AI is a bad tool
bytecode.news
AI is a bad tool
1–10 of 103 posts
Re: AI is a bad tool
#2I can only imagine that people who say things like:
> If you use AI for anything else, and in particularly if you use it to generate code, you're wasting your time.
Have not used frontier models in at least a year.
It is nearly inconceivable to me that I would ever go back to writing code by hand, in any context. Even if no new model was ever released, the combination of GLM 5.2 and DeepSeek V4 flash is more than sufficient to do real work. It's not hard to imagine that a distillation of Mythos/5.6S or whatever is a couple generations away will push me even further in this direction.
Re: AI is a bad tool
#3I'd welcome someone pointing out where I'm wrong in my critique of this critique..
"The reason AI is a bad tool is that generally speaking, it is completely opaque."
"The real question is, who can verify that what the AI built is good and true?"
Well, you? The developer? The person responsible for using the tool, no?
Isn't this article just saying, "using a tool blindly and not checking the result" is bad? Which, of course, it would be.
Re: AI is a bad tool
#4Great article. Yes, often what's needed are better (rock-solid) abstractions that we can manipulate around quickly and confidently (think Abelson/Sussman SICP style), not a machine that can take good guesses at piles of spaghetti code.
Re: AI is a bad tool
#5I can only imagine that people who say things like: > If you use AI for anything else, and in particularly if you use it to generate code, you're wasting your time. Have not used frontier models in at least a year. It is nearly inconceivable to me that I would ever go back to writing code by hand, in any context. Even if no new model was ever released, the combination of GLM 5.2 and DeepSeek V4 flash is more than suf…
Are you writing code for end-user applications, or for tools or libraries that other stuff is built with?
Re: AI is a bad tool
#6I'd welcome someone pointing out where I'm wrong in my critique of this critique.. "The reason AI is a bad tool is that generally speaking, it is completely opaque." "The real question is, who can verify that what the AI built is good and true?" Well, you? The developer? The person responsible for using the tool, no? Isn't this article just saying, "using a tool blindly and not checking the result" is bad? Which, of…
I think most tools, according to the UNIX philosophy, do one thing (and do it well). AI is a tool that does _a lot_ of things...to various degrees of success. While you can verify that the output of `sed` or `grep` is valid, you can't with 10k lines of code you have no context on (without _significant_ effort).
Same with Gimp, Firefox, and your terminal. Tools, all, do many easily verifiable things. AI isn't verifiable without an existing framework, and that's why it's so "good" at rewriting code from language A to language B, but not at zero-to-one building real world software.
Re: AI is a bad tool
#7I'd welcome someone pointing out where I'm wrong in my critique of this critique.. "The reason AI is a bad tool is that generally speaking, it is completely opaque." "The real question is, who can verify that what the AI built is good and true?" Well, you? The developer? The person responsible for using the tool, no? Isn't this article just saying, "using a tool blindly and not checking the result" is bad? Which, of…
Or the users?
At some point it either works or it doesn’t.
And I can use AI to write 100 api tests and run them in the pipeline on day 1 when that would probably be a year 2 project otherwise.
And I can document business decisions in plain english and the AI will read those and almost certainly honor them.
Re: AI is a bad tool
#8Is this satire? That's my most charitable interpretation.
This smells like it was written by someone who doesn't actually write code. How does one make the logic leap that any code AI is able to write, is only because that code is "trivial"? The author doesn't even bother defending that claim.
I suppose the only other charitable interpretation would be to say, "Well then 99% of the code I'm paid to write is 'trivial'." If that's the case, then you have to separate "code as means to an end" (which is clearly well within the wheelhouse of AI) from "code as a mathematical art" which is okay, but the latter doesn't pay my bills or create value for my clients.
Re: AI is a bad tool
#9I can only imagine that people who say things like: > If you use AI for anything else, and in particularly if you use it to generate code, you're wasting your time. Have not used frontier models in at least a year. It is nearly inconceivable to me that I would ever go back to writing code by hand, in any context. Even if no new model was ever released, the combination of GLM 5.2 and DeepSeek V4 flash is more than suf…
Are you writing code for end-user applications, or for tools or libraries that other stuff is built with?
Not the guy you asked, but honestly, I'm not sure which one of those I'd consider better use cases, not worse.
Re: AI is a bad tool
#10I'd welcome someone pointing out where I'm wrong in my critique of this critique.. "The reason AI is a bad tool is that generally speaking, it is completely opaque." "The real question is, who can verify that what the AI built is good and true?" Well, you? The developer? The person responsible for using the tool, no? Isn't this article just saying, "using a tool blindly and not checking the result" is bad? Which, of…
the problem is that a lot of AI use is done blindly. how much of that bun rewrite in rust was verified by a human?