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Comment by great_psy | Hacker News Reader

I see people highly trained engineers spend hundreds of thousand of tokens doing what can reliably be accomplished with 150 lines of python.

I think the push from management for us to use AI has made it so we don’t have to be efficient with our consumption, so now we write md files which we feed to Claude in a loop instead of python and bash scripts to do routine tasks.

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> I think the push from management for us to use AI has made it so we don’t have to be efficient with our consumption, so now we write md files which we feed to Claude in a loop instead of python and bash scripts to do routine tasks.

We're all being measured to AI usage, so...

Instead of doing a grep | uniq | awk which would give me an answer in 100 milliseconds for free, I launch a prompt to spend 30 seconds on it and will cost some actual money.

I hope we get over this phase of the hype soon. I want and will use AI as a tool, but it's just another (good) tool in the toolbox.

When I need to do a one-off investigation, it's great to use AI and spend 5-10 minutes querying and get my answer for $5 or so, instead of having to spend 2-3 hours writing a script which I'll discard. That's a great use case.

But using AI for routine processing done daily where writing a script would be amortized over thousands of runs, it's insane. I'd rather use AI to write the script and then don't need the AI anymore, the script will be faster and free. Oh but then my AI usage in the executives report drops. Can't have that. Waste away.

>>> Instead of doing a grep | uniq | awk which would give me an answer in 100 milliseconds for free, I launch a prompt to spend 30 seconds on it and will cost some actual money.

I'd argue it will be even worse, you still remember how to do it, next gen of SDEs won't even try.

It's not just push from mangement; AI firms themselves really aggressively market this idea of AI replacing everything. It's not "allowed" to be a mere tool, useful for some but not other tasks, it's gotta (be able to) do everything.

Part of that is the ridiculous belief that they can create "AGI" by just glueing together enough LLMs.

Presumably it's also financial viability. You can't charge thousands a month without replacing those "highly trained engineers" with a bunch of kids in the developing world.

> AI firms themselves really aggressively market this idea of AI replacing everything. It's not "allowed" to be a mere tool, useful for some but not other tasks, it's gotta (be able to) do everything.

That's marketing. It's up to management to decide to fall for it blindly or look at it with healthy skepticism. It seems a lot of them chose the former.

It's worse than that, in many cases management actively rewards inefficiency. It's like Friedman's "why not spoons?"

They optimize because their work requires them to. 100k tokens is a few bucks and a couple minutes, then 15 more minutes to verify that the output does what it's intended for reasonably well, so it's more like $50 in total cost.

For an engineer paid $100/hr to write a 150 line Python script and test it to the same extent could take a few hours, so the total costs rise meaningfully.

Yeah they rise from $100/hr to $150/hr.

I just suggest you use Claude to write the script for you. And then you run the script with cron. Really it’s not any more time, just takes a different view on what the goal is.

I think 150 lines of python is rather a lot. That would take at least an hour to write, and can run up to a few days (depending on complexity and familiarity with the task).

You should do some competitive coding.

Many, if not most, medium to hard problems require at least 100–150 lines of code. With experience, you can write it, bugfree, in 15 minutes.

It's about thinking ahead and experience.

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