←back to thread

214 points Brajeshwar | 2 comments | | HN request time: 0s | source
Show context
yodsanklai ◴[] No.45087351[source]
Seems about right for me (older developer at a big tech company). But we need to define what it means that the code is AI-generated. In my case, I typically know how I want the code to look like, and I'm writing a prompt to tell the agent to do it. The AI doesn't solve any problem, it just does the typing and helps with syntax. I'm not even sure I'm ultimately more productive.
replies(6): >>45087633 #>>45087699 #>>45087883 #>>45089870 #>>45090395 #>>45090712 #
danielvaughn ◴[] No.45087699[source]
Yeah I’m still not more productive. Maybe 10% more. But it alleviates a lot of mental energy, which is very nice at the age of 40.
replies(9): >>45088209 #>>45088219 #>>45088793 #>>45089316 #>>45089574 #>>45090610 #>>45091064 #>>45091142 #>>45091665 #
darkwater ◴[] No.45090610[source]
For all the folks on the "reduce mental burden", "reduce cognitive load" train, are you all aware that this basically means you are exercising less your brain day in and day out, and in the end you will forget how to do things? You will learn how to guide an AI agent, but until the day an AI agent is perfect (and we don't know if we will ever see that day), you are just losing inch by inch your ability to actually understand what the agent is writing and what is going on.

I'm pretty radical on this topic but for me cognitive load is good, you are making your neurons work and keep synapses in place where they matter (at least for your job). I totally accept writing down doc or howto to make doing some action in future easier and reduce that cognitive load, but using AI agent IMO is like going to bike in the mountain with an electrical bike.

Yes, you keep seeing the wonderful vistas but you are not really training your legs.

replies(9): >>45090697 #>>45090950 #>>45091057 #>>45091581 #>>45091689 #>>45092550 #>>45092744 #>>45093049 #>>45093902 #
1. jvanderbot ◴[] No.45091057[source]
My current pattern is to manually craft during the first half of the day when I enjoy that, and during the second half when I'd be normally burnt on hard thought and not quite up for another coffee, pomodoro, theanine deep dive, I can start tackling tests, exploratory data analysis, or small bugs, and these tasks are 50% or more LLM.

So yeah, 30%-50% seems right, but it's not like I lost any part of my job that I love.

replies(1): >>45091452 #
2. darkwater ◴[] No.45091452[source]
That's a good approach, I like it and probably adopt it as well. I'm not dogmatically against LLMs, I just need we should think about possible consequences, and not thinking about them like a holy grail of everything.