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Comment by ryandrake | Hacker News Reader

Someone in a HN thread a few months ago put it in a way that makes a lot of sense to me: "AI seems good at things you are not good at."

So, if you're not actually a programmer, or not a good programmer, you look at AI output and think "Wow, I could never have done that so well/fast. AI is great at this!" It's solving something he's not good at.

On the other hand, if you already are a good/skilled programmer, AI is not solving anything for you. Its output is flawed and has to be manually fixed and refactored. When you consider the prompting and the waiting and the cajoling and the fixing and the refactoring, it's not really doing things faster than you could.

I'm not an artist. To me, AI art seems great, because it's doing something I am very bad at. I think the same is true for AI programming.

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> On the other hand, if you already are a good/skilled programmer, AI is not solving anything for you. Its output is flawed and has to be manually fixed and refactored. When you consider the prompting and the waiting and the cajoling and the fixing and the refactoring, it's not really doing things faster than you could.

This seems to not coincide with the reality of some very skilled programmers saying exactly the opposite.

Just to quote the latest one, here's Linus Torvalds, who I think we can agree is a good programmer:

> AI is a tool, just like other tools we use. And it's clearly a useful one.

> It may not have been that "clearly" even just a year ago, but it's no longer in question today.

> There are other questions around AI (like what the economy of it will actually look like in the end), but "is it useful" is no longer one of those questions. Anybody who doubts that clearly hasn't actually used it.

This rings true to me. There are some pretty notable software engineers that are saying otherwise, that they are getting tons of value out of AI, but there are also some very notable engineers saying otherwise. There are studies that say there are no improvements, some that say there are small improvements, some that say there are actually decreases. We're very far from any settled understanding of what LLM use is doing

Lots of noise, and no actually measureable improvements. Just a lot of anecdotes

And people should keep in mind how much money that there is riding on this. Especially on a site like this, there's probably people who are multi-, maybe even hundred-, millionaires if their AI bets continue to pay off.

I dunno. There's a lot of dust in the air. All I know is I hate using it for code generation. I don't like being personally accountable for code I didn't write. I don't like TDD and I don't think large test suites are a guarantee of good software anyways. I'd rather work with a team of eager juniors than prompt an LLM all day.

this is pure cope, and the realm of things you are better than it at will continue to shrink, and you need to be mentally and economically prepared for this.

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