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Comment by ath3nd | Hacker News Reader

Why though. Why should we do that?

If AI is so groundbreaking, why do we have to have guides and jump through 3000 hoops just so we can make it work?

Because now your manager will measure on LOCs against other engineers again and it's only software engineers worrying about complexity, maintainability, and, in summary, the health of the very creature it's going to pay your salary.

This is the new world we live in. Anyone who actually likes coding should seriously look for other venues because this industry is for other type of people now.

I use AI in my job. I went from tolerable (not doing anything fancy) to unbearable.

I'm actually looking to become a council employee with a boring job and code my own stuff, because if this is what I have to do moving forward, I rather go back to non-coding jobs.

i strongly disagree with this - if anything, using AI to code real production code in real complex codebase is MORE technical than just writing software.

Staff/Principal engineers already spend a lot more time designing systems than writing code. They care a lot about complexity, maintainability, and good architecture.

The best people I know who have been using these techniques are former CTOs, former core Kubernetes contributors, have built platforms for CRDTs at scale, and many other HIGHLY technical pursuits.

This is actually where the "myth" of the 10x engineer comes from - there do exist such people and they always could do more than the rest of us ... because they knew what to build. It's not 10K lines of code, it's _the right_ 10K lines of code. Whether using LLMs or LLVM to produce bytes the bytes produced are not the "τέχνη".

That said, I don't think it takes MORE τέχνη to use the machine, merely a distinct ἐμπειρία. That said, both ἐμπειρία and τέχνη aren't σοφία.

why do we have guides and lessons on how to use a chainsaw when we can hack the tree with an axe?

The chainsaw doesn't sometimes chop off your arm when you are using it correctly.

If you swing an axe with a lack of hand eye coordination you don't think it's possible to seriously injure yourself?

Was the axe or the chainsaw designed in such a way that guarantees that it will definitely miss the log and hit your hand fair amount of the times you use it? If it were, would you still use it? Yes, these hand tools are dangerous, but they were not designed so that it would probably cut off your hand even 1% of the time. "Accidents happen" and "AI slop" are not even remotely the same.

So then with "AI" we're taking a tool that is known to "hallucinate", and not infrequently. So let's put this thing in charge of whatever-the-fuck we can?

I have no doubt "AI" will someday be embedded inside a "smart chainsaw", because we as humans are far more stupid than we think we are.

if nuclear power is so much better than coal, why do we need to learn how to safely operate a reactor just to make it work? Coal is so much easier

Even if we had perfectly human-level AI it'd still need management, just like human workers do, and turns out effective management is actually nontrivial.

I don't want to effectively manage the idiot box

I want to do the work

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