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Comment by adamddev1 | Hacker News Reader

Honest question: if you didn't enjoy using AI, why not just write code without using AI?

I can't speak for anyone else, but I find AI to be very effective. It can do nearly all coding tasks many OOMs faster than I can. And I'm able to get it to produce high-quality code in the process. Using AI, our codebase actually has less tech debt than any time I can remember. I would be less effective if I wasn't using AI and if I wasn't finding new ways to leverage it.

That doesn't mean I enjoy it using AI. I loved coding. I was really good at it! I spent decades honing my abilities, and while some of those skills are still applicable when working with AI, many are not.

I want my company to be successful, so I work as effectively as I can. Unfortunately, the most effective method of working no longer scratches the creative/craftsman itch that it used to.

Right now I'm mitigating it by taking up creative writing in the evenings. That's difficult and creative in a way that coding used to be. Identifying and solving character and story problems feels like debugging and designing used to. Learning to craft effective prose feels like it used to when I was picking up a new programming language and learning its idioms.

At least in my work, this is sort of like asking "If you don't enjoy CI/CD or the cloud, why not do without it?" It's becoming integrated into every process at this point.

And many employers now require you to code faster, which is only possible with AI tooling. They don't understand that coding faster isn't always better.

How is that enforced though? At any normal workplace they will ask you "how long is this going to take"?

It depends on the management. Mine asks that, but others within my company get "this is going to be done by [DATE]".

And no one argues about unrealistic deadlines?

A few firings of those that do under this job market convince the rest not to.

Job market in Western Europe isn't doing so well right now. Better not make a big deal out of it.

Of course they do. Generally the end result from this is bad - reduced in scope, buggy, and/or unstable. But that's an issue with communication/expectations/management. It'll keep happening either because of politics or the fact that a sub-par deliverable still meets the needs of the overall organization. Until it doesn't.

"How will you be leveraging AI for this task? Why can't the AI do it faster than that?"

These managers literally believe, or are made to pretend, that AI is better than you and faster than you. Any argument to the contrary is a CLM.

Is this related to what business your employer is in? In other words, is their business producing code, or is code written to support some other business?

Or is this just everywhere now?

Everywhere. Normally adding an extra endpoint to the REST API would take a sprint. Now PM expects you to do two. Only way to get that done is a lot of vibe-coding and delivering sub-par results.

I am amazed that anyone ever needed a "sprint" to "add an endpoint".

It usually speaks to the approach you are taking, but I also believe sprint-based planning leads development teams to make work fit into it instead of needing natural time to do it.

Let's remember that all of have probably built full systems over a weekend. What organizational dysfunction has led to us needing a sprint is what needs fixing.

While the tinkerer in me would love to, the pragmatic side of me cannot ignore the speed boost, specially for prototyping programs.

If I write everything by hand, I know I'm leaving velocity or quality on the table. If I use LLMs, I can eventually get good output from it, either by going faster with moderate quality, or by going slower and focusing on better code. But that makes me hate the whole development process. I enjoyed modeling a problem with types and, writing functions that work on these types. Automating that process (either the cognitive work itself, or the typing work to bring ideas to life) takes away most of my fun.

It was being pushed hard by mgmt. Constant pushing, emails with “league tables” of most active users, “why is this taking so long?”.

Hard to not use it

That's so sad. Presumably they won't also be asking, "why is this breaking so often?"

As Eric Schluntz from Anthropic put it (not verbatim): If you're not using AI (I believe he was specifically referring to Vibe Coding), then you are the bottleneck.

That sounds like a good reason not to listen to advice from someone who works for Anthropic.

But the boomer C-suites will listen with awe to these salesmen

That sounds like a good reason not to listen to Eric Schluntz, who both overestimates the ability of LLMs today, but also has a vested interest in it being so.

I am sure Anthropic is full of smart people who are making Claude work well for those who do not want to be vibe coding and who believe that's not productive either.

Yeah, because someone who is trying to sell you something would NEVER try to convince you that you can't possibly hope to compete without buying their product. /s

Token seller saying you should buy more tokens.

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