After a 10 year break, I started programming again using modern AI. Wow.

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mgertner@reddit (OP)

Hey, OP here. I notice that the comments here are pretty critical and I'm curious why. Because people are skeptical that AI will have a major impact on developer productivity? If so, why do you feel that way? It seems like pretty cut-and-dried to me but I'd like to understand the other perspective.

At very least you should check out the part about scraping websites with an LLM. For that particular use case I don't think there's any doubt that generative AI is absolutely revolutionary. I don't know a single developer who enjoys hand-crafting CSS selectors for specific websites...

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dravonk@reddit

It's a rather critical topic as a lot of people have gotten the impression that some managers are overselling the abilities of LLMs and dreaming of getting rid of many employees.

Regarding using LLMs for scraping: that certainly works (summaries are a strength of LLMs), but I would be interested in the long term costs - LLMs require a lot of energy and you are depending on OpenAI or other providers not to increase their price or lower their quality.

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mgertner@reddit (OP)

I was actually pretty surprised at how well LLMs do at getting relevant data out of a webpage based only on a brief description of the fields. The library I'm using actually converts the HTML to a kind of stripped-down Markdown before sending it to the LLM, and it still does a great job! That said, it does seem to work a lot better with larger models since the smaller models, as usual, have a much higher propensity to hallucinate.

Regarding energy consumption, that's a huge topic in its own right. Personally I don't think abstaining from use of specific technologies is the right way to address this. We need to push forward with carbon-neutral energy sources (which thankfully is happening) and probably explore ways to remove carbon from the environment as well.

Regarding dependence on vendors, thankfully there is healthy competition in the space.

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VineyardLabs@reddit

I don’t mean to be harsh, but you’re a person who is not a professional software developer, posting on a sub of people who generally are, openly admitting that you haven’t programmed for 10 years. Why should anyone care what your thoughts on using AI to program are here?

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mgertner@reddit (OP)

Well I have a computer science degree from an Ivy League university and worked as a professional developer for years before starting my first software company 25 years ago. I’m now running my third software company (currently about 50 people). In between I had multiple stints working as a freelance developer. The reason I don’t program much anymore is that I don’t have time.

I’ve also been writing about software development for 25 years. So yeah I think I’m qualified to write about this.

I don’t mean to be harsh but I find the groupthink here to be frankly shocking. It’s an interesting topic and worthy of thoughtful discussion, not knee jerk rejection.

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VineyardLabs@reddit

Im not judging your qualifications, just explaining how this post comes off to the audience that is this sub. There are lots and lots of people who don’t program (or haven’t actively programmed in a long time ) writing blogposts with fancy titles about how they accomplished a relatively basic programming task with LLMs. This might have been interesting in 2021, but in 2024 the signal to noise ratio on this topic is extremely low. There is a common theme (I’m not saying you are doing this) of the people writing these types of posts also advocating that programming is a dying profession that will be wholly displaced by llm-prompters, so people are extra sensitive to the topic.

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mgertner@reddit (OP)

For some reason I took "you're not a developer so why should we care about your opinion?" to be judging my credentials ;-)

In all seriousness, I hear you but there is a huge amount of whitespace between "AI is going to replace all developers" and "anyone who uses AI is not a real developer", which seems to be the gist of most of the comments here. That's just silly because a lot of damn good developers are using AI already because it speeds up their work, especially when it comes to drudgery like writing React boilerplate and the like.

But what I really find baffling is that when I posted a comment saying "help me understand your perspective", it was immediately massively downvoted. I'm not saying anyone here has an obligation to engage with me or anyone else, or even pay the slightest attention to me if they're not interested, but that has more than a whiff of "silence the infidel!" to it. I find that disturbing.

That said, that makes me appreciate all the more you taking the time to respond to me. Cheers!

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lnkprk114@reddit

There's a dozen articles a day taking about how revolutionary generative AI is for programming and then half a dozen posts a day complaining about team members using generate AI inappropriately. It's just a very, very heavily tread on topic.

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fasync@reddit

Plus, there is just no new information in these articles, because there is nothing to tell about this topic.

What OP probably doesn't understand is, that most developers aren't interested in metrics like "productivity". When Management talks about developer "productivity" it often means how much code a developer produces in a specific timeframe. But this is not how Software Development works, this is not how you should measure performance. This is not about producing as much low-quality code as possible. If Bob created two quality pull-requests a day before using AI, this doesn't look impressive for management. But it helped the team and the product. If Bob now creates 10 low-quality pull-requests a day, this looks impressive! AI makes developers 5 times faster!!! But the other developers aren't that excited about it.

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mgertner@reddit (OP)

Did you read my article? It's mostly about the AI features built into Cursor. The reason I posted it here is because I believe (and still strongly believe) that that's a topic of interest to developers.

Regarding productivity I can only say that my experience is completely different. Most of the developers I know, especially senior developers, are delighted if they can get more done in less time.

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tiplinix@reddit

Of course this had to be written on LinkedIn.

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shevy-java@reddit

Is it like medium.com?

Certain websites I need to block totally.

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tiplinix@reddit

Some would argue worst.

The "problem" with Medium is that it attracts people that probably don't have the knowledge or expertise to write on the topic they are writing on. Also, the site is not great when it comes to user experience.

LinkedIn is more like that annoying guy that tells you how great they are when they are not. Lots of pretentious bullshit nonsense.

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Worsebetter@reddit

Linked in is the most cringe humble-brag bullshit. People posting their latest lame achievements hoping to impress…. HR managers maybe?

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lookmeat@reddit

Mostly.. the whole point is that these posts will attract recruiters and people looking for jobs, especially for jobs that are gotten through networking. You need the post to be attractive and popular (which requires it is an article that peers would see as about themselves) but also something that will sell you (so the post needs to be about you). Hence humblegrabasm.

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andrey-r@reddit

So relieving to hear it from others. With my lack of professional confidence LinkedIn takes me down so hard I get all anxious just by tapping on the app icon.

Its the same detrimental effect other social nets have, where bragging is widespread.

But still its the place where you look for jobs 😭 (allegedly) Can't just ditch it alltogether.

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tiplinix@reddit

Don't worry. Nobody sane takes it seriously. Most users just use it to contact other people.

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Wotg33k@reddit

Most senior devs don't take these things seriously. Maybe occasionally I'll come across a medium article that seems worth a damn, but I still start it with distrust. LinkedIn is similar.

Both of these websites seem to want people to be braggadocios and I think websites like them are partially what's wrong with the world.

Medium is known to be giant articles about something and there's no real way to verify that Bob Somebody wrote 4000 words of value or 4000 words of shit unless you know what you're talking about, in which case.. why are you reading a medium article?

LinkedIn is great to make connections with recruiters, but the users of LinkedIn (mostly recruiters) who use it like a social media account are seriously lacking in their abilities as well. They may know the industry and etc, but talented recruiters seem few and far between.

The problem arises when people put on a suit and go to LinkedIn or medium and pretend to be in the industry to try to get into the industry. Because IT is such a popular industry for people to want to be in, it creates this lower layer of nonsense that isn't real and makes both websites feel somewhat like a playground.

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cenkozan@reddit

Yeah everybody dissing on LinkedIn have no idea how useful it is for contractors, recruiters. I always tell devs to use linkedin to connect with all recruiters there and follow up on their job postings. Because all the recruiters are religiously posting and using that platform. So it makes sense for us to use it as well - not use it to engage with stupid posts obviously.

It is up to us to weed out the useless chatter like we normally do. But LinkedIn got so bad of a reputation everybody stays out of it.

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tiplinix@reddit

The feed part is absolute garbage. Nobody sane engages with it. The only real value is being able to contact and keep in touch with people (recruiters, ex-colleagues, etc...) and see where they work(ed).

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cenkozan@reddit

I'd invested in my time to find whoever posted a job on a site, and connected with them on linkedin. Then their recruiter connections started noticing me, then employers, then company HRs. My feed on weekdays will be full of contract postings. I stay away from it starting Friday, and the weekends - they are full self promoting stupids.

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bonnydoe@reddit

I got found by my current boss on LinkedIn, but I had trouble with guys who thought it was a dating app :(
It is good to be there so you can be found, true.

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Wotg33k@reddit

Oh don't get us wrong.

I use LinkedIn when I need a new job, but it's in the list with indeed and the rest of them.

I do not use LinkedIn like a social media account and people who do need to learn more about sex.

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vytah@reddit

Just see /r/LinkedInLunatics/

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shevy-java@reddit

So ... this is a bit random, in regards to AI and ChatGPT in particular.

Travis keeps on fighting officials. In a recent "experiment" he was using ChatGPT to find useful strategies in regards to preparing his legal defence. The video can be seen here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mANqxio25qY

It's way too long for most to watch, but interestingly, after a few questions, ChatGPT keeps on giving nonsensical answers that make no sense. For instance, it starts by "don't give up your rights", but then it gradually changes the answers towards "comply with the police either way", which leads to giving up your rights (unless a charge can be substantiated PRIOR to giving up your rights). So, all this "AI" is really just total eye-wash - there is no real intelligence. The answers that are given make partial sense, but the deeper you dig into it, the more rubbish it gets.

That does not mean it is useless, but it simply means that despite all the promo, it is still rubbish babelfish crap. I don't think people really learn "programming" via "AI shortcuts". You kind of need to write code on your own and build up experience - AI could be helpful there, but it is no substitute for being able to think critically yourself.

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ssuuh@reddit

A lot of time and energy is to even figure out what you can use.

AI tells you instead of you going through so answers.

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HaraldNieswandt@reddit

You can start programming again OR you can use "AI" ...

https://www.reddit.com/r/ProgrammerHumor/comments/1fmtjo9/learndontrelyonai/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web3x&utm_name=web3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button

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