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The copilot delusion

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Re: The copilot delusion

#41

Post by ivape »

noobermin wrote: post #11

Is the writing here intentionally bad? May be it's not my cup of tea but it's been a while since I've read something so cringey, it's difficult to finish.

I don’t know, this made me kinda laugh:

Because if that programmer—if that thing, that CREATURE—walked into your stand-up in human form, typing half-correct garbage into your codebase while ignoring your architecture and disappearing during cleanup, you’d fire them before they could say "no blockers".

The description of the greenfield project first engineer. They are gone before you know it, or at the very least at some point offer a “well I had no choice you see, they really wanted to release something”.

Re: The copilot delusion

#42

Post by allthenopes25 »

Jcampuzano2 wrote: post #19

As a preface, I think lots of people will not like this take. A lot of people are going to have to come to the realization that has already been mentioned before but many find it hard to grasp. Your boss, stakeholders, and especially non-technical people literally give 0 fucks about "quality code" as long as it does what they want it to do. They do not care about tests insofar as if it works it works. Many have no cl…

A sane person writes clean code because they are going to have to maintain it themselves one day a few years into the future when the baby kept them up all night for three nights in a row and coffee isn't working for them anymore and they can't remember anything about it and it's falling over so it's really urgent and f**** those guys they swore they'd get someone to take this on with a proper handover and surely there was a goddamn sent email somewhere about it but nothing is coming up when you search and goddamnit it used to compile did people ignore your comment about how it won't build with the new version yet so don't update the build tools and and and

You write good code because you own it.

If you get ChatGPT or Copilot or Claude or whateverthe****else to write it, you're going to have a whole lot less fun when it's on fire.

The level of irresponsibility that "vibe coding" is introducing to the world is actually worse than the one that had people pouring their savings into a shitcoin. But it's the same arseholes talking it up.

Re: The copilot delusion

#43

Post by [deleted] »

Jcampuzano2 wrote: post #19

As a preface, I think lots of people will not like this take. A lot of people are going to have to come to the realization that has already been mentioned before but many find it hard to grasp. Your boss, stakeholders, and especially non-technical people literally give 0 fucks about "quality code" as long as it does what they want it to do. They do not care about tests insofar as if it works it works. Many have no cl…

[deleted]

Re: The copilot delusion

#44

Post by tptacek »

The real horror isn’t that AI will take our jobs—it’s that it will let people in who never wanted the job to begin with.

Gross. Also: you could have said this about the spreadsheet.

Re: The copilot delusion

#45

Post by Jcampuzano2 »

nalekberov wrote: post #30
Jcampuzano2 wrote: post #19

As a preface, I think lots of people will not like this take. A lot of people are going to have to come to the realization that has already been mentioned before but many find it hard to grasp. Your boss, stakeholders, and especially non-technical people literally give 0 fucks about "quality code" as long as it does what they want it to do. They do not care about tests insofar as if it works it works. Many have no cl…

> I really think a lot of the reason some people say it doesn't give them as much productivity as they would like is due largely to a desire to write "clean" code based on years and years of our own training, and due to having to be able to pass code review done by your peers. Machine doesn't get mad when an app takes forever to start or keeps constantly crashing, but we humans do. Writing "clean" code has the least…

People keep reading off this nonsense that AI generated code is always bad or slow.

This is so far from the truth that I really think anybody who still says this has not actually used it for anything real in at least a couple years.

Yes, I'm not saying it will always generate you the best code, sometimes it may even be bad.

What I am saying is it CAN generate code that is reasonably performant, sometimes even more performant than you would have written it given time constraints, and fulfills requirements (even if sometimes it requires a little bit of manual effort) much faster than we ever could before.

Re: The copilot delusion

#46

Post by rester324 »

Jcampuzano2 wrote: post #19

As a preface, I think lots of people will not like this take. A lot of people are going to have to come to the realization that has already been mentioned before but many find it hard to grasp. Your boss, stakeholders, and especially non-technical people literally give 0 fucks about "quality code" as long as it does what they want it to do. They do not care about tests insofar as if it works it works. Many have no cl…

Well that might be true, but I think the reason why they are blatantly acting like that because stakeholders and decision makers are detached from their decisions timewise.

That's why I bring such topics as maintenance and stability very early on into the discussions and ask those stakeholders how much system downtime they can tolerate, so that they can feel the weight of their decision making, and that gives me an opportunity to explain why quality matters.

Then it's up to them to decide how much crap they tolerate.

Re: The copilot delusion

#48

Post by lyu07282 »

focusgroup0 wrote: post #16

Adapt or die. Keep up on industry trends and learn how to (responsibly) use the tools to be a better programmer, or be unnaturally selected out.

We will see, but I can also imagine the pile of shit you vibecoded around you collapsing on top of you.

Re: The copilot delusion

#49

Post by ivape »

malfist wrote: post #4

I feel this in my bones. Every day I'm getting challenged by leadership that we're not using AI enough, told that I should halve my estimates because "we'll use AI", and being told that there's a new AI tool that I have to adopt because someone is tracking KPIs related to adoption and if our team doesn't adopt enough AI tools we're going to be fired to give more headcount to those that do. It's like the world has los…

But, management is the one to go soon. The other shoe is going to drop dear brother, this I promise you. Stay strong.

Re: The copilot delusion

#50

Post by cjbgkagh »

bluefirebrand wrote: post #7
malfist wrote: post #4

I feel this in my bones. Every day I'm getting challenged by leadership that we're not using AI enough, told that I should halve my estimates because "we'll use AI", and being told that there's a new AI tool that I have to adopt because someone is tracking KPIs related to adoption and if our team doesn't adopt enough AI tools we're going to be fired to give more headcount to those that do. It's like the world has los…

> Management has an AI shaped hammer and they're hitting everything to see if it's a nail. I really think we need to figure out how to cut back on management so we can get back to the business of actually doing work

Well how hard would it be to replace management with AI? Perhaps a developer could use AI to recreate the other tasks of the company without all of the overhead of actual people.
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