top | item 46657438

(no title)

acron0 | 1 month ago

I am going to give a predictable rebuttal. Many of these articles come from a place of fear and uncertainty, which is completely understandable. We ascribe value to the things we love, we love coding and therefore coding is valuable. But if it's commoditized how can it be valuable anymore? This alone is enough to shake the tree of rationality and most articles, including this one, set out with a mission of bashing a force they don't really understand. One signature of these articles, as I have noticed, is that they talk about AI writing code fairly reasonably but then insist that without a clear mental view of it, how could it ever be understood, or debugged, or optimised? This simply illuminates the lack of experience with the tools. Anyone who's used Ralph or Taches skills will understand this is a non-problem because well-attuned, AI-first codebases are actually very good at debugging, optimising, and will happily relay to you the model they've used, so that your grey matter can understand it.

discuss

order

sunnyam|1 month ago

Thanks! I agree with you to some extent. I _do_ need to get better with these tools but I remain suspicious for reasons like skill atrophy and the fact that I'm perhaps experienced enough to know how much I don't know. Using AI to plug gaps in my own skillset feels like setting a dangerous precedent on the one hand, but on the other hand, if it works then what's the problem? People just want things that work at the end of the day.

Just to check that I've got it right by the way, are you referring to the Ralph Wiggum loops? And are these Taches? https://github.com/glittercowboy/taches-cc-resources

I'm definitely keen to dive into these tools.

A message that I maybe didn't land in my post is that it is a little bit ridiculous to demand or only deliver "Artisanal Code". It's more labour intensive and the end product is virtually the same at the end of the day.

acron0|1 month ago

I appreciate your response, and I will confess to a certain bias as at some point I think I made the leap of acceptance of AI, in the sense of "this is how it's going to be from now on so I better get on board with it".

Spot on. These are the exact tools I was referring to. They seem a little un-magical but the real value is the boilerplate they provide for context management. Essentially allowing coding agents to perform at their beat. For what it's worth, Taches is my tool of choice.