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The copilot delusion

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Re: The copilot delusion

#61

Post by sanderjd »

monero-xmr wrote: post #18
-__---____-ZXyw wrote: post #8

I wonder if we'll look back on this period in a couple of years and feel a nostalgic fondness as we think of the fateful moment when people working in software were forced to pull the wool from their eyes and look at the fact that businesses really, really, really dislike losing huge amounts of money paying people to make the software their businesses completely depend on. I mean, I'm guessing that's true. It'd make…

Non-technical business owners have always had deep anxiety about software development. They don’t understand it, it’s very expensive, timelines can explode, and a hack or leak can materially damage their business. A reasonably smart CEO can pretty much understand, in depth, every aspect of their business. But when it comes to tech, which is often the most essential part, they are left grasping, and must rely on the e…

> A reasonably smart CEO can pretty much understand, in depth, every aspect of their business. But when it comes to tech, which is often the most essential part, they are left grasping, and must rely on the expertise of other people

I honestly really don't understand why this would be the case. Software isn't more complicated than any of the other aspects of the business. I think a "reasonably smart" CEO could just ... learn how it works? if it's really so critical to their business.

It's been a long time since I worked for a CEO who didn't understand software.

Re: The copilot delusion

#63

Post by tokioyoyo »

lyu07282 wrote: post #48
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.

Does it matter? The selling point of AI generated code is, eventually, you won't care what's happening in your code base and things just "work". It's like 95% of people who code (99%?) don't know what compilers do. Throw away what is collapsing, bring up new stuff, rinse and repeat.

Re: The copilot delusion

#64

Post by loloquwowndueo »

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 liked it. Spotted one grammar mistake though. I like even that - an ai doesn’t make that kind of mistake.

Re: The copilot delusion

#65

Post by MeetingsBrowser »

abletonlive wrote: post #6
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…

Well when you have a hammer big enough everything is indeed a nail. Have you considered that instead of resisting you should do more to figure out why you're not getting the results that a lot of us are talking about? If nothing has changed for you in the past 2 years in your productivity the problem is most likely you. Don't you think it's your responsibility as an engineer to figure out what you're doing wrong when…

Kind of brutal, but if LLMs drastically improved your productivity I think it speaks more to your baseline productivity than the power of LLMs.

Re: The copilot delusion

#66

Post by boxed »

Jcampuzano2 wrote: post #33
boxed wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Clean code is nice. Working code is a requirement. You missed the point. AI slop doesn't just fail on point 1. It fails on point 2.

I work in an enterprise company where we just recently got access to use cursor, before that copilot. We have literally stood up entire services built practically entirely with AI that are deployed right now and consumers are using. AI does work with competent people behind the wheel. People can't keep hiding behind saying that it always churns out code that doesn't work. We are way past those days. If you don't you…

> AI does work with competent people behind the wheel

So does extremely junior devs that are really bad but you code review EVERYTHING.

(Except jr programmers can learn, AI models can't really, they can be retrained from scratch by big corporations)

Re: The copilot delusion

#68

Post by felubra »

> The machine is real. The silicon is real. The DRAM, the L1, the false sharing, the branch predictor flipping a coin—it’s all real. And if you care, you can work with it.

This is one of the most beautiful pieces of writing I’ve come across in a while.

Re: The copilot delusion

#69

Post by Jcampuzano2 »

MeetingsBrowser wrote: post #51
Jcampuzano2 wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I work in an enterprise company where we just recently got access to use cursor, before that copilot. We have literally stood up entire services built practically entirely with AI that are deployed right now and consumers are using. AI does work with competent people behind the wheel. People can't keep hiding behind saying that it always churns out code that doesn't work. We are way past those days. If you don't you…

> entire services built practically entirely with AI What kind of services and how complex are they? I've been using Cursor for a year and struggle to get the agent to make competent changes in a medium sized code base. Even something isolated like writing a test for a specific function usually take multiple rounds of iteration and manual cleanup at the end.

Most services that are written today (Not just talking about my company/experience, I'm talking broadly) are not complex. Many are basically a copy paste of the same types of things that have been built thousands of times before. Now with that knowledge and knowing how LLM's should work it should come as no surprise that AI will be able to spin up new ones quite competently and quickly.

Regarding tests: that is also something I find and many of my peers find that LLM's excel at. Given X inputs and Y outputs an llm will spit out a whole suite of tests for every case of your functions without issue except in complicated scenarios. End to end tests it may not do quite as well at since usually it requires a lot of externalities/setup, but it can help with generating some of the setup and given examples it can build from there. Of course this depends on how much you value those tests, since some don't even think tests are that useful nowadays.

Re: The copilot delusion

#70

Post by sanderjd »

Jcampuzano2 wrote: post #33
boxed wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Clean code is nice. Working code is a requirement. You missed the point. AI slop doesn't just fail on point 1. It fails on point 2.

I work in an enterprise company where we just recently got access to use cursor, before that copilot. We have literally stood up entire services built practically entirely with AI that are deployed right now and consumers are using. AI does work with competent people behind the wheel. People can't keep hiding behind saying that it always churns out code that doesn't work. We are way past those days. If you don't you…

Yep, agreed. I can no longer relate to people who don't recognize how powerful a tool like Cursor can be.

But I also can't relate to people who think they can, today, build fully working software using just AIs, without people who know how software works and are able to understand and debug what is being generated.

Maybe it's true that this will no longer be the case a year from now. I honestly don't know. But at the moment, I think being a skilled practitioner who is also able to effectively use these powerful new tools is actually a pretty sweet spot, despite all the doom and gloom.

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