It is useful for programming, I know a lot of people here don’t want to hear that, but denying it now is being willfully ignorant. No it isn’t good enough that you can tell it “just go do the thing” and then accept what it gives you without checking it, but using it as a tool as a professional can very much improve your work and how quickly you do things. For me recently I used it to unpick a nasty race condition that was occasionally causing a program I was working on to lock up and couldn’t figure out why. It took some back and forth with it but it did help me figure it out when before I had been stumped.
but using it as a tool as a professional can very much improve your work and how quickly you do things.
Maybe it’s just my 20 yoe, but that has so far not been my experience with it. It is improving, but definitely not there yet. Even standard boiler plate I can typically bang out faster than asking the AI to do it and then needing to double check it’s work because it somehow still manages to screw that up occasionally. Sometimes it does manage to be better than one of the juniors, but using it that way also cuts the legs out from under the career development pipeline which will result in an intermediate and senior dev drought down the road.
Even standard boiler plate I can typically bang out faster than asking the AI to do it
The people that claim it helps with boilerplate clearly never took the time to learn how to sed/awk, mustache templates, write a perl/python/etc script, use the regex find/replace in their editor, use the keyboard macro in their editor, use snippets in their editor and I’m sure other ways that aren’t immediately coming to mind that have existed forever and won’t hallucinate. They’re the ones that were not highly skilled in the first place and they’re vexingly successful at convincing newbies and laymen to listen to them about LLMs instead of the actual skilled people that actually know what they’re talking about.
Everyone I work with that uses it is worse at their job than before they started using it, and I’ve lost the ability to teach them how to actually do good work because telling the c-suite they’re 10x now (even though they’re producing only slightly more code and more issues) makes the c-suite happy. I could believe that some people have made small improvements to their workflows but its obvious to anyone competent that it’s not as big as an improvement as they’d have you believe and the vast majority is just people getting addicted to the slot machine, deskilling, and creating inferior output.
I do work in software, and my main focus is on code review, as we work with money, and things have happened due to many factors.
I DO NOT want any more work being done. Fuck that. It’s hard reviewing ‘normal’ amount of code, multiplying it will backfire horrendously.
I do not need people not being able to figure out their bugs. It’s the most important part of the job, and not being able to fix it quickly costs us a lot.
If you need to fix something in a library you don’t understand… maybe you should review it before using? There are situations when it’s not possible, usually in low risk fields, frontends and such, but even then, we (IT in general) produce so much shit for no real gain. And we need LESS of it, not more.
requires too many attempts to get a mildly useful block.
yes, that’s bad
more verbose,
How is that bad? I can’t count how many times I’ve revisited my work a year or more later, and wondered what I was thinking, having taken 2 minutes to parse something dense that I wrote, and then thought “why didn’t I make this a little clearer at the time?”
It’s clearly a controversial thing to say on the fediverse, but everyone must realize that AI is another tool - a sometimes faulty, sometimes great tool. A professional can use it well, a careless person can use it carelessly. But it is a tool that can help in certain cases. It’s a nuanced thing, which many people unfortunately have trouble accepting. It has flaws, yes. It also has benefits. This shouldn’t be controversial to say.
That of course doesn’t guarantee that providing that tool must be profitable. It may well be that providing AI models is just too expensive to actually make sense, at least as it is right now.
How is the technology useful?
For the love of Asimov, someone please explain.
It is useful for programming, I know a lot of people here don’t want to hear that, but denying it now is being willfully ignorant. No it isn’t good enough that you can tell it “just go do the thing” and then accept what it gives you without checking it, but using it as a tool as a professional can very much improve your work and how quickly you do things. For me recently I used it to unpick a nasty race condition that was occasionally causing a program I was working on to lock up and couldn’t figure out why. It took some back and forth with it but it did help me figure it out when before I had been stumped.
Maybe it’s just my 20 yoe, but that has so far not been my experience with it. It is improving, but definitely not there yet. Even standard boiler plate I can typically bang out faster than asking the AI to do it and then needing to double check it’s work because it somehow still manages to screw that up occasionally. Sometimes it does manage to be better than one of the juniors, but using it that way also cuts the legs out from under the career development pipeline which will result in an intermediate and senior dev drought down the road.
Which model are you using? My experience is that it can definitely do “standard boilerplate”. What programming language are you using?
The people that claim it helps with boilerplate clearly never took the time to learn how to sed/awk, mustache templates, write a perl/python/etc script, use the regex find/replace in their editor, use the keyboard macro in their editor, use snippets in their editor and I’m sure other ways that aren’t immediately coming to mind that have existed forever and won’t hallucinate. They’re the ones that were not highly skilled in the first place and they’re vexingly successful at convincing newbies and laymen to listen to them about LLMs instead of the actual skilled people that actually know what they’re talking about.
Right? Drives me crazy.
Everyone I work with that uses it is worse at their job than before they started using it, and I’ve lost the ability to teach them how to actually do good work because telling the c-suite they’re 10x now (even though they’re producing only slightly more code and more issues) makes the c-suite happy. I could believe that some people have made small improvements to their workflows but its obvious to anyone competent that it’s not as big as an improvement as they’d have you believe and the vast majority is just people getting addicted to the slot machine, deskilling, and creating inferior output.
I do work in software, and my main focus is on code review, as we work with money, and things have happened due to many factors.
I DO NOT want any more work being done. Fuck that. It’s hard reviewing ‘normal’ amount of code, multiplying it will backfire horrendously.
I do not need people not being able to figure out their bugs. It’s the most important part of the job, and not being able to fix it quickly costs us a lot.
If you need to fix something in a library you don’t understand… maybe you should review it before using? There are situations when it’s not possible, usually in low risk fields, frontends and such, but even then, we (IT in general) produce so much shit for no real gain. And we need LESS of it, not more.
it’s not useful for programming and it makes code more verbose, poorly structured, and requires too many attempts to get a mildly useful block.
yes, that’s bad
yes, that’s bad
How is that bad? I can’t count how many times I’ve revisited my work a year or more later, and wondered what I was thinking, having taken 2 minutes to parse something dense that I wrote, and then thought “why didn’t I make this a little clearer at the time?”
More verbose does not imply that is is more clear, it is often rambling and not even accurate.
correct. it’s long winded code that could be written a lot more succinctly.
Ah yes, that makes sense; thank you.
It’s clearly a controversial thing to say on the fediverse, but everyone must realize that AI is another tool - a sometimes faulty, sometimes great tool. A professional can use it well, a careless person can use it carelessly. But it is a tool that can help in certain cases. It’s a nuanced thing, which many people unfortunately have trouble accepting. It has flaws, yes. It also has benefits. This shouldn’t be controversial to say.
That of course doesn’t guarantee that providing that tool must be profitable. It may well be that providing AI models is just too expensive to actually make sense, at least as it is right now.