers, but as temporarily understaffed middle-managers." [0]

This, this is you. This is the entire charade. It seems poetic somehow.

[0]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45123094

I see myself as a hacker.

By your own exposition, you aren’t a hacker.

hackers can also cook and not become a chef

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