Hacker News Famous - AI Coding is Gambling
I ended up on hacker news and got my biggest blog traffic spike through the weekend and I only noticed it 3 days later. A very me story.
I thought I'd respond to the ~500 comments it got, most of which do not call me an idiot.
Managerial Gambling
A lot of people are focused on how most of life is gambling. A manager giving a developer a developer a task can be described as gambling, because the output can be unpredictable. Give the same task to multiple developers and you will certainly get different solutions. Lots of teachers rely (or at least relied) on this to spot cheating. If the whole class comes up with the same solution, they all cheated. The code can be formated differently, but if 30 people have the same thinking, it's certainly proof of cheating.
While I agree that this is a form of gambling, everything in life is. Some forms just have higher certainty to get the desired outcome. But being a manager doesn't resemble a slot machine, the specific form of gambling I equate AI coding to. The difference is in the speed and velocity. Namely, developers need time to think and create a product that is complete, well designed and solves real problems. Staking their professional (or at least organizational) reputation on said solution. The do not just gobble up half remembered code to get something that looks right, but breaks at the slightest scrutiny.
Developers can also say no to unreasonable demands. They can call you on your bullshit, squish your dreams and create a realistic and optimal answer. At least most of them will. They will not just sycophantically yes man you and mentally jerk you off while doing your bidding. But plenty of bosses want that and they'll try it. Hopefully the market will punish their shitty products, even if lately it doesn't seem to be.
There was a time I was fooled that the best product often wins in capitalism, that's why we run the world that way. It's good for us. Sadly that's far from true, but sometimes it can be. Good products exist and we can choose them. If we're unsatisfied we can build them. We don't have to rely on the "industry standard" solutions.
If It Were Perfect
The top rated comment riffs on why it's gambling - because everything it gives you is imperfect. In my blog I used "every output is different" and this is a better explanation. You can tell it to clone any function, app or style but the clone is never exactly the same, or good enough. If it was, coding with an AI agent would take a few minutes and our jobs would truly be pointless. Instead we can work more than ever, being far more productive but also manic.
Which gets us at a fascinating point I've never considered. What if the AI hype is true? What if we get everything they're promising? What would their business be? Capitalism is built atop scarcity, but once we move into abundance will we dissolve it? Or will the largest firms just use their dominance to choke the field?
Not Coder Enough
A lot of people commenting on how I never enjoyed coding or I'm not a true coder. I do state that in the blog, but I know people who love to just solve a coding problem the hard way and enjoy every second of it. I've never been one of those. I enjoy what I can build with code, I do not particularly enjoy code. I simply see it as a very efficient way to build things I like. Getting called a manager sounds horrible to my ear, but it's not wrong. I do want to lead a team in my vision, I would just never use that word. I do some coding, I style myself more as a multi hyphenate designer than a coder, just look at the page you're on.
People seem specifically offended I used the phrase "I feel like I'm good a programming." It's very clear that I'm just editing the code I get, instead of writing it by hand. That has been something I've been great at pre-LLM's. I do not start projects from scratch, I never could.
I knew code is open source and widely available and my career has included lots of finding the right starter template, picking the right features we should have, adding and modifying them to delightful results. I'm not blindly generating shit that looks but doesn't function, as some people assume.
In addition to the code, I handle the graphic design, user interface and user experience. The key is the whole widget as Steve Jobs called it. Not one specialized part, but everything for product design done exquisitely. That's what I do.
In Good company
So many people agreed with my thesis and added to it. Frankly I'm surprised that this whole experience was quite pleasant. It was great to get so much feedback on my work and it really has inspired me to start looking for more readers. To everyone, thank you for reading and I hope you stick around. Let me know what you think!