So mine is a trick. People feel more and more programming is completely modified by AI and don’t know what they should do, if they can really start coding in a completely different way, without looking much at the code as their main output. They feel like they are betraying their own field. So my intention is to arrive and say “look at me, In can write code, you know, I’m not hiding behind AI: yet, things changed, it’s not your weakness, it’s not that you are AI-pilled. It is just that our field is evolving in an incredible *and* painful (but also joyful) direction”.
This is why yesterday, on X, I said that I believe many programmers at this point have less impact they could have because they look at the code. I truly believe into that. And note that this does not mean to vibe code something just asking for the final product. The point is: if you control the ideas of your software, looking at the code itself is suboptimal and often pointless. For the following reasons:
Maybe antirez is some god-tier prompter, but I find myself constantly dissatisfied by the decisions that anthropic's frontier models make. I think they are 100% great at automated reviews...
Maybe antirez is some god-tier prompter, but I find myself constantly dissatisfied by the decisions that anthropic's frontier models make.
I think they are 100% great at automated reviews (relatively low cost to verify, I can overrule without negotiation, endless attention any time of the day, can be fed house review checklists). I think they are great sounding boards for design. Exploiting their encyclopedic knowledge of general techniques to direct research yields better designs faster than I could unassisted. I am just struggling with the idea that you can be so sure that your ideas are being faithfully reflected if you look never. That's not at all my experience. I am constantly finding inconsistencies and stupidity any time I take my eye off the underlying evolution of what's being spit out.
Speaking as an amateur, my approach has been to not touch LLMs for code help unless I'm absolutely desperate, and part of his closing vindicates that choice, I feel: I take that to mean, roughly,...
Speaking as an amateur, my approach has been to not touch LLMs for code help unless I'm absolutely desperate, and part of his closing vindicates that choice, I feel:
I have a doubt only regarding young programmers that don't have enough experience, and can't build a mental model. We don't know, yet, if they will require or not to understand very well how a given piece of code works, but I believe they should learn how to write programs.
I take that to mean, roughly, "If you couldn't write the code/solve the problem yourself, you shouldn't be asking the LLM to do it for you." So while I find a lot of what he says in there disturbing (e.g. "I believe many programmers at this point have less impact they could have because they look at the code. [...] The working day is 8 hours. If you read the code, it is a tradeoff."), the ending bit kind of qualifies the rest of it in a way that I'm more comfortable with, I guess?
Idk. Looking forward to hearing what the professionals on here think.
From the article:
Maybe antirez is some god-tier prompter, but I find myself constantly dissatisfied by the decisions that anthropic's frontier models make.
I think they are 100% great at automated reviews (relatively low cost to verify, I can overrule without negotiation, endless attention any time of the day, can be fed house review checklists). I think they are great sounding boards for design. Exploiting their encyclopedic knowledge of general techniques to direct research yields better designs faster than I could unassisted. I am just struggling with the idea that you can be so sure that your ideas are being faithfully reflected if you look never. That's not at all my experience. I am constantly finding inconsistencies and stupidity any time I take my eye off the underlying evolution of what's being spit out.
Speaking as an amateur, my approach has been to not touch LLMs for code help unless I'm absolutely desperate, and part of his closing vindicates that choice, I feel:
I take that to mean, roughly, "If you couldn't write the code/solve the problem yourself, you shouldn't be asking the LLM to do it for you." So while I find a lot of what he says in there disturbing (e.g. "I believe many programmers at this point have less impact they could have because they look at the code. [...] The working day is 8 hours. If you read the code, it is a tradeoff."), the ending bit kind of qualifies the rest of it in a way that I'm more comfortable with, I guess?
Idk. Looking forward to hearing what the professionals on here think.