Comment by eightysixfour
3 days ago
I have been teaching people at my company how to use AI code tools, the learning curve is way worse for developers and I have had to come up with some exercises to try and breakthrough the curve. Some seemingly can’t get it.
The short version is that devs want to give instructions instead of ask for what outcome they want. When it doesn’t follow the instructions, they double down by being more precise, the worst thing you can do. When non devs don’t get what they want, they add more detail to the description of the desired outcome.
Once you get past the control problem, then you have a second set of issues for devs where the things that should be easy or hard don’t necessarily map to their mental model of what is easy or hard, so they get frustrated with the LLM when it can’t do something “easy.”
Lastly, devs keep a shit load of context in their head - the project, what they are working on, application state, etc. and they need to do that for LLMs too, but you have to repeat themselves often and “be” the external memory for the LLM. Most devs I have taught hate that, they actually would rather have it the other way around where they get help with context and state but want to instruct the computer on their own.
Interestingly, the best AI assisted devs have often moved to management/solution architecture, and they find the AI code tools brought back some of the love of coding. I have a hypothesis they’re wired a bit differently and their role with AI tools is actually closer to management than it is development in a number of ways.
> Interestingly, the best AI assisted devs have often moved to management/solution architecture, and they find the AI code tools brought back some of the love of coding. I have a hypothesis they’re wired a bit differently and their role with AI tools is actually closer to management than it is development in a number of ways.
The CTO and VPEng at my company (very small, still do technical work occasionally) both love the agent stuff so much. Part of it for them is that it gives them the opportunity to do technical work again with the limited time they have. Without having to distract an actual dev, or spend a long time reading through the codebase, they can quickly get context for an build small items themselves.
> Interestingly, the best AI assisted devs have often moved to management/solution architecture, and they find the AI code tools brought back some of the love of coding
This suggests me though that they are bad at coding, otherwise they would have stayed longer. And I can't find anything in your comment that would corroborate the opposite. So what gives?
I am not saying what you say is untrue, but you didn't give any convincing arguments to us to believe otherwise.
Also, you didn't define the criteria of getting better. Getting better in terms of what exactly???
I'm not bad at coding. I would say I'm pretty damned good. But coding is a means-to-an-end. I come up with an idea, then I have the long-winded middle bit where I have to write all the code, spin up a DB, create the tables, etc.
LLMs have given me a whole new love of coding, getting rid of the dull grind and letting me write code an order of magnitude quicker than before.
> This suggests me though that they are bad at coding, otherwise they would have stayed longer.
Or they care about producing value, not just the code, and realized they had more leverage and impact in other roles.
> And I can't find anything in your comment that would corroborate the opposite.
I didn’t try and corroborate the opposite.
Honestly, I don’t care about the “best coders.” I care about people who do their job well, sometimes that is writing amazing code but most of the time it isn’t. I don’t have any devs in my company who work in a magical vacuum where they are handed perfectly written tasks, they complete them, and then they do the next one.
If I did, I could replace them with AI faster.
> Also, you didn't define the criteria of getting better. Getting better in terms of what exactly?
Delivery velocity - bug fixes, features, etc. that pass testing/QA and goes to prod.
> Honestly, I don’t care about the “best coders.”
> Interestingly, the best AI assisted devs have often moved to management/solution architecture
Is it just me? Or does it seem to others as well that you pretty much rank these people even at the moment and your first comment contradicts your second comment? Especially when you admit that you rank them based on velocity.
I am not saying you shouldn't do that, but it feels to me like rating road construction workers on the number of potholes fixed, even though it's very possible that the potholes are caused by the sloppy work to begin with.
Not what I would want to do.
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