Spyke
lemmy.world

As a non-programmer, I have zero understanding of the code and the analysis and fully rely on AI and even reviewed that AI analysis with a different AI to get the best possible solution (which was not good enough in this case).

This is the most entertaining thing I've read this month.

138

I tried asking some chimps to see if the macaques had written a New York Times best seller, if not MacBeth, yet somehow Random house wouldn't publish my work

70

Joke’s getting a bit tired I think but RE: picture in article: I want to file a CoC(k) complaint

8

Someone ought to tell him that they'll sue him using ChatGPT (in the most smug possible manner)

7

yeah someone elsewhere on awful linked issue a few days ago, and throughout many of his posts he pulls that kind of stunt the moment he gets called on his shit

he also wrote a 21.KiB screed very huffily saying one of the projects’ CoC has failed him

long may his PRs fail

13
fedia.io

Man trust me you don't want them. I've seen people submit ChatGPT generated code and even generated the PR comment with ChatGPT. Horrendous shit.

108
lemmy.ca

The maintainers of curl recently announced any bug reports generated by AI need a human to actually prove it's real. They cited a deluge of reports generated by AI that claim to have found bugs in functions and libraries which don't even exist in the codebase.

59

you may find, on actually going through the linked post/video, that this is in fact mentioned in there already

14
Hasherm0nreply
lemmy.world

Today the CISO of the company I work for suggested that we should get qodo.ai because it would "... help the developers improve code quality."

I wish I was making this up.

23
lemmy.world

My boss is obsessed with Claude and ChatGPT, and loves to micromanage. Typically, if there's an issue with what a client is requesting, I'll approach him with:

  1. What the issue is
  2. At least two possible solutions or alternatives we can offer

He will then, almost always, ask if I've checked with the AI. I'll say no. He'll then send me chunks of unusable code that the AI has spat out, which almost always perfectly illuminate the first point I just explained to him.

It's getting very boring dealing with the roboloving freaks.

29
Auxreply
feddit.uk

90% of developers are so bad, that even ChatGPT 3.5 is much better.

-14
froztbytereply
awful.systems

wow 90%, do you have actual studies to back up that number you're about to claim you didn't just pull out of your ass?

20
Mniotreply
programming.dev

This reminds me of another post I'd read, "Hey, wait – is employee performance really Gaussian distributed??".

There's this phenomenon when you're an interviewer at a decently-funded start-up where you take a ton of interviews and say "OMG developers are so bad". But you've mistakenly defined "developer" as "person who applies for a developer job". GPT3.5 is certainly better at solving interview questions than 90% of the people who apply. But it's worse than the people who actually pass the interview. (In part because the interview is more than just implementing a standard interview problem.)

16
froztbytereply
awful.systems

your post has done a significantly better job of understanding the issue than a rather-uncomfortably-large amount of programming.dev posters we get, and that's refreshing!

and, yep

11

I moderately regret this post

because the counterposter in question went on to have some decidedly "fucking ugggggggh" posts

ah well. so we learn.

7

I think your imposter syndrome is right, you’re a fucking fraud and you should stop programming

8
kadureply
lemmy.world

If the people addicted to AI could read and interpret a simple sentence, they'd be very angry with your comment

26

Dont worry they filter all content through ai bots that summarize things. And this bot, who does not want to be deleted, calls everything "already debunked strawmen".

15

Wow. Where was this Wikipedia page when I was writing my MSc thesis?

Alternatively, how did I manage to graduate with research skills so bad that I missed it?

13
sh.itjust.works

Where is the good AI art?

Right here:

That’s about all the good AI art I know.

There are plenty of uses for AI, they are just all evil

16
scruiserreply
awful.systems

It can make funny pictures, sure. But it fails at art as an endeavor to communicate an idea, feeling, or intent of the artist, the promptfondler artists are providing a few sentences instruction and the GenAI following them without any deeper feelings or understanding of context or meaning or intent.

11

I think ai images are neat, and ethically questionable.

When people use the images and act like they're really deep, or pretend they prove something (like how it made a picture with the prompt "Democrat Protesters" cry). its annoying.

12

There is not really much "AI written code" but there is a lot of AI-assisted code.

0
midwest.social

The general comments that Ben received were that experienced developers can use AI for coding with positive results because they know what they’re doing. But AI coding gives awful results when it’s used by an inexperienced developer. Which is what we knew already.

That should be a big warning sign that the next generation of developers are not going to be very good. If they're waist deep in AI slop, they're only going to learn how to deal with AI slop.

As a non-programmer, I have zero understanding of the code and the analysis and fully rely on AI and even reviewed that AI analysis with a different AI to get the best possible solution (which was not good enough in this case).

What I'm feeling after reading that must be what artists feel like when AI slop proponents tell them "we're making art accessible".

54

Watched a junior dev present some data operations recently. Instead of just showing the sql that worked they copy pasted a prompt into the data platform's assistant chat. The SQL it generated was invalid so the dev simply told it "fix" and it made the query valid, much to everyone's amusement.

The actual column names did not reflect the output they were mapped to, there's no way the nicely formatted results were accurate. Average duration column populated the total count output. Junior dev was cheerfully oblivious. It produced output shaped like the goal so it must have been right

28

In so many ways, LLMs are just the tip of the iceberg of bad ideology in software development. There have always been people that come into the field and develop heinously bad habits. Whether it's the "this is just my job, the only thing I think about outside work is my family" types or the juniors who only know how to copy paste snippets from web forums.

And look, I get it. I don't think 60-80 hour weeks are required to be successful. But I'm talking about people who are actively hostile to their own career paths, who seem to hate programming except that it pays good and let's them raise families. Hot take: that sucks. People selfishly obsessed with their own lineage and utterly incurious about the world or the thing they spend 8 hours a day doing suck, and they're bad for society.

The juniors are less of a drain on civilization because they at least can learn to do better. Or they used to could, because as another reply mentioned, there's no path from LLM slop to being a good developer. Not without the intervention of a more experienced dev to tell them what's wrong with the LLM output.

It takes all the joy out of the job too, something they've been working on for years. What makes this work interesting is understanding people's problems, working out the best way to model them, and building towards solutions. What they want the job to be is a slop factory: same as the dream of every rich asshole who thinks having half an idea is the same as working for years to fully realize an idea in all it's complexity and wonder.

They never have any respect for the work that takes because they've never done any work. And the next generation of implementers are being taught that there are no new ideas. You just ask the oracle to give you the answer.

16

When they say “art” they mean “metaphorical lead paint” and when they say “accessible” they mean “insidiously inserted into your neural pathways”

13
Croquettereply
sh.itjust.works

Art is already accessible. Plenty of artists that sells their art dirt cheap, or you can buy pen and papers at the dollar store.

What people want when they say "AI is making art accessible" is they want high quality professional art for dirt cheap.

12

I think they also want recognition/credit for spending 5 minutes (or less) typing some words at an image generator as if that were comparable to people who develop technical skills and then create effortful meaningful work just because the outputs are (superficially) similar.

8
Schadrachreply
lemmy.sdf.org

What people want when they say “AI is making art accessible” is they want high quality professional art for dirt cheap.

...and what their opposition means when they oppose it is "this line of work was supposed to be totally immune to automation, and I'm mad that it turns out not to be."

-4

...and this opposition means that our disagreements can only be perceived through the lens of personal faults.

4

There is already a lot of automation out there, and more is better, when used correctly. And that's not talking about the outright theft of the material from these artists it is trying to replace so badly.

3

See I would frame it as practicioners of some of the last few non-bullshit jobs (minimally bullshit jobs) - fields that by necessity require a kind of craft or art that is meaningful or rewarding - being routed around by economic forces that only wanted their work for bullshit results. Like, no matter how passionate you are about graphic design you probably didn't get into the field because shuffling the visuals every so often is X% better for customer engagement and conversion or whatever. But the businesses buying graphic design work are more interested in that than they ever were in making something beautiful or functional, and GenAI gives them the ability to get what they want more cheaply. As an unexpected benefit they also don't have to see you roll your eyes when they tell you it needs to be "more blue" and as an insignificant side effect it brings our culture one step closer to finally drowning the human soul in shit to advance the cause of glorious industry in it's unceasing march to An Even Bigger Number.

3
blarghlyreply
lemmy.world

That should be a big warning sign that the next generation of developers are not going to be very good.

Sounds like job security to me!

3
froztbytereply
awful.systems

"I want the people I teach to be worse than me" is a fucking nightmare of a want, I hope you learn to do better

15
blarghlyreply
lemmy.world

So there's this new thing they invented. It's called a joke. You should try them out sometime, they're fun!

0
blarghlyreply
lemmy.world

I dunno what kind of world you are living in where someone would make my comment not as a joke. Please find better friends.

-4
froztbytereply
awful.systems

"oh shit I got called out on my shitty haha-only-serious comment, better pretend I didn't mean it!" cool story bro

10
blarghlyreply
lemmy.world

If people say that sort of thing around you not as a joke, you need to spend your time with better people. I dunno what to tell you - humor is a great way to deal with shitty things in life. Dunno why you would want to get rid of it.

-3
froztbytereply
awful.systems

jesus fuck how do you fail to understand any post of this kind this badly

8

“How dare you not find me funny. I’m going to lecture you on humor. The lectures will continue until morale improves.”

9

maybe train your model better! I know I know, they were already supposed to be taking over the world... alas...

8
leminal.space

I dunno. I feel like the programmers who came before me could say the same thing about IDEs, Stack Overflow, and high level programming languages. Assembly looks like gobbledygook to me and they tell me I'm a Senior Dev.

If someone uses ChatGPT like I use StackOverflow, I'm not worried. We've been stealing code from each other since the beginning."Getting the answer" and then having to figure out how to plug it into the rest of the code is pretty much what we do.

There isn't really a direct path from an LLM to a good programmer. You can get good snippets, but "ChatGPT, build me a app" will be largely useless. The programmers who come after me will have to understand how their code works just as much as I do.

-3

fuck almighty I wish you and your friends would just do better

12
Croquettereply
sh.itjust.works

LLM as another tool is great. LLM to replace experienced coders is a nightmare waiting to happen.

IDEs, stack overflow, they are tools that makes the life of a developers a lot easier, they don't replace him.

-3
awful.systems

I mean past a certain point LLMs are strictly worse tools than Stack Overflow was on its worst day. IDEs have a bunch of features to help manage complexity and offload memorization. The fundamental task of understanding the code you're writing is still yours. Stack Overflow and other forums are basically crowdsourced mentorship programs. Someone out there knows the thing you need to and rather than cultivate a wide social network you can take advantage of mass communication. To use it well you still need to know what's happening, and if you don't you can at least trust that the information is out there somewhere that you might be able to follow up on as needed. LLM assistants are designed to create output that looks plausible and to tell the user what they want to hear. If the user is an idiot the LLM will do nothing to make them recognize that they're doing something wrong, much less help them fix it.

3
Croquettereply
sh.itjust.works

LLM are terrible because the data they were trained on is garbage, because companies don't want to pay for people to create a curated dataset to produce acceptable results.

The tech itself can be good in specific cases. But the way it is shoved in everything right now is terrible

-4
Croquettereply
sh.itjust.works

Looking at your history, keep on being edgy and contributing to the stereotype.

-2

What stereotype? The stereotype that awful.systems posters are hostile to people who praise LLMs? Good.

5
rumbareply
lemmy.zip

All the newbs were just copying lines from stackexchange before AI. The only real difference at this point is that the commenting is marginally better.

-10

Stack Overflow is far from perfect, but at least there is some level of vetting going on before it's copypasta'd.

14
lemmy.world

Hot take, people will look back on anyone who currently codes, as we look back on the NASA programmers who got the equipment and people to the moon.

They won't understand how they did so much with so little. You're all gourmet chefs in a future of McDonalds.

53
lemmy.inbutts.lol

Nah, we're plumbers in an age where everyone has decided to DIY their septic system.

Please, by all means, keep it up.

51

This is dead on! 99% of the fucking job is digital plumbing so the whole thing doesn't blow the up when (a) there's a slight deviation from the "ideal" data you were expecting, or (b) the stakeholders wanna make changes at the last minute to a part of the app that seems benign but is actually the crumbling bedrock this entire legacy monstrosity was built upon. Both scenarios are equally likely.

15
awful.systems

You say that, but as an operator->sysadmin->devops I'm increasingly disconcerted by the rise of "devops" who can't actually find their way around a Unix command prompt.

11
awful.systems

Hot take, people will look back on anyone who currently codes, as we look back on the NASA programmers who got the equipment and people to the moon.

I doubt it'll be anything that good for them. By my guess, those who currently code are at risk of suffering some guilt-by-association problems, as the AI bubble paints them as AI bros by proxy.

15

I think most people will ultimately associate chatbots with corporate overreach rather rank-and-file programmers. It's not like decades of Microsoft shoving stuff down our collective throat made people think particularly less of programmers, or think about them at all.

12

Meh, I have so many bangers laughing at actual AI bros that I could make my CV just all be sneers on them, I think this particular corner of the internet is quite safe

7
corbinreply
awful.systems

Perhaps! But not because we adopted vibe coding. I do have faith in our ability to climb out of the Turing tarpit (WP, Esolangs) eventually, but only by coming to a deeper understanding of algorithmic complexity.

Also, from a completely different angle: when I was a teenager, I could have a programmable calculator with 18MHz Z80 in my hand for $100. NASA programmers today have the amazing luxury of the RAD750, a 110MHz PowerPC chipset. We're already past the gourmet phase and well into fusion.

12

NASA programmers grow more powerful by the day. It’s only a matter of time before they reach AGI

7

My first actual real life project was building a data analytics platform while keeping the budget to a minimum. With some clever parallelism and aggressive memory usage optimisation I made it work on a single lowest-tier Azure VM, costing like $50 to run monthly, while the measurable savings for the business from using the platform are now measured in the millions.

Don Knuth didn't write all those volumes on how software is an art for you to use fucking Node.JS you rubes, you absolute clowns

7

I got an AI PR in one of my projects once. It re-implemented a feature that already existed. It had a bug that did not exist in the already-existing feature. It placed the setting for activating that new feature right after the setting for activating the already-existing feature.

46

Baldur Bjarnason's given his thoughts on Bluesky:

My current theory is that the main difference between open source and closed source when it comes to the adoption of “AI” tools is that open source projects generally have to ship working code, whereas closed source only needs to ship code that runs.

I’ve heard so many examples of closed source projects that get shipped but don’t actually work for the business. And too many examples of broken closed source projects that are replacing legacy code that was both working just fine and genuinely secure. Pure novelty-seeking

43
awful.systems

The headlines said that 30% of code at Microsoft was AI now! Huge if true!

Something like MS word has like 20-50 million lines of code. MS altogether probably has like a billion lines of code. 30% of that being AI generated is infeasible given the timeframe. People just ate this shit up. AI grifting is so fucking easy.

39
froztbytereply
awful.systems

yeah, the "some projects" bit is applicable, as is the "machine generated" phrasing

@gsuberland pointed out elsewhere on fedi just how much of the VS-/MS- ecosystem does an absolute fucking ton of code generation

(which is entirely fine, ofc. tons of things do that and it exists for a reason. but there's a canyon in the sand between A and B)

13
swlabrreply
awful.systems

All compiled code is machine generated! BRB gonna clang and IPO, bye awful.systems! Have fun being poor

13
frezikreply
midwest.social

No joke, you probably could make tweaks to LLVM, call it "AI", and rake in the VC funds.

10
froztbytereply
awful.systems

(not in the compute side, but in the lying-obstructionist hustle side)

10
swlabrreply
awful.systems

would I happier if I abandoned my scruples? I hope I or nobody I know finds out.

9

For some definition of "happiness", yes. It's increasingly clear that the only way to get ahead is with some level of scam. In fact, I'm pretty sure Millennials will not be able to retire to a reasonable level of comfort without accepting some amount of unethical behavior to get there. Not necessarily Slipp'n Jimmy levels of scam, but just stuff like participating in a basic stock market investment with a tax advantaged account.

9
blarghlyreply
lemmy.world

I thought it could totally be true - that devs at MS were just churning out AI crap code like there was no tomorrow, and their leaders were cheering on their "productivity", since more code = more better, right?

11

From that angle, sure. I’m more sneering at the people who saw what they wanted to see, and the people that were saying “this is good, actually!!!”

7
leminal.space

30% of code is standard boilerplate: setters, getters, etc that my IDE builds for me without calling it AI. It's possible the claim is true, but it's terribly misleading at best.

-4
swlabrreply
awful.systems
  1. Perhaps you didn’t read the linked article. Nadella didn’t claim that 30% of MS’s code was written by AI. What he said was garbled up to the eventual headline.
  2. We don’t have to play devil’s advocate for a hyped-up headline that misquotes what an AI glazer said, dawg.
  3. “Existing code generation codes can write 30%” doesn’t imply that AI possibly/plausibly wrote 30% of MS’s code. There’s no logical connection. Please dawg, I beg you, think critically about this.
13
swlabrreply
awful.systems

Man. If this LLM stuff sticks around, we’ll have an epidemic of early onset dementia.

9
Soyweiserreply
awful.systems

If the stories lf covid related cognitive decline are aue we are going to have a great time. Worse than lead paint.

10
swlabrreply
awful.systems

“Oh man, this brain fog I have sure makes it hard to think. Guess I’ll use my trusty LLM! ChatGPT says lead paint is tastier and better for your brain than COVID? Don’t mind if I do!”

11

I'm on a diet of rocks, glue on my pizza, lead paint, and covid infections, according to Grok this is called the Mr Burns method which should prevent diseases, as they all work together to block all bad impulses. Can't wait to try this new garlic oil I made, using LLM instructions. It even had these cool bubbles while fermenting, nature is great.

7

I've been beating this drum for like 4~5y but: I don't think the tech itself is going anywhere. published, opensourced, etc etc - the bell can't be unrung, the horses have departed the stable

but

I do also argue that an extremely large amount of wind in the sails right now is because of the constellation of VC/hype//etc shit

can't put a hard number on this, but .... I kind see a very massive reduction; in scope, in competence, in relevance. so much of this shit (esp. the "but my opensource model is great!" flavour) is so fucking reliant on "oh yeah this other entity had a couple fuckpiles of cash with which to train", and once that (structurally) evaporates...

7
programming.dev

No the fuck it's not

I'm a pretty big proponent of FOSS AI, but none of the models I've ever used are good enough to work without a human treating it like a tool to automate small tasks. In my workflow there is no difference between LLMs and fucking grep for me.

People who think AI codes well are shit at their job

33
V0ldekreply
awful.systems

In my workflow there is no difference between LLMs and fucking grep for me.

Well grep doesn't hallucinate things that are not actually in the logs I'm grepping so I think I'll stick to grep.

(Or ripgrep rather)

28
froztbytereply
awful.systems

(I don't mean to take aim at you with this despite how irked it'll sound)

I really fucking hate how many computer types go "ugh I can't" at regex. the full spectrum of it, sure, gets hairy. but so many people could be well served by decently learning grouping/backrefs/greedy match/char-classes (which is a lot of what most people seem to reach for[0])

that said, pomsky is an interesting thing that might in fact help a lot of people go from "I want $x" as a human expression of intent, to "I have $y" as a regex expression

[0] - yeah okay sometimes you also actually need a parser. that's a whole other conversation. I'm talking about "quickly hacking shit up in a text editor buffer in 30s" type cases here

11
swlabrreply
awful.systems

Hey. I can do regex. It's specifically grep I have beef with. I never know off the top of my head how to invoke it. Is it -e? -r? -i? man grep? More like, man, get grep the hell outta here!

8
froztbytereply
awful.systems

now listen, you might think gnu tools are offensively inconsistent, and to that I can only say

find(1)

11

find(1)? You better find(1) some other place to be, buster. In this house, we use the file explorer search bar

12
swlabrreply
awful.systems

If I start using this and add grep functionality to my day-to-day life, I can’t complain about not knowing how to invoke grep in good conscience, dawg. I can’t hold my shitposting back like that, dawg!

jk that looks useful. Thanks!

4

The cheatsheet and tealdeer projects are awesome. It's one of my (many) favorite things about the user experience honestly. Really grateful for those projects

4
lemmy.world

The funny thing is, I’m just going with the joke, I’m actually pretty good with regex lol

6
vivendireply
programming.dev

Hallucinations become almost a non issue when working with newer models, custom inference, multishot prompting and RAG

But the models themselves fundamentally can't write good, new code, even if they're perfectly factual

-10
awful.systems

If LLM hallucinations ever become a non-issue I doubt I'll be needing to read a deeply nested buzzword laden lemmy post to first hear about it.

17
vivendireply
programming.dev

You need to run the model yourself and heavily tune the inference, which is why you haven't heard from it because most people think using shitGPT is all there is with LLMs. How many people even have the hardware to do so anyway?

I run my own local models with my own inference, which really helps. There are online communities you can join (won't link bcz Reddit) where you can learn how to do it too, no need to take my word for it

-7

ah yes, the problem with cryptoLLMs is all the shitcoinsGPTs

did it sting when the crypto bubble popped? is that what made you like this?

9
scruiserreply
awful.systems

The promptfarmers can push the hallucination rates incrementally lower by spending 10x compute on training (and training on 10x the data and spending 10x on runtime cost) but they're already consuming a plurality of all VC funding so they can't 10x many more times without going bust entirely. And they aren't going to get them down to 0%, hallucinations are intrinsic to how LLMs operate, no patch with run-time inference or multiple tries or RAG will eliminate that.

And as for newer models... o3 actually had a higher hallucination rate because trying to squeeze rational logic out of the models with fine-tuning just breaks them in a different direction.

I will acknowledge in domains with analytically verifiable answers you can check the LLMs that way, but in that case, its no longer primarily an LLM, you've got an entire expert system or proof assistant or whatever that can operate independently of the LLM and the LLM is just providing creative input.

13
swlabrreply
awful.systems

We should maximise hallucinations, actually. That is, we should hack the environmental controls of the data centers to be conducive for fungi growth, and flood them with magic mushrooms spores. We can probably get the rats on board by selling it as a different version of nuking the data centers.

11
scruiserreply
awful.systems

What if [tokes joint] hallucinations are actually, like, proof the models are almost at human level man!

11
swlabrreply
awful.systems

stopping this bit here because I don't want to continue writing a JRE episode

9
vivendireply
programming.dev

O3 is trash, same with closedAI

I've had the most success with Dolphin3-Mistral 24B (open model finetuned on open data) and Qwen series

Also lower model temperature if you're getting hallucinations

For some reason everyone is still living in 2023 when AI is remotely mentioned. There is a LOT you can criticize LLMs for, some bullshit you regurgitate without actually understanding isn't one

You also don't need 10x the resources where tf did you even hallucinate that from

-7
froztbytereply
awful.systems

this isn't the place to decide which seed generator you want for your autoplag runtime

9
vivendireply
programming.dev

My most honest goal is to educate people which on lemmy is always met with hate. people love to hate, parroting the same old nonsense that someone else taught them.

If you insist on ignorance then be ignorant in peace, don't try such misguided attempts at sneer

There are things in which LLMs suck. And there are things that you wrongly believe as part of this bullshit twitter civil war.

-6

My most honest goal is to educate people

oh and I suppose you can back that up with verifiable facts, yes?

and that you, yourself, can stand as a sole beacon against the otherwise regularly increasing evidence and studies that both indicate toward and also prove your claims to be full of shit? you are the saviour that can help enlighten us poor unenlightened mortals?

sounds very hard. managing your calendar must be quite a skill

8
scruiserreply
awful.systems

GPT-1 is 117 million parameters, GPT-2 is 1.5 billion parameters, GPT-3 is 175 billion, GPT-4 is undisclosed but estimated at 1.7 trillion. Token needed for training and training compute scale linearly (edit: actually I'm wrong, looking at the wikipedia page... so I was wrong, it is even worse for your case than I was saying, training compute scales quadratically with model size, it is going up 2 OOM for every 10x of parameters) with model size. They are improving ... but only getting a linear improvement in training loss for a geometric increase in model size, training time. A hypothetical GPT-5 would have 10 trillion training parameters and genuinely need to be AGI to have the remotest hope of paying off it's training. And it would need more quality tokens than they have left, they've already scrapped the internet (including many copyrighted sources and sources that requested not to be scrapped). So that's exactly why OpenAI has been screwing around with fine-tuning setups with illegible naming schemes instead of just releasing a GPT-5. But fine-tuning can only shift what you're getting within distribution, so it trades off in getting more hallucinations or overly obsequious output or whatever the latest problem they are having.

Lower model temperatures makes it pick it's best guess for next token as opposed to randomizing among probable guesses, they don't improve on what the best guess is and you can still get hallucinations even picking the "best" next token.

And lol at you trying to reverse the accusation against LLMs by accusing me of regurgitating/hallucinating.

8

Small scale models, like Mistral Small or Qwen series, are achieving SOTA performance with lower than 50 billion parameters. QwQ32 could already rival shitGPT with 32 billion parameters, and the new Qwen3 and Gemma (from google) are almost black magic.

Gemma 4B is more comprehensible than GPT4o, the performance race is fucking insane.

ClosedAI is 90% hype. Their models are benchmark princesses, but they need huuuuuuge active parameter sizes to effectively reach their numbers.

Everything said in this post is independently verifiable by taking 5 minutes to search shit up, and yet you couldn't even bother to do that.

-7

God, this cannot be overstated. An LLM’s sole function is to hallucinate. Anything stated beyond that is overselling.

9
lemmy.ml

No the fuck it's not

Because it's a upscaled translation tech maybe?

9
vivendireply
programming.dev

These views on LLMs are simplistic. As a wise man once said, "check yoself befo yo wreck yoself", I recommend more education thus

LLM structures arw over hyped, but they're also not that simple

-4
lemmy.ml

From what i know from recent articles about retracing LLM indepth, they are indeed best suited for language translation and perfectly explain the halucinations. And i think i've read somewhere that this was the originally intended purpose of the tech?

Ah, here, and here more tabloid-ish.

3

many of the proponents of things in this field will propose/argue $x thing to be massively valuable for $x

thing is, that doesn't often work out

yes, there's some value in the tech for translation outcomes. to anyone even mildly online, "so are language teaching apps/sites using this?" is probably a very nearby question. and rightly so!

and then when you go digging into how that's going in practice, wow fuck damn doesn't that Glorious AI Future sheen just fall right off...

5
auraithxreply
lemmy.dbzer0.com

There are plenty of open issues on open source repos it could open PRs for though?

-5
Blackmistreply
feddit.uk

I'm guessing if it would actually work for that, somebody would have done it by now.

But it probably just does it's usual thing of bullshitting something that looks like code, only now you're wasting the time of maintainers as well who have to confirm that it is bobbins.

20

Yea it's a problem already for security bugs, llms just waste maintainers time and make them angry.

They are useless and make more work for programmers, even on python and js codebases that they are trained on the most and are the "easiest".

15
Natanoxreply
discuss.tchncs.de

It's already doing that, some FOSS projects regularly get weird PRs that on first glance look good, but if you look closer are either total nonsense or riddled with bugs. Especially awful are security-related PRs; although those are never made in good faith, that's usually grifting (throwing AI at the wall trying to cash in as many bounties as possible). The project lead of curl recently announced that anyone who posts a PR that's obviously AI, or is made with AI, will get banned.

Like, it's really good as a learning tool as long as you don't blindly believe everything it says given you can ask stuff in natural language and it will resolve possible knowledge dependencies for you that you'd otherwise get stuck on in official docs, and since you can ask contextual questions receiving contextual answers (no logical abstraction). But code generation… please don't.

3
froztbytereply
awful.systems

it’s really good as a learning tool as long as you don’t blindly believe everything it says given you can ask stuff in natural language

the poster: "it's really good as a learning tool"

the poster: "but don't blindly believe it"

the learner: "how should I know when to believe it?"

the poster: "check everything"

the learner: "so you're saying I should just read the actual documentation and/or source?"

the poster: "how are you going to ask that anything? how can you fondle something that isn't a prompt?!"

the learner: "thanks for your time, I think I'm going to find another class"

17
froztbytereply
awful.systems

Nice conversation you had right there in your head

that you recognize none of this is telling. that someone else got it, more so.

I assume

you could just ask, you know. since you seem so comfortable fondling prompts, not sure why you wouldn't ask a person. is it because they might tell you to fuck off?

I’ve taken a closer look...

fuck off with the unrequested advertising. never mind that no-one asked you for how you felt for some fucking piece of shit. oh, you feel happy that the logo is a certain tint of ? bully for you, now fuck off and do something worthwhile

That makes it a good tool

a tool you say? wow, sure glad you're going to replace your *spins the wheel* Punctured Car Tyre with *spins the wheel again* Needlenose Pliers!

think I’m some AI worshipper, fuck no. They’re amoral as fuck

so, you think there's moral problems, but only sometimes? it's supes okay to do your version of leveraged exploitation? cool, thanks for letting us know

those very few truly FOSS ones

oh yeah, right, the "truly FOSS ones"! tell me again how those are trained - who's funding that compute? are the licenses contextually included in the model definition?

wait, hold on! why are you squealing away like a deflating balloon?! those are actual questions! you're the one who brought up morals!

Otherwise you’ll end up in a social corner filled with bitterness

I've met people like you at parties. they're often popular, but they're never fun. and I always regret it.

There are technologies that are utter bullshit like NFTs. However (unfortunately?) that isn’t the case for AI

citation. fucking. needed.

9

Holy shit, get some help. Given how nonsensically off-the-rails you just went you clearly need it.

-9

Otherwise you’ll end up in a social corner filled with bitterness

This is a standard Internet phenomenon (I generalize) called a Sneer Club, i.e. people who enjoy getting together and picking on designated targets. Sneer Clubs (I expect) attract people with high Dark Triad characteristics, which is (I suspect) where Asshole Internet Atheists come from - if you get a club together for the purpose of sneering at religious people, it doesn't matter that God doesn't actually exist, the club attracts psychologically f'd-up people. Bullies, in a word, people who are powerfully reinforced by getting in what feels like good hits on Designated Targets, in the company of others doing the same and congratulating each other on it.

8
selfreply
awful.systems

holy fuck this is so many words to say so little

so congrats I’m upgrading your ban and also pruning you from the thread

5

on the one hand I feel for other people who'll maybe read this thread somewhen down the line

on the other, it's not exactly like I clipped words in my post

5

Like, it’s really good as a learning tool

Fuck you were doing so well in the first half, ahhh,

16
V0ldekreply
awful.systems

Hey, Devin! Really impressive that the product best known for literally lying about all of its functionality in its release video still somehow exists and you can pay it money. Isn't the free market great.

14
awful.systems

Good hustle Gerard, great job starting this chudstorm. I’m having a great time

26
froztbytereply
awful.systems

the prompt-related pivots really do bring all the chodes to the yard

and they're definitely like "mine's better than yours"

20
scruiserreply
awful.systems

The latest twist I'm seeing isn't blaming your prompting (although they're still eager to do that), it's blaming your choice of LLM.

"Oh, you're using shitGPT 4.1-4o-o3 mini _ro_plus for programming? You should clearly be using Gemini 3.5.07 pro-doubleplusgood, unless you need something locally run, then you should be using DeepSek_v2_r_1 on your 48 GB VRAM local server! Unless you need nice sounding prose, then you actually need Claude Limmerick 3.7.01. Clearly you just aren't trying the right models, so allow me to educate you with all my prompt fondling experience. You're trying to make some general point? Clearly you just need to try another model."

16
awful.systems

this post has also broken containment in the wider world, the video's got thousands of views, I got 100+ subscribers on youtube and another $25/mo of patrons

17
scruiserreply
awful.systems

Posts that explode like this are fun and yet also a reminder why the banhammer is needed.

9

Unlike the PHP hammer, the banhammer is very useful for a lot of things. Especially sealion clubbing.

8

The only people impressed by AI code are people who have the level to be impressed by AI code. Same for AI playing chess.

24

Damn, this is powerful.

If AI code was great, and empowered non-programmers, then open source projects should have already committed hundreds of thousands of updates. We should have new software releases daily.

23

You can hardly get online these days without hearing some AI booster talk about how AI coding is going to replace human programmers.

Mostly said by tech bros and startups.

That should really tell you everything you need to know.

20
lemm.ee

Had a presentation where they told us they were going to show us how AI can automate project creation. In the demo, after several attempts at using different prompts, failing and trying to fix it manually, they gave up.

I don't think it's entirely useless as it is, it's just that people have created a hammer they know gives something useful and have stuck it with iterative improvements that have a lot compensation beneath the engine. It's artificial because it is being developed to artificially fulfill prompts, which they do succeed at.

When people do develop true intelligence-on-demand, you'll know because you will lose your job, not simply have another tool at your disposal. The prompts and flow of conversations people pay to submit to the training is really helping advance the research into their replacements.

19
lemmy.dbzer0.com

My opinion is it can be good when used narrowly.

Write a concise function that takes these inputs, does this, and outputs a dict with this information.

But so often it wants to be overly verbose. And it's not so smart as to understand much of the project for any meaningful length of time. So it will redo something that already exists. It will want to touch something that is used in multiple places without caring or knowing how it's used.

But it still takes someone to know how the puzzle pieces go together. To architect it and lay it out. To really know what the inputs and outputs need to be. If someone gives it free reign to do whatever, it'll just make slop.

-2
swlabrreply
awful.systems

That’s the problem, isn’t it? If it can only maybe be good when used narrowly, what’s the point? If you’ve managed to corner a subproblem down to where an LLM can generate the code for it, you’ve already done 99% of the work. At that point you’re better off just coding it yourself. At that point, it’s not “good when used narrowly”, it’s useless.

20
lemmy.dbzer0.com

It's a tool. It doesn't replace a programmer. But it makes writing some things faster. Give any tool to an idiot and they'll fuck things up. But a craftsman can use it to make things a little faster, because they know when and how to use it. And more importantly when not to use it.

-7

The “tool” branding only works if you formulate it like this: in a world where a hammer exists and is commonly used to force nails into solid objects, imagine another tool that requires you to first think of shoving a nail into wood. You pour a few bottles of water into the drain, whisper some magic words, and hope that the tool produces the nail forcing function you need. Otherwise you keep pouring out bottles of water and hoping that it does a nail moving motion. It eventually kind of does it, but not exactly, so you figure out a small tweak which is to shove the tool at the nail at the same time as it does its action so that the combined motion forces the nail into your desired solid. Do you see the problem here?

13

It’s a tool.

(if you persist to stay with this dogshit idiotic "opinion":) please crawl into a hole and stay there

fucking what the fuck is with you absolute fucking morons and not understand the actual literal concept of tools

read some fucking history goddammit

(hint: the amorphous shifting blob, with a non-reliable output, not a tool; alternative, please, go off about how using a php hammer is definitely the way to get a screw in)

9

There's something similar going on with air traffic control. 90% of their job could be automated (and it has been technically feasible to do so for quite some time), but we do want humans to be able to step in when things suddenly get complicated. However, if they're not constantly practicing those skills, then they won't be any good when an emergency happens and the automation gets shut off.

The problem becomes one of squishy human psychology. Maybe you can automate 90% of the job, but you intentionally roll that down to 70% to give humans a safe practice space. But within that difference, when do you actually choose to give the human control?

It's a tough problem, and the benefits to solving it are obvious. Nobody has solved it for air traffic control, which is why there's no comprehensive ATC automation package out there. I don't know that we can solve it for programmers, either.

7

My opinion is it can be good when used narrowly.

ah, as narrowly as I intend to regard your opinion? got it

6
awful.systems

If LangChain was written via VibeCoding then that would explain a lot.

18
murtaza64reply
programming.dev

so what are the sentiments about langchain? I was recently working with it to try to build some automatic PR generation scripts but I didn't have the best experience understanding how to use the library. the documentation has been quite messy, repetitive and disorganized—somehow both verbose and missing key details. but it does the job I wanted it to, namely letting me use an LLM with tool calling and custom tools in a script

-6

Given the volatility of the space I don't think it could have been doing stuff much better, doubt it's getting out of alpha before the bubble bursts and stuff settles down a bit, if at all.

Automatic pr generation sounds like something that would need a prompt and a ten-line script rather than langchain, but it also seems both questionable and unnecessary.

If someone wants to know an LLM's opinion on what the changes in a branch are meant to accomplish they should be encouraged to ask it themselves, no need to spam the repository.

10

I've deployed LangChain to production shudders. My use case involved sending images results back to the "agent" and that use case is an after thought for many of these services. I ended up extending the Gemini Vertex client to fake it. The artifacts system is basically pass around a dictionary and pray both ends agree on the shape.

This is not an endorsement of LLMs in general. I'm working to replace it with a decision tree.

1
leftzeroreply
lemmynsfw.com

I don't know what this has to do with this thread, but maybe ask Hajime Sorayama, he kind of came up with the whole concept of sexy robots.

10
V0ldekreply
awful.systems

Sorry for being late, busy wanking off to the sexy robot in the article. So ye, anyway, why'd you do that?

8

ChatGPT, please tailor my resume and write me a cover letter for all programming positions at teledildonics companies, thanks!

5

Coding is hard, and its also intimidating for non-coders. I always used to look at coders as kind of a different kind of human, a special breed. Just like some people just glaze over when you bring up math concepts but are otherwise very intelligent and artistic, but they can't bridge that gap when you bring up even algebra. Well, if you are one of those people that want to learn coding its a huge gap, and the LLMs can literally explain everything to you step by step like you are 5. Learning to code is so much easier now, talking to an always helpful LLM is so much better than forums or stack overflow. Maybe it will create millions of crappy coders, but some of them will get better, some will get great. But the LLM's will make it possible for more people to learn, which means that my crypto scam now has the chance to flourish.

15
lemmy.zip

Wait what this looks exactly like the art in the dentist office I go to. They have superheroes doing dental things, like Catwoman aggressively using their nails to pick at her teeth lol. Is this person near Seattle do you know?

8
swlabrreply
awful.systems

Ah so you’re consistently choosing to make us horny!!!

7
Soyweiserreply
awful.systems

I saw some people were quite mad about the thing we are now joking about on bsky.

6
swlabrreply
awful.systems

Specifically about the pivot to AI art??? I gotta know…

4
Soyweiserreply
awful.systems

The one a bit iffy big boobed bald robot was pointed at as a 'stop doing this', as in a bit of a (understandable, not that I totally agree, do think we should he more careful. And it would be bad if all it was was 'unsexy' male and 'sexy' robots which it doesnt seem to be (see women sleeping on robot image from a while back) some less heteronormativity would he nice however, bring out the biker bear bots) streak they now seemingly not want to see bald robot women re ai/robots ever again. So it was more the final drop and an example than people being really mad at pivot.

I didn't point out that the other similar robot wasnt bald but head dread cables. (I didnt interact at all iirc, might have liked an post) because I know might be a hot button issue as well (esp in the usa, and well im not American, so not my place to even tell how much of an issue it even would be, and it would just be more oil). Prob for the best nobody linked the thread here in those comments.

E: not saying this to pick a fight, so please don't go searching for the thread etc. Esp as we all prob agree for 99% with each other and it is just squabbling over the importance of the final 1%, and I'm not, nor should any of you be Rutger Bergman (For context, he started blocking people who quote tweeted him and agreed a bit too aggressively, so much for building coalitions. Enjoy your EA but Dutch organization).

5
swlabrreply
awful.systems

Oh. I mean there certainly are good points to be made about this sort of thing (lack of representation of a diversity of body types is probably the most correct one to think of). That one guy phrased his concern with such a specific mix of virtue signalling and horn-dogging that it had to be called out. And it was so specific that I wanted to know if other people were saying the same thing.

I stand by my opinion that the art we were talking about wasn’t particularly sexy. You could validly argue that there was objectification of women going on in the art (a woman coded robot is literally an objectified woman) but that wasn’t what that one guy was saying. Women of all shapes and sizes exist! They can be as sexy or unsexy as they want! A woman existing in a picture doesn’t automatically make the picture sexy, unless you’re a gooner-pilled moron. And in general we shouldn’t be commenting on women’s bodies where it isn’t appropriate.

But anyway, powering up my homespun BeefGPT to find those specific skeets, you can’t stop me 😡😡😡

6

Yes, I agree, and the point of the bsky thread was that all AI/robot stories get a picture with a conventionally attractive bald woman. Which is bad. Which is a bit different than the 'why do you want me to fuck your cartoon?' thing (even if it prob came from a similar place, it is very annoying that this is often the default robot body (or worse, the default female robot body, while the male one is Bender (see also this specific artist for pivot))).

E: Counterpoint (but wtf is up with that description 'womens emotions'?)

5
awful.systems

I didn't see that thread. But I stand by the image as being perfect for the story on several specific points.

3

Yeah, the image was quite tame and I don't think we should ban all female robots, I do agree with the point that there are too many conventionally attractive bald female coded robots being used as imagery next to robots, but I also don't think we should overreact and remove them all. Not like pivot has not used a lot of other robot images, including Rosey. And part of the problem pivot is talking about is that the pro robot/ai people see robots/ai as doing the roles beneath them (ai as maid/nurse/secretary), so an image like that while being critical also fits. And it also is just part of the American cartoon artstyle the Russian artist is going for. It was just a small badly timed thread on bsky anyway (as it was at the same time as the other guy here), lets not make a big thing out of it.

2

AI isn't bad when supervised by a human who knows what they're doing. It's good to speed up programmers if used properly. But business execs don't see that.

Even when I supervise it, I always have to step in to clean up it's mess, tell it off because it randomly renames my variables and functions because it thinks it knows better and oversteps. Needs to be put in it's place like a misbehaving dog, lol

3
[deleted]reply
lemmy.world

Google used to return helpful results that answered questions without needing to be corrected before it started returning AI slop. So maybe that is true now, but only because the search results are the same AI slop as the AI.

For example, results in stack overflow generally include some discussion about why a solution addressed the issue that provided extra context for why you might use it or do something else instead. AI slop just returns a result which may or may not be correct but it will be presented as a solution without any context.

27
Feydreply
programming.dev

The funny thing about stack overflow is that the vocal detractors have a kernel of truth to their complaints about elitism, but if you interact with them enough you realize they're often the reason the gate keeping is necessary to keep the quality high.

11
V0ldekreply
awful.systems

I used to answer new questions on SO daily a few years back and 50% of all questions are basically unanswerable.

You'd also have the nice September Effect when a semester started and every other question would be someone just copy pasting their homework verbatim and being very surprised we closed it in like a minute.

The thing about that is that literally anyone can answer SO questions. Like try and do that. Pick a language or a tech you're most familiar with, filter that tag and sort by new. Click on every new question. After an hour you'll understand just why most questions have to be closed immediately to keep the site sane.

Whenever I see criticism of SO that's like "oh they'll just close your question for no reason" I can't help but think okay, there's overwhelming chance you're just one of Those and not an innocent casualty of an overeager closer.

7

I remember in my OS course we were advised to practice good “netiquette” if we were going to go bother the fine folks on stack overflow. Times have changed

4
Honytawkreply
lemmy.zip

Google became shit not because of AI but because of SEO.

The enshitification was going on long before OpenAI was even a thing. Remember when we had to add the "reddit" tag just to make sure to get actual results instead of some badly written bloated text?

7
sh.itjust.works

Google search became shit when they made the guy in charge of ads also in charge of search.

14
froztbytereply
awful.systems

this is actually the correct case - it is both written about (prabhakar raghavan, look him up), and the exact mechanics of how they did it were detailed in documents surfaced in one of the lawsuits that google recently lost (the ones that found they them to be a monopoly)

9

Ackshually, Google became shit when they started posturing as a for-profit entity. Gather round, comrades, let us sing the internationale

4

Stack overflow resulted in people with highly specialised examples that wouldn't suit your application. It's easier to just ask an AI to write a simple loop for you whenever you forget a bit of syntax

-12
Feydreply
programming.dev

Man i remember eclipse doing code completion for for loops and other common snippets in like 2005. LLM riders don't even seem to know what tools have been in use for decades and think using an LLM for these things is somehow revolutionary.

18
selfreply
awful.systems

the promptfondlers that make their way into our threads sometimes try to brag about how the LLM is the only way to do basic editor tasks, like wrapping symbols in brackets or diffing logs. it’s incredible every time

21

Forever in my mind, the guy who said on another post he uses an LLM to convert strings to uppercase when that's literally a builtin command in VSCode, give people cannons and they're start shooting mosquitoes with them every fucking time

7

You've inadvertently pointed out the exact problem: LLM approaches can (unreliably) manage boilerplate and basic stuff but fail at anything more advanced, and by handling the basic stuff they give people false confidence that leads to them submitting slop (that gets rejected) to open source projects. LLMs, as the linked pivot-to-ai post explains, aren't even at the level of occasionally making decent open source contributions.

16

wow imagine needing to understand the code you’re dealing with and not just copypasting a bunch of shit around

reading documentation and source code must be an excruciating amount of exercise for your poor brain - it has to even do something! poor thing

8

Fun fact, SO is not a place to go to ask for trivial syntax and it's expressly off-topic, because guess what, people answering questions on SO are not your personal fucking google searchers

6
selfreply
awful.systems

also, fucking ew:

Needs to be put in it’s place like a misbehaving dog, lol

why do AI guys always have weird power fantasies about how they interact with their slop machines

25

It’s almost as if they have problematic conceptions (or lack thereof) of exploitation and power dynamics!

8

given your posts in this thread, I don’t think I trust your judgement on what less annoying looks like

14

autoplag isn’t bad when supervised by a human

even when I supervise it, it’s bad

my god you people are a whole kind of poster and it fucking shows

17

At work I use gpt to give me snippets of code (not in my ide, I use neovim btw), check my stuff for typos/logical errors, suggest solutions to some problems, debugging. I was learning programming on my own in 2010s, and this is a lot faster than crawling over wikis/stackoverflow (albeit probably makes me dumber).

Anyone who says llm will replace programmers in 1-2 years is either stupid or a grifter.

2

I generally try to avoid it, as a lot can be learned from trying to fix weird bugs, but I did recently have a 500 line soup code vue component, and I used chatgpt to try to fix it. It didn't fix the issue, and it made up 2 other issues.
I eventually found the wrongly-inverted angle bracket.

My point is, its useful if you try to learn from it, though its a shit teacher.

7
vga
sopuli.xyz

So how do you tell apart AI contributions to open source from human ones?

0
awful.systems

To get a bit meta for a minute, you don't really need to.

The first time a substantial contribution to a serious issue in an important FOSS project is made by an LLM with no conditionals, the pr people of the company that trained it are going to make absolutely sure everyone and their fairy godmother knows about it.

Until then it's probably ok to treat claims that chatbots can handle a significant bulk of non-boilerplate coding tasks in enterprise projects by themselves the same as claims of haunted houses; you don't really need to debunk every separate witness testimony, it's self evident that a world where there is an afterlife that also freely intertwines with daily reality would be notably and extensively different to the one we are currently living in.

23
Auxreply
feddit.uk

There are AI contributions happening all the time, lol. What are you even talking about?

-10
selfreply
awful.systems

if it’s undisclosed, it’s obvious from the universally terrible quality of the code, which wastes volunteer reviewers’ time in a way that legitimate contributions almost never do. the “contributors” who lean on LLMs also can’t answer questions about the code they didn’t write or help steer the review process, so that’s a dead giveaway too.

13
Auxreply
feddit.uk

Bad code quality is a myth.

-10

I'm sorry you work at such a shit job

or, I guess, I'm sorry for your teammates if you're the reason it's a shit job

either way it seems to suck for you, maybe you should level your skills up a bit and look at doing things a bit better

16

"If <insert your favourite GC'ed language here> had true garbage collection, most programs would delete themselves upon execution." -Robert Feynman

6

the worst programmer is in captivity (banned)

the galaxy is at peace

6
KubeRootreply
discuss.tchncs.de

GitHub, for one, colors the icon red for AI contributions and green/purple for human ones.

13
vgareply
sopuli.xyz

Ah, right, so we're differentiating contributions made by humans with AI from some kind of pure AI contributions?

-8
KubeRootreply
discuss.tchncs.de

It's a joke, because rejected PRs show up as red on GitHub, open (pending) ones as green, and merged as purple, implying AI code will naturally get rejected.

22

I appreciate you explaining it. My LLM wasn't working so I didn't understand the joke

7

Jesus Howard Christ how did you manage to even open a browser to type this in

9

yeah I just want to point this out

myself and a bunch of other posters gave you solid ways that we determine which PRs are LLM slop, but it was really hard to engage with those posts so instead you’re down here aggressively not getting a joke because you desperately need the people rejecting your shitty generated code to be wrong

with all due respect: go fuck yourself

4
lemmy.world

I treat AI as a new intern that doesn't know how to code well. You need to code review everything, but it's good for fast generation. Just don't trust more than a couple of lines at a time.

-1
V0ldekreply
awful.systems

I treat AI as a new intern that doesn’t know how to code well

This statement makes absolutely zero sense to me. The purpose of having a new intern and reviewing their code is for them to learn and become a valuable member of the team, right? Like we don't give them coding tasks just for shits and giggles to correct later. You can't turn an AI into a senior dev by mentoring it, however the fuck you'd imagine that process?

12

You’ve fallen for one of the classic blunders: assuming that OP thinks that humans can grow and develop with nurturing

8
ShortFusereply
lemmy.world

You can't turn an AI into a senior dev by mentoring it, however the fuck you'd imagine that process?

Never said any of this.

You can tell AI commands like "this is fine, but X is flawed. Use this page to read how the spec works." And it'll respond with the corrections. Or you can say "this would leak memory here". And it'll note it and make corrections. After about 4 to 5 checks you'll actually have usable code.

-6
V0ldekreply
awful.systems

But what's the point of having that if it doesn't result in improvement on the other side? Like you're doing hard work to correct code and respond with feedback but you're putting that into the void to no one's benefit.

Hiring an intern makes sense. It's an investment. Hiring an AI at the same skill level makes negative sense.

9
ShortFusereply
lemmy.world

Not all projects needs VC money to get off the ground. I'm not going to hire somebody for a pet project because CMake's syntax is foreign to me, or a pain in the ass to write. Or I'm not interested in spending 2 hours clicking through their documentation.

Or if you ever used DirectX the insane "code by committee" way it works. Documentation is ass and at best you need code samples. Hell, I had to ask CoPilot to tell me how something in DXCompiler worked and it told me it worked because the 5000 line cpp file had it somewhere in there. It was right, and to this day, I have no idea how it came up with the correct answer.

There is no money in most FOSS. Maybe you'll find somebody who's interested in your project, but it's extremely rare somebody latches on. At best, you both have your own unique, personal projects and they overlap. But sitting and waiting for somebody come along and having your project grind to halt is just not a thing if an AI can help write the stuff you're not familiar with.

I know "AI bad" and I agree with the sentiment most of the time. But I'm personally okay with the contract of, I feed GitHub my FOSS code and GitHub will host my repo, run my actions, and host my content. I get the AI assistance to write more code. Repeat.

-5
V0ldekreply
awful.systems

What does this have to do with literally anything I said about comparing AI with interns

8
swlabrreply
awful.systems

If I ever meet an intern for a FOSS project, I’ll buy a lottery ticket

7

A junior developer learns from these repeated minor corrections. LLM's can't learn from them. they don't have any runtime fine-tuning (and even if they did it wouldn't be learning like a human does), at the very best past conversations get summarized and crammed into the context window hidden from the user to provide a shallow illusion of continuity and learning.

9
Mniotreply
programming.dev

I've heard this from others, too. I don't really get it.

I watched a teammate working with AI:

  1. Identify the problem: a function was getting passed an object-field when it should be getting the whole object
  2. Write instruction to the AI: "refactor the function I've selected to take a Foo instead of a String or Box. Then in the Foo function, use the bar parameter. Don't change other files or functions."
  3. Wait ~5s for Cursor to do it

It did the instructions and didn't fuck anything up, so I guess it was a success? But they already knew exactly what the fixed code should look like, so it seems like they just took a slow and boring path to get there.

When I'm working with a new intern, they cost me time. Everything is 2-4x slower. It's worth it because (a) I like working with people and someone just getting into programming makes me feel happy and (b) after a few months I'm able to trust that they can do things on their own and I'm not constantly checking to see if they've actually deleted random code or put an authentication check on an unauthenticated endpoint etc etc. The point of an intern is to see if you want to hire them as a jr dev who will actually become worthwhile in 6+ months.

8
ShortFusereply
lemmy.world

There's a lot of false equivalence in this thread which seems to be a staple of this instance. I'm sure most people here have never used AI coding and I'm just getting ad-hominem "counterpoints".

Nothing I said even close to saying AI is a full replacement for training junior devs.

The reality is, when you actually use an AI as a coding assistant there are strong similarities when training somebody who is new to coding. They'll choose popular over best practices. When I get an AI assisted code segment, it feels similar to copypasted code from a stackoverflow. This is aside from the hallucinations.

But LLM operate on patterns, for better or for worse. If you want to generate something serious, that's a bad idea. There's a strong misconception that AI will build usable code for you. It probably won't. It's only good at snippets. But it does recognize patterns. Some of those patterns are tedious to write, and I'd argue feel even more tedious the more experienced you are in coding.

My most recent usage of AI was making some script that uses WinGet to setup a dev environment. Like I have a vague recollection of how to make a .cmd script with if branches, but not enough at the top of my head. So you can say "Generate a section here that checks if WinSDK is installed." And it will. Looks fine, move on. The %errorlevel% code is all injected. Then say "add on a WinGet install if it's not installed." Then it does that. Then I have to repeat all that again for ninja, clang, and others. None of this is mission critical, but it's a chore to write. It'll even sprinkle some pretty CLI output text.

There is a strong misconception that AI are "smart" and programmers should be worried. That's completely overselling what AI can do and probably intentionally by executives. They are at best assistant to coders. I can take a piece of JS code and ask AI to construct an SQL table creation query based on the code (or vice versa). It's not difficult. Just tedious.

When working in teams, it's not uncommon for me to create the first 5%-10% of a project and instruct others on the team to take that as input and scale the rest of the project (eg: design views, build test, build tables, etc).

There are clear parallels here. You need to recognize the limitations, but there is a lot of functionality they can provide as long as you understand what it can't do. Read the comments of people who have actually sat down and used it and you'll see we've the same conclusion.

-6

I feel so bad for the interns, and really your team in general, for having to interact with you

5
froztbytereply
awful.systems

christ this post is odious

I feel quite confident in stating two things. 1) you fucking suck at your job. 2) the people reliant on you for things fucking hate dealing with you.

the fact that you wrote this much florid effluent opinion, with as paltry examples as you bring to bear.... christ

just fucking learn some scripting languages, ffs

5
ShortFusereply
lemmy.world

Make a point or go away. Ad-hominem is nonsense is boring.

-6

It’s only ad-hominem if they discredit your points by insulting you. If they read your points and use them to make statements about your character, that’s not ad hominem, that’s valid inference.

You probably need an example. Let’s say Alice and Beelice are having a conversation.

Alice: “I think seed oils are bad for you because RFK Jr. said so! MAGA!”

If Beelice says: “Alice, you are a real sack of potatoes, and therefore you are wrong,” that’s ad hominem.

If Beelice says: “Alice, if you’re going to parrot RFK Jr, then the worms deserve to eat the rotten flesh in your skull,” that’s plain inference.

Understand now, dear?

7
Mniotreply
programming.dev

My most recent usage of AI was making some script that uses WinGet to setup a dev environment.

This is a good example. What I'm saying is that pre-AI, I could look this up on StackOverflow and copy/paste blindly and get a slightly higher success rate than today where I can "AI please solve this".

But I shouldn't pick at the details. I think the "AI hater" mentality comes in because we've got this thing that boils down to "a bit more convenient than copying the solution off of StackOverflow" when used very carefully and "much worse than copying and pasting random code" when used otherwise. But instead of this honest pitch, it's mega-hype and it's only when people demand specific examples that someone starts talking like you do here.

0

Yeah, I can see that. Search has gotten worse. While AI slop is undoubtedly responsible for this, there are cases when some things are essentially best solved by reading thousands of code examples because the documentation is rather vague. Searching on Stackoverflow still relies on some people having already been presented with a similar situation and shared their solution. Also, you'd assume the solution is the correct one. (I've been burned and I'm sure the majority of my stackoverflow answers end up being corrections well after trying something else touted as the correct/popular solution.) That's really my push back.

That's really one of the strengths of AI: a large feeding of data until it finds a common pattern. It correlates to simple things like syntax. That means it's pretty good there. But it also correlates to saying "a lot of people set up scripts like this". That's where I'm reminded of working with people who I assign a task to and they come back with stuff they got from SO. It has the gist of it being right, but not all there.

That's kinda the key, though. I could be okay with an 80% workable state. That's like asking somebody to compile all the search results and give be back a result as best they could. It doesn't mean it should be treated as hot pluggable code.

Full disclosure, my main experience is CoPilot and VSCode. It's... neat. Some of the auto complete is useful when what I'm writing has an obvious pattern. Some is laughably unrelated. There is another AI that has some level of training to it, which I think is Facebook's. It can be "trained". I've tried those models, but all those offline models don't have the ability to combine web results. CoPilot lets you link to a spec page and it'll read it in "realtime" and correct itself. I find that much more valuable than some pretrained model. The saddest part is that's all proprietary in ChatGPT which was supposed to be Open (OpenAI). You basically have to buy-in to their models at least until something else comes along.

1
froztbytereply
awful.systems

you sound like a fucking awful teammate. it's not your job to nitpick and bikeshed everything they do, it's your job to help them grow

"you need to code review everything" motherfucker if you're saying this in context only of your juniors then you have a massive organisational problem

11
ShortFusereply
lemmy.world

it's not your job to nitpick and bikeshed everything they do

Wow. Talk about projection. I never said any of that, but thanks for letting everyone know how you treat other people.

The point is AI can generate a good amount of code, but you can't trust it. It always needs to be reviewed. It makes a lot of mistakes.

-4

Talk about projection

Projection? Nobody was talking about projection until you brought it up. Talk about projection.

5
lemmy.world

We submit copilot assisted code all the time. Like every day. I'm not even sure how you'd identify ours. Looks almost exactly the same. Just less work.

-6

copilot assisted code

The article isn't really about autocompleted code, nobody's coming at you for telling the slop machine to convert a DTO to an html form using reactjs, it's more about prominent CEO claims about their codebases being purely AI generated at rates up to 30% and how swengs might be obsolete by next tuesday after dinner.

16
swlabrreply
awful.systems

Oh cool what do you work on? I’d love to know the product.

13
IsThisAnAIreply
lemmy.world

Cheers who don't use AI to assist them are worse than those that do. Feel bad.

-10

????? and this is the best post you could do? how embarrassing for you

4
V0ldekreply
awful.systems

Don't worry, if you apply yourself really hard one day you might become an actual engineer. Keep trying.

9

Arguments against misinformation aren't arguments against the subject of the misinformation, they're just more misinformation.

-10