Several months ago, I decided that AI contributions were no longer welcome in a FOSS project I am building and maintaining - LibreWeddingPlanner. It’s not that it got a lot of contributions with AI — actually all contributions I’ve had are translations and feature requests — but I wanted to...

I recovered the joy of programming. And I didn’t look back. I won’t pretend that number of lines of code or PRs is a valid metric, especially when AI can be as verbose as it wants to win on every metric. But I can say that I am pushing significant changes every day, getting PRs merged, and at the end of the day, getting the work done. And for that reason, I’m not scared of being fired. Plus, I’m keeping my brain functions intact.

  • HaraldvonBlauzahn@feddit.orgOP
    19·
    6 days ago

    From the article:

    At some point, I had so many AI agents working, that the focus change was too much for me. There were tasks I could have done in 20 minutes easily, that took 5 minutes of an AI agent, and then 2 days for me to review. Because there were so many other things. And maybe AI and computers are good at context switching, but not me. I was exhausted. Because if it was just about approving PRs that are perfectly written, it would be good. But for each PR I had to look at the code, the tests, the style, give feedback, switch to something else, go back again, push, see if I have any PR comments, if CI passed, wait, now the linter complains. And it takes you 2 days to deliver something that could have been literally 1 hour single-focused. In my personal experience, multiplied AI performance is just an illusion. Multiplied frustration and exhaustion is guaranteed, though.

    • staircase@programming.dev
      2·
      3 days ago

      maybe AI and computers are good at context switching, but not me

      Interesting phrase, because AI is not good at context. Maybe that’s how it can easily switch (if indeed it can): it doesn’t recontextualize.

    • Hugh@programming.dev
      7·
      6 days ago

      This is similar to my experience. I have never used agents, but I have worked on projects with people who have. They could create PRs in a few hours that would take me half a week to fix.

      The agent would do things like create a new type definition in the same file as the function that used it. Except we already had a type definition in the types file so that it could be imported into different parts of the code.

      I try to employ “DRY” practices where applicable because it improves the readability, maintainability and extensibility of the code. A random word generator will never be able to understand things like the structure and architecture of the project, nor the project requirements, so it is liable to always increase technical debt.

      • Feyd@programming.dev
        8·
        6 days ago

        This is similar to my experience. I have never used agents, but I have worked on projects with people who have. They could create PRs in a few hours that would take me half a week to fix.

        Isn’t it infuriating that they outsource work to you then get kudos because they’re telling the suits what they want to hear?

      • HaraldvonBlauzahn@feddit.orgOP
        2·
        6 days ago

        The agent would do things like create a new type definition in the same file as the function that used it. Except we already had a type definition in the types file so that it could be imported into different parts of the code.

        Ouch. In C++, this violates the “One Definition Rule”, which will in this case likely not cause any compiler warning, and can cause extremely hard-to-find Undefined Behaviour bugs if, for example, the layout for classes or structs is different between definitions.

        (And the latter can of course easily happen if you later edit or extend one definition without being aware of redundant other definitions.)

    • exdor@programming.dev
      21·
      6 days ago

      Tbh though shouldnt agents see the linter and CI output and adapt their PRs? At least everything that a machine can parse should be considered