Technology

I can kind of relate. There are a lot of parts of coding I find a little boring.

• Once the interesting problem is solved and all you need to do is follow through
• Large scale refactorings in ways too complicated for an IDE.
• Fixing annoying dependency / migration issues

When you use an expensive AI agent, like Claude, it can nowadays handle these tasks competently, to the point where I only need to correct small things here and there.

When you give these tasks to an AI agent, it feels a bit like delegating to a junior, but without the guilt of giving someone a menial or boring task. That allows me to work on stuff I find more interesting. To me, THAT'S why it's adictive.

However, this isn't without cost. First, there's the societal costs: Environmental, centralization of power, contribution to hardware shortages and a bubble

Second, there are more personal costs. You'll come to rely more and more on these tools, and your skills will rust. You may end up avoiding learning things about a codebase because you delegate it away.

It's a tempting tool. One which in my experience can genuinely help, but is easy to misuse.

Addictive? What the fuck are they coding?

Every time I try to use AI for coding I just get endlessly frustrated and angry.

But coding is fun and there's lots of free resources to help. What could be fun about begging an AI to write poorly made code?

Ai coding is like the loom for society but you have to know how to use it.

People claiming its garbage slop are 2 years out of date on current models.

To all those people I suggest you familiarize yourself with it as whats coming is going to ruin the world but not because its slop because its going to be capable.

So my preferred agent atm is GitHub Copilot as a jetbrains plugin. The other day when GitHub had a 6 hour outage and I couldn't log in, my first instinct was "guess I can't work today". I realized almost immediately how fucking dumb that initial thought was. Like I had forgotten that I've been doing this for over 20 years, and around 17 of those with no AI whatsoever.

Was I slower that day? Yes absolutely. Was I incapable? Not at all.

I wouldn't want to do without it, because on the positive side it has helped me discover libraries and tools I had no idea existed, and it's made me a better archtitect. But, maybe we should still actually touch the code a little.

Coding with AI is really leaves you in a similar mental state as if you've just scrolled tiktok reels during that time.

The biggest chilling effect I noticed, even as a developer who refuses to use AI, is that I feel like I can no longer ask my co-workers for advice. When I do, I get the the AI equivalent of "let me Google that for you, was that so hard?" So even without using it, I feel cut off from the normal places I would use to learn and improve my coding skills.

This is a small, fairly biased survey with unpublished proper metrics. Whether you agree or disagree with the result, this is bad science.

The only utility I've had with it is as a slightly more fancy document search. "Give me the syntax for [one line of code I want but can't remember]" or "Give me the syntax to do a c# style .select() call in [language I am less familiar with]"

And then I look at the docs and actually put the effort into understanding how the fuck things work.

Using it for anything more than that is a mistake. You still need to understand the context of what it is you're doing, you still need to think.

It's almost like all Big Tech sells is addiction.

Doesn't mean they said it wasn't helpful, just that the addictive score was higher than the helpful score for 80% of the developers asked.

it's like gambling. you hope it churns out good stuff -- and some of the time, it does! lucky!

then you try your luck again. and again with small "fixes". and again.

I had this experience once. We have a ChatGPT license where I work, and I asked it to configure a switch that I wasn't familiar with. I simply described in words what network architecture I wanted and it did it! It even made some nice-looking documentation.

But, then I tried the new configs, and they didn't work. It turns out there were some key syntax things it got wrong. And the documentation was wrong on top of that, with incorrect diagrams, and when I asked it to fix it it made different errors I the diagrams in different places. On balance, I still saved some time over reading all the manuals and figuring out the syntaxes myself, but only because I made my own documentation with the results that worked. If I had trusted the AI I would be sunk.

I've concluded that AI gives the illusion of competence, like a overly confident new manager. This can be very attractive to a less experienced person. But it's really guessing, just like we all are. It can just guess after actually "reading" all the manuals. I haven't used AI to write anything more than simple configurations and helper scripts. If I did want to use AI for more it would be in more of a pair-programming context. I might have a window open where I describe some things and ask for analysis, but I wouldn't just run anything it does blindly.

Depends how it's used.

The internet is the purveyor of many addictions, gambling, pornography, gaming etc.... the difference is, whereas a generation ago the Baby Boomers were able to hold account the Tobacco companies for their addictive products, our Current generation is failing to do the same for tech companies and their addictive products.

The problem is cigarettes cant get people elected, while social media campaigns do, so business is now the legislator in a lot of cases. its a form of regulatory capture, really.