Comment by throwatdem12311
8 hours ago
For me it’s just a matter of “does this actually save me time at all?”
If it generates the slop version in a week but it takes me 3 more weeks to clean it up, could I have I just done it right the first time myself in 4 weeks instead? How much money have I wasted in tokens?
I've been arguing that it's POSSIBLE to get a small (but meaningful) uplift in productivity on average if you are careful with how you use LLMs, but at the same time, it's also extremely easy to actually negatively impact your productivity.
In both cases, you feel super productive all the time, because you are constantly putting in instructions and getting massive amounts of output, and this feels like constant & fast progress. It's scary how easy it is to waste time on LLMs while not even realizing you are wasting time.
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A car saves you time in getting to and from the store. But if you don't learn to drive, and just hop in the car and press things, you're going to crash, and that definitely won't save you time. Cars are also more expensive than walking or a bike, yet people still buy them.
I already know how to drive stick (trad coding), I don’t feel like I’m gaining much by switching to automatic transmission.
Yeah that's not the difference, lol. With AI coding you can get the same work done in an order of magnitude less time, without even knowing how to program.
The only comparison I can come up with is 3D printers, but even that's not as ridiculously fast and easy as AI coding. An average person can ask an agent to write a program, in any popular language, and it'll do it, and it'll work. We still need people intelligent enough to steer the agent, but you do not need to edit a single line of code anymore.
> does this actually save me time at all?
Soooooo....
As one who hasn't taken the plunge yet -- I'm basically retired, but have a couple of projects I might want to use AI for -- "time" is not always fungible with, or a good proxy for, either "effort" or "motivation"
> How much money have I wasted in tokens?
This, of course, may be a legitimate concern.
> If it generates the slop version in a week but it takes me 3 more weeks to clean it up, could I have I just done it right the first time myself in 4 weeks instead?
This likewise may be a legitimate concern, but sometimes the motivation for cleaning up a basically working piece of code is easier to find that the motivation for staring at a blank screen and trying to write that first function.
Well for me, the amount of time/effort as a function my of my motivation has acted as a natural gatekeeper to bad ideas. Just because I can do something with AI now doesn’t necessarily mean that I should. I am also weary of trading time and effort for outright money right out of my own pocket to find out, especially when I find the people I’d be giving money to so reprehensible. I don’t live somewhere where developers make a lot of money. I’m not poor in any stretch but not rich enough that I can waste money on slop for funsies. But I can spend a month on validating a side project because I find coding as a hobby enjoyable in and of itself, and I don’t care if I throw out a few thousand lines of code after a little while and realize I’m wasting my time.
Cleaning up agent slop code by hand is also a miserable experience and makes me hate my job. I do it already because at $DAYJOB because my boss thinks “investing” in third worlders for pennies on the dollar and just giving them a Claude subscription will be better than investing in technical excellence and leadership. The ROI on this strategy is questionable at best, at least at my current job. Code Review by humans is still the bottleneck and delivering proper working features has not accelerated because they require much more iteration because of slop.
Would much rather spend the time making my own artisanal tradslop instead if it’s gonna take me the same amount of time anyway - at least it’s more enjoyable.
Your position makes an immense amount of sense for your described situation.
As I said, I'm retired, and so I've never had to clean up slop at $DAYJOB.
Since the whole AI thing would be a learning experience for me, it would include trying to toilet train the AI itself, as others have intimated can be done in some cases, rather than dealing with a bunch of already-checked-into-the-repo-slop.
And that may be a losing proposition. I don't know; haven't tried it yet.
> Would much rather spend the time making my own artisanal tradslop instead if it’s gonna take me the same amount of time anyway - at least it’s more enjoyable.
Although I haven't had the AI experience you describe, I have had a similar experience with coworkers who moved fast and broke all kinds of shit. That was similarly no fun. It's like trying to work on your wife's minivan, but she won't pull over and let you properly fix it.
Given sufficient time, I enjoy polishing/perfecting/refactoring code. My final output often looks radically different from my prototype. It is clear to me that I would hate the situation you describe. It is not clear to me that starting with prompted slop and wrangling it into submission would be much less enjoyable to me than writing my own slop and then wrangling it into submission.
> especially when I find the people I’d be giving money to so reprehensible.
This is a bit of a concern, but I'm pretty sure that, at the moment, every token you burn costs them more than you.