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AI is a bad tool

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Re: AI is a bad tool

#21

Post by bensyverson »

This article starts off by saying AI can be useful for question-answering, but then quickly states that if you're using AI to generate code "you're wasting your time:"

> The reason AI is a bad tool is that generally speaking, it is completely opaque.

The author is missing the fact that you can use those great question-answering and knowledge distillation capabilities to ask the AI questions about the code it wrote.

Later, they write:

> Who is going to verify that it is doing what it is supposed to?

What? If you hire a writer to write a blog post, who is going to verify that they didn't just fill in gibberish? It's you. You there, in the front. You're the one.

If you can't find any way to independently verify that the software is doing what you think it should do, I don't think you have any business generating it, whether you use AI or code it by hand. That's like commissioning a portrait of someone you've never seen.

Re: AI is a bad tool

#22

Post by datakan »

wmichelin wrote: post #18
datakan wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you not enjoy coding? I'm not trying to be snarky, just a genuine question. People used to enjoy it but lately all I see are people talking about they "no longer have to do it" I see both sides of the argument people endless have over this. I have been hesitant to take a solid position, first because I suck at coding and second because I dont really have a dog in this fight. The only context I have is my friend in…

I enjoy building things. I do not enjoy the act typing out code by hand. > Do you not enjoy coding? I'm not trying to be snarky, just a genuine question To follow this debate through, to maximize coding enjoyment, shouldn't we be avoiding compilers? They take away a lot of the code we need to write. Frameworks as well?

Thanks for the honesty and I think I get it. The AI doing the code leap frogs you to a finished product which is the reward. I do worry about craftmanship in that scenario though.

Re: AI is a bad tool

#23

Post by Ken_At_EM »

datakan wrote: post #16
m_w_ wrote: post #2

I 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…

Do you not enjoy coding? I'm not trying to be snarky, just a genuine question. People used to enjoy it but lately all I see are people talking about they "no longer have to do it" I see both sides of the argument people endless have over this. I have been hesitant to take a solid position, first because I suck at coding and second because I dont really have a dog in this fight. The only context I have is my friend in…

ok but a lot of coding used to be fighting package managers, discovering bugs in dependencies, dealing with deploy baloney, etc, not just "solving puzzles" or "architecting the backend"

Re: AI is a bad tool

#24

Post by spankalee »

This statement is just ridiculous:

> Recently, there's a lot of talk about AI allegedly finding security flaws in software. That is an unsubstantiated claim. As such, it would need to be verified by a non-machine, and arguably, the verification process would require the same amount of effort or more than would be required to find the issue to begin with.

Once a security issue is found, it is often far less effort to verify it. Digging through millions of lines of codes to find high-probability vulnerabilities is the hard part.

Re: AI is a bad tool

#25

Post by m_w_ »

adamddev1 wrote: post #5
m_w_ wrote: post #2

I 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?

Generally end-user applications, depending on how you classify internal tools. I'm generally very happy with the output of Opus 4.X with a moderately structured CLAUDE.md and some investment in detection/avoidance of anti-patterns (Next.js+ts). I imagine that the bitter lesson is true here, and these heuristic guidelines will become increasingly unnecessary w/ smarter models.

Library-type work has mostly been side/toy projects, although fwiw, with a standard/spec on hand (CommonMark for example), I'm also happy w/ the output. It's often possible to "close the loop" and have the coding agent autonomously iterate until the standard is adhered to.

Re: AI is a bad tool

#26

Post by paul7986 »

datakan wrote: post #16
m_w_ wrote: post #2

I 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…

Do you not enjoy coding? I'm not trying to be snarky, just a genuine question. People used to enjoy it but lately all I see are people talking about they "no longer have to do it" I see both sides of the argument people endless have over this. I have been hesitant to take a solid position, first because I suck at coding and second because I dont really have a dog in this fight. The only context I have is my friend in…

Really if you think about it AI will know everything and you can quickly get the answer for whatever right from inside your smart glasses.

We all become knowledge experts especially when the data we see inside our glasses is always 100% correct. This could take Years but that's where we are heading and Im sure no one now likes the sound of it.

Re: AI is a bad tool

#27

Post by furyofantares »

The idea that it only reveals missing abstractions and that this is bad, is pretty off the mark in a lot of ways.

First off, there's plenty of cases where it make no sense for me to spend all my time abstracting everything possible in my pipeline. Maybe I'm a game developer who doesn't want to spend all my time abstracting away all the initial scaffolding for game prototype and just make a dang game prototype.

Or maybe the abstraction would needs to much confirmation to not really be any different than code (again, games.)

Or maybe the LLM is indeed a perfectly good abstraction for such a task, reliable and customizable.

Just keep writing abstractions all the way up the chain until you're so abstracted that you take english input and can product whatever is asked for, and, oh right.

Re: AI is a bad tool

#28

Post by Sevii »

datakan wrote: post #16
m_w_ wrote: post #2

I 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…

Do you not enjoy coding? I'm not trying to be snarky, just a genuine question. People used to enjoy it but lately all I see are people talking about they "no longer have to do it" I see both sides of the argument people endless have over this. I have been hesitant to take a solid position, first because I suck at coding and second because I dont really have a dog in this fight. The only context I have is my friend in…

I enjoy getting into the zone while listening to synthwave and banging out code. But I'm not going to ignore that I can code most programs 100x as fast using claude code. I don't enjoy coding so much that I will spend 8 hours getting a side project together when I could get more done in 30 minutes with AI.

Re: AI is a bad tool

#29

Post by dgacmu »

> Recently, there's a lot of talk about AI allegedly finding security flaws in software. That is an unsubstantiated claim. As such, it would need to be verified by a non-machine, and arguably, the verification process would require the same amount of effort or more than would be required to find the issue to begin with.

This is simply not true. Security flaws are a great use-case for AI specifically because they're easy to verify. If you can drive a program to segfault based on inputs, you've got a good indicator it is, in fact, a security vulnerability (at minimum a DoS, but usually you find out later it was exploitable). You could even have the AI generate an exploit PoC. Shell? Valid hole. Done.

The bad use cases for AI are the ones where it's as or more expensive to verify correctness as it would have been to find the solution in advance.

Re: AI is a bad tool

#30

Post by adamddev1 »

adamtaylor_13 wrote: post #13
adamddev1 wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you writing code for end-user applications, or for tools or libraries that other stuff is built with?

Both. And internal tools. And infrastructure scaffolding a la terraform. And visual design. And frontier models routinely crush all the above in a way I couldn't, at speeds unattainable to mere flesh and blood like me.

I still think internal tools are kind of in a category closer to end-user applications. They are limited in how widely they are used, and therefore they don't have to be as solid as say libraries used by millions.
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