AI Coding is Making Me HATE Programming

I'm just going to say it. I would argue the indeterministic nature of AI is worse than hallucinations. This guy CJ uh last month he kind of lost his love for coding because of AI. He was he was finding he was basically becoming a manager which famously people just don't like to do. Um become managers. He missed actually coding. So because he was just managing his AIS and stuff like that. So he made a vow to like not code for 30 days and he actually made this review of kind of what what he's learned. And I followed this journey just because again like I said earlier like I'm someone who does want to keep challenging their own beliefs and see the other side and start to you know question whether I'm you know rightly informed on everything. I don't want to be just kind of blind to all of the the shortcomings of AI. Yeah. And I kind of wanted to point out a few of the things that he learned, right? Um, funny enough, even though he had only done 30 days, he still found that he craved using AI for quite a few things, right? He talks about this cycle of AI slop being now put onto the internet. And I I really don't want to see this coming because a friend of mine sent me a video that was AI and she thought it was not AI and I was like, "Sorry, that cute dog is is AI." Um, and I I it made me think like if people are constantly being bombarded with AI stuff, they're just not going to use that platform. Instagram being this example. People are not going to use Instagram because it's like every other post is faking AI, you know? all they need to be able to filter that stuff out. The internet, I hope, is not going to be the same thing. Like, if every everywhere we go, every website we turn to, there's just AI crap on there. There's no new information or anything like that, people are going to stop posting to the internet or stop using the internet. I really hope that's not going to be the case. Or someone needs to come out with some big filter that says no to AI stuff, like even these AI browsers. I'd hope that we could turn a thing off to say just don't show me or don't suggest AI created content. What he turned to is a new website that I found now called Dev Docs. He's turned to using documentation above something like Stack Overflow, which traditionally we would use just because the the question has already been answered somewhere on Stack Overflow, right? Stack Overflow driven development. He resorted to using dev docs or documentation just in general. This is just a nice way to have it. So this will you can download and install actually any documentation to any sort of language vit uh view uh what we got it you know webpack all this sort of stuff you can actually select those for offline re like referencing. So if you are getting into development like being able to and god damn it documentation can be ugly you know it's very very difficult to sort of pick apart but saying that I actually wanted to create an MCP wrapper for this website. I don't know how whether it's possible to do that but um yeah some way to to be able to reference documentation or bring that in because I have MCPs for documentation. So he long story short is he found that he found a lot of um answers to actually understand what's actually happening by reading the documentation. So that was a a nice little insight. Um he also found that the human aspect to defining the infrastructure of applications was was something he used to just throw to AI. I'm still at that level. It's kind of weird because I kind of understand how applications are put together. Uh, and I think that's what makes me a good developer in the age of AI is that I can trust that the AI can do the the the uh, what do you call it? The manual stuff, but I'm there happily overseeing it and making sure that everything's roughly done in the right way. But to define and design like the architecture to your app, you know, your your thing, right? You had a developer put that in a prompt, but they were there to think about how you would architect this project. That sort of stuff. And they didn't do it, by the way. No, I know you didn't do it, but you Yeah. Oh, what? You didn't you didn't use that prompt. No, no, I used the prompt and the prompt had uh like exact steps and like an exact structure and they did like 80% of the the things as it was told to and the rest just blew it. Yeah. It Yeah. didn't do it correctly. Wow. Yeah, that's the thing. Like you can Yeah, you I would have Yeah, exactly. Right. I probably would have just given you a boiler plate and that's enough for it to like there's plenty of boiler plates out there. Yeah. The amount of like prompts that I go through to to get things done and I change stuff. Uh sometimes I just add features and then remove them and I because I don't do it in a let's say sustainable way. Um it it gets really busy very fast cuz I'm building like MVPs essentially, not Yeah. Yeah. very clean. Yeah. Yeah. Um so I mean that was that was that it was it's interesting to see his journey. There is there is still you know he's a hardcore coder. There is still a time and a place for coding. But then I saw another video. This is a cold fusion video. We've mentioned a few times on the on the show. This was a video just released this week and it talks about the kind of you know are we really ready for AI? It used to be called vibe coding but they must have updated the um title or something but you know just reading about this it's kind of like a a semi-spon to you know lovable sponsored this video and I don't care what who you are if someone gives you money you are going to be slightly biased to that person. He does say they don't have any input blah blah blah. You are going to be slightly biased. I'm sorry, but it's just that's just the way the brain works. Anyway, obviously you're seeing a lot of lovable stuff here. This is still lovable stuff. This was created in lovable uh this was creating a lovable a lot of lovable stuff. [laughter] So anyway, you know, again, just kind of Oh, he even mentioned CJ's video too, actually. So, it kind of made Yes, he did. He did. I I watched this video as well. So, the whole video is sponsored by Lovable. Um, but the video is basically showing how unreliable AI is. This is my uh take from the video that yes, you can build a prototype. Yes, you can do a bunch of stuff that you couldn't do before uh but now if you want that polish and you want the things to work, you know, properly, very often AI can't get you that far. Um, and this is kind of like a starting point and yeah, it's AI is not going anywhere and we're not going to use it less. We will certainly use it a lot more, but I think what needs to be settled down and you know, we need to kind of like get there and understand that it's non-deterministic. It's it's not really as reliable as these companies are trying to to say. And it still requires an actual expert who knows what the hell is going on in order to create something proper. Mhm. [clears throat] Yeah. And on top of obviously saying go watch these videos for yourself and you know come to your own conclusion. It's it's left me in a really interesting point because CJ mentioned something which is and you've just said it as well is is the undeterministic nature of AI and coding is the most deterministic thing you could probably ever do. It will not do anything that you don't write. any bug that's in the code, you can't blame the code. You can only blame or sorry, you can't blame the execution. You can only blame the code that you yourself have written. It is so deter. So you've got this massive dichotomy now of like well I'm trying to create something that has to be deterministic that has to do exactly as I tell it to using a tool that you can write the same prompt and it's it's different every time. And this is something that's really it's really affected me the last, you know, week or so or half a week. And that I love doing this. I'm trying to again like you say, it's here to stay, but I'm trying to figure out where this will find where this will rest. Where's the final resting place for AI driven development? Or have I exhausted all of my options when it comes to AIdriven development? And that's why I picked up code rabbit. That's why I tried Trey. I really don't want to get sucked into moving fast and and building things um and using all the extra time that I've now saved to just build more features. Like you could it's very easy to get in that rut of just like well now that's taken me three minutes. Let's move on to the next feature. I really trying to utilize the extra time to make sure my um my system is set up as best as it can. So again, setting up rules, setting up MCPs, although I'm moving off of those now. Having a code having code rabbit run and and all this kind of stuff. I'm I'm feeling a bit fatigued and feeling a bit frustrated with the with the indeterministic nature and I'm trying to make it as deterministic as possible within reason. But I think we're going to really struggle if there's coding is going to really struggle if they don't sort out. I would argue the indeterministic nature of AI is worse than hallucinations. I'm just going to say it. Humans hallucinate hallucinate, right? They have problem, but but at least they what they write or whatever, you know, what they say goes. Do you know what I mean? I don't know how they're going to sort that out to be honest, right? But this is kind of where I'm landing on with the AI stuff. I'm not going to stop. I'm just going to try and get better, but it's just like further understanding where AI is going to stop. This is part of a larger conversation on my show, Command AI, which we stream live every single week. We discuss the news and all things related to AI in the world of design and web. Catch us next week and join in the banter.