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AI-written code is still your code

martiansoftware.com

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Re: AI-written code is still your code

#81

Post by Verdex »

Retr0id wrote: post #32
Verdex wrote: post #25

I don't believe that AI is the 'higher level of abstraction[1]' that it is often claimed to be. However I wonder if it's possible to work with a codebase when other developers are treating AI as a higher level of abstraction. Analogously, people can write in assembly, but can you write in assembly when the codebase is frequently altered by someone with an optimizing compiler? [1] - Do higher levels of abstractions ev…

> can you write in assembly when the codebase is frequently altered by someone with an optimizing compiler This itself is quite normal (e.g. we have .S files and .c files and link them together), but I suppose a more accurate analogy would be that someone is dumping their optimising compiler output directly into your .S files. Maybe what we need is better ways to partition the slop-code and the not-slop code.

Clearly I misspoke. But it looks like you've got the gist of what I was trying to say.

Re: AI-written code is still your code

#82

Post by Verdex »

exe34 wrote: post #40
Verdex wrote: post #25

I don't believe that AI is the 'higher level of abstraction[1]' that it is often claimed to be. However I wonder if it's possible to work with a codebase when other developers are treating AI as a higher level of abstraction. Analogously, people can write in assembly, but can you write in assembly when the codebase is frequently altered by someone with an optimizing compiler? [1] - Do higher levels of abstractions ev…

Sounds like you just don't like the phrase 'higher level'. To most people this is synonymous to 'powerful abstractions' and 'more ergonomic abstractions' in the sense that they allow us to think "at a higher level" - map instead of loop, objects instead of memory addresses and size, modules instead of gotos.

To be sure I don't like the phrase. But more importantly I also don't like the outcomes when improper abstractions are setup and vital details ignored.

Re: AI-written code is still your code

#83

Post by croes »

Kinrany wrote: post #47
croes wrote: post #13

My code if you mean responsibility, not my code if you mean authorship.

That's not too different for crediting e.g. a typewriter as the tool used to author the text. That is, not ridiculous, but not new.

I can prompt AI to create code I couldn’t write myself, I can hardly say that about a typewriter.

It’s more like a calculator that does calculations I can’t do.

Can you perform calculations involving roots and logarithms without a calculator? If not, do you claim YOU can calculate them?

Re: AI-written code is still your code

#84

Post by AnimalMuppet »

prometheus1992 wrote: post #15

I find it incredibly difficult to contribute to code files that were initiated by LLMs. Need to dig deeper to understand why but I just don't like it. I end up prompting my way out of any issues I see, sometimes it works out sometimes it doesn't.

My father-in-law has (among other things) done a fair amount of editing or proofreading prose, mostly on paper with red and blue pens. He says that when the page looks like it's covered in blood, that means it was good writing. For bad writing, it's so bad that you can't really work with it.

I would not want to take a block of text written by AI and try to edit it to sound human. It's too hard to fix. (And I suspect this is why people don't - they just paste the AI output.)

I think the same may be true of AI code. You're not going to fix it. You can't edit it to be the code you would write. All you can do is re-prompt to try to get the AI to fix it.

Re: AI-written code is still your code

#85

Post by exe34 »

Verdex wrote: post #82
exe34 wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sounds like you just don't like the phrase 'higher level'. To most people this is synonymous to 'powerful abstractions' and 'more ergonomic abstractions' in the sense that they allow us to think "at a higher level" - map instead of loop, objects instead of memory addresses and size, modules instead of gotos.

To be sure I don't like the phrase. But more importantly I also don't like the outcomes when improper abstractions are setup and vital details ignored.

There are no true scotsmen.

Re: AI-written code is still your code

#86

Post by daveguy »

jlawrence6809 wrote: post #66
daveguy wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've inherited plenty of code bases. AI generated code is a special kind of foobar. With a code base inherited from a human you can at least be assured at least one human has understood each portion for a brief period. With agentic slop all bets are off.

Maybe I'm a bad programmer or have worked at places with terrible dev culture, but honestly I've made changes to code I didn't really understand. The changes I made seemed to accomplish the task I was aiming at, but the downstream effects were sometimes impossible for me to grok. Before vibe coding took over, using AI to help me get a handle on what a bunch of code was doing was actually one of the things that sold m…

Yeah, I think AI is a great tool to get a handle on a codebase so you understand it. It's just a much more difficult task when that code is AI generated. I don't think agentic coding is worth all the overhead and complexity. Honestly think that as human understanding is prioritized agentic coding will decline. But I don't think human understanding will be prioritized until we see some major crash and burns with agentic.

Re: AI-written code is still your code

#87

Post by pringk02 »

altern8 wrote: post #9
eterm wrote: post #3

Yes I'm more than okay. AI has enabled a scale of personal ambition I could only previously have dreamed of. I've never been the kind of coder who could easily sit down and get their thoughts out from mind to written lines. I've seen that happen in a few gifted individuals, and AI might be frustrating them, because for them, coding was never the bottleneck, but for me, I would always get stuck in analysis paralysis,…

Is this a bot, or real..?

I have started to wonder to what degree programming discussion online is astroturfed. The financial incentive to flood programming discussion (any discussion related to work) with pro-AI messaging, and the simultaneous ease with which AI makes it to do so, makes it hard not to ponder what amount of seemingly organic pro-AI sentiment is not.

I'm sure there is some that is indeed genuine. It could even be most. But I'd be surprised if it is all.

Re: AI-written code is still your code

#88

Post by discreteevent »

ryandvm wrote: post #64
Retr0id wrote: post #14

> It’s crystal clear that AI can be a complexity factory. > I’ve been thinking a lot lately about what software would look like if we made keeping software understandable to humans a first-class design goal in the age of AI. I agree, and I've been thinking similarly. But I don't think there's anything "new" about what understandable and well-factored code should look like. It's the same principles as ever. A lot of a…

I think the worst part is that to the bullshit artists that usually float to the top of any org chart, AI generated docs, and implementation plans, and code is superficially plausible. It's hard to find any particular thing that is wrong with all of it - just a general vibe of verbosity. I am observing entire engineering departments drowning in AI generated RFCs and TDDs and thousand plus word Jira tickets and PR rev…

> I think a lot of shops are going to have to go through a couple years of Github-style "why the fuck is our service always down?" before they put 2 and 2 together.

I think it will be like the outsourcing wave in the early 2000s. A lot of places ended up pulling development back in house when it became unsustainable.

Re: AI-written code is still your code

#89

Post by discreteevent »

gchamonlive wrote: post #45
Retr0id wrote: post #14

> It’s crystal clear that AI can be a complexity factory. > I’ve been thinking a lot lately about what software would look like if we made keeping software understandable to humans a first-class design goal in the age of AI. I agree, and I've been thinking similarly. But I don't think there's anything "new" about what understandable and well-factored code should look like. It's the same principles as ever. A lot of a…

I don't think these comparisons between AI generated code and an idealised version of the code are productive. We have to compare with code that exists in the real world, so AI against human, and not only that, good AI generated code with good human written code, as well as AI slop with human slop. I think if we did that we'd see that on average the code written by humans are less legible, parts of the intention will…

> there is no replacement for humans immersed in their world yet, so we need developers with with good understanding of the domain

It's not enough. The software model that you produce ends up becoming part of the domain. You need to understand the system. You are the only one who has the potential do that if you have the ability and are willing to work at it.

Re: AI-written code is still your code

#90

Post by josefritzishere »

xacky wrote: post #60

There are still boomers who think that BASIC from the 1960s made computing too easy, the gatekeepers will lose over a long enough time period.

I don't see how that allegory relates. Understanding software is something that comes from education, time and experience. It can't he withheld to the same extent that it can't be magically imbued. AI can't give you that, because it doesn't have it to give.
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