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AI tooling must be disclosed for contributions

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728 points freetonik | 5 comments | 21 Aug 25 18:49 UTC | HN request time: 0.628s | source
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thallavajhula ◴[21 Aug 25 19:27 UTC] No.44976973[source]▶
I’m loving today. HN’s front page is filled with some good sources today. No nonsense sensationalism or preaching AI doom, but more realistic experiences.

I’ve completely turned off AI assist on my personal computer and only use AI assist sparingly on my work computer. It is so bad at compound work. AI assist is great at atomic work. The rest should be handled by humans and use AI wisely. It all boils down back to human intelligence. AI is only as smart as the human handling it. That’s the bottom line.

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tick_tock_tick ◴[21 Aug 25 19:44 UTC] No.44977158[source]▶
> AI is only as smart as the human handling it.

I think I'm slowly coming around to this viewpoint too. I really just couldn't understand how so many people were having widely different experiences. AI isn't magic; how could I have expected all the people I've worked with who struggle to explain stuff to team members, who have near perfect context, to manage to get anything valuable across to an AI?

I was original pretty optimistic that AI would allow most engineers to operate at a higher level but it really seems like instead it's going to massively exacerbate the difference between an ok engineer and a great engineer. Not really sure how I feel about that yet but at-least I understand now why some people think the stuff is useless.

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jerf ◴[21 Aug 25 20:00 UTC] No.44977339[source]▶
I've been struggling to apply AI on any large scale at work. I was beginning to wonder if it was me.

But then my wife sort of handed me a project that previously I would have just said no to, a particular Android app for the family. I have instances of all the various Android technologies under my belt, that is, I've used GUI toolkits, I've used general purpose programming languages, I've used databases, etc, but with the possible exception of SQLite (which even that is accessed through an ORM), I don't know any of the specific technologies involved with Android now. I have never used Kotlin; I've got enough experience that I can pretty much piece it together when I'm reading it but I can't write it. Never used the Android UI toolkit, services, permissions, media APIs, ORMs, build system, etc.

I know from many previous experiences that A: I could definitely learn how to do this but B: it would be a many-week project and in the end I wouldn't really be able to leverage any of the Android knowledge I would get for much else.

So I figured this was a good chance to take this stuff for a spin in a really hard way.

I'm about eight hours in and nearly done enough for the family; I need about another 2 hours to hit that mark, maybe 4 to really polish it. Probably another 8-12 hours and I'd have it brushed up to a rough commercial product level for a simple, single-purpose app. It's really impressive.

And I'm now convinced it's not just that I'm too old a fogey to pick it up, which is, you know, a bit of a relief.

It's just that it works really well in some domains, and not so much in others. My current work project is working through decades of organically-grown cruft owned by 5 different teams, most of which don't even have a person on them that understands the cruft in question, and trying to pull it all together into one system where it belongs. I've been able to use AI here and there for some stuff that is still pretty impressive, like translating some stuff into psuedocode for my reference, and AI-powered autocomplete is definitely impressive when it correctly guesses the next 10 lines I was going to type effectively letter-for-letter. But I haven't gotten that large-scale win where I just type a tiny prompt in and see the outsized results from it.

I think that's because I'm working in a domain where the code I'm writing is already roughly the size of the prompt I'd have to give, at least in terms of the "payload" of the work I'm trying to do, because of the level of detail and maturity of the code base. There's no single sentence I can type that an AI can essentially decompress into 250 lines of code, pulling in the correct 4 new libraries, and adding it all to the build system the way that Gemini in Android Studio could decompress "I would like to store user settings with a UI to set the user's name, and then display it on the home page".

I think I recommend this approach to anyone who wants to give this approach a fair shake - try it in a language and environment you know nothing about and so aren't tempted to keep taking the wheel. The AI is almost the only tool I have in that environment, certainly the only one for writing code, so I'm forced to really exercise the AI.

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1. thewebguyd ◴[21 Aug 25 20:28 UTC] No.44977662[source]▶
> try it in a language and environment you know nothing about and so aren't tempted to keep taking the wheel.

That's a good insights. Its almost like to use AI tools effectively, one needs to stop caring about the little things you'd get caught up in if you were already familiar and proficient in a stack. Style guidelines, a certain idiomatic way to do things, naming conventions, etc.

A lot like how I've stopped organizing digital files into folders, sub folders etc (along with other content) and now I just just rely on search. Everything is a flat structure, I don't care where its stored or how it's organized as long as I can just search for it, that's what the computer is for, to keep track for me so I don't have to waste time organizing it myself.

Like wise for the code Generative AI produces. I don't need to care about the code itself. As long as its correct, not insecure, and performant, it's fine.

It's not 100% there yet, I still do have to go in and touch the code, but ideally I shouldn't have to, nor should I have to care what the actual code looks like, just the result of it. Let the computer manage that, not me. My role should be the system design and specification, not writing the code.

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2. jimbokun ◴[21 Aug 25 21:01 UTC] No.44978039[source]▶
How do you know the code is correct, isn’t insecure, and performant, without caring about the code?
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3. thewebguyd ◴[21 Aug 25 21:03 UTC] No.44978066[source]▶
Not a solved problem yet, admittedly. Performance can be measured externally, but ideally we'll get to a point where certain criteria can be automatically tested/AI output be checked without manual intervention, or even before the AI actually puts text to editor.
4. ◴[22 Aug 25 01:21 UTC] No.44980137[source]▶
5. ryandrake ◴[22 Aug 25 01:22 UTC] No.44980142[source]▶
> Its almost like to use AI tools effectively, one needs to stop caring about the little things you'd get caught up in if you were already familiar and proficient in a stack. Style guidelines, a certain idiomatic way to do things, naming conventions, etc.

This makes me a little sad. Part of the joy of writing software is expressing yourself through caring about these little things. Stylistic coherence, adhering to consistent naming conventions, aligning code blocks, consistently applying patterns, respecting the way the language and platform's APIs work together rather than fighting it... heck, even tiny things like alphabetizing header declarations. None of these things make the finished product better/faster/more reliable, but all of these demonstrate something about the author: What he believes in. That he is willing to sand, polish and beautify the back of the cabinet that nobody is going to see. As Steve Jobs said:

    "Even though it faces the wall and nobody will ever see it. You’ll know it’s there, so you’re going to use a beautiful piece of wood on the back. For you to sleep well at night, the aesthetic, the quality, has to be carried all the way through."
If you surrender to the AI, you're no longer carrying the aesthetic and quality all the way through. You're abandoning the artistry. You're living with the barf because it works, and because it's much harder to go back and beautify it than it is to build it beautifully from the start.