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I'm tired of fixing customers' AI generated code

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Re: I'm tired of fixing customers' AI generated code

#151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And then there are those of us who find computers to be more bearable than people... At least computers don't think it's their god-given right to treat you like garbage.

What percentage of web traffic today would you say is composed of bits that the user--if they bothered to inspect it--would prefer to not have anything to do with? I'd say it's more than half. Computers treat people like garbage all the time.

its not computers who treat people like garbage. they do as they are instructed by humans, in all cases.

Re: I'm tired of fixing customers' AI generated code

#152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Doesn't solve the problem that the budget they has in mind for the app was $300, while an experienced dev can directly see this is going to be a $20K v.1 before change requests project.

And this is why people continue to do it. And at that, with such a discrepancy, why not? Proof of concept, you know if it adds value and makes money, enough money to pay $20k.

I think the missing proof point is whether companies would fork out the extra $19,700 once they understand the actual cost.

Re: I'm tired of fixing customers' AI generated code

#153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

you're right, but I have a hard time picturing the computer as having emotions to be able to treat me like garbage in the first place. you won't rm the file? sudo rm file! the computer could fight back and say access denied still because of extended attributes, but for some reason I don't equate poorly written software as being treated like garbage. I always imagine some hapless programmer is doing the best they coul…

I'm similarly sympathetic when I come across a buggy implementation. It's malicious design that I'm objecting to. But I suppose it's a bit silly to say that it's the computer that's treating me like garbage. It's just that someone else is in control of my computer, and they're treating me like garbage.

sadly these days, it seems a keen mind is only a machine's mind. People spend far to little time to understand what they are telling their poor computers to do. And look what happens, people start turning against them. Blaming them for their misdoing. It's like Blaming god, the government, a nation, family or a tribe. These are all made of humans. Human bad behavior is at the core of our suffering. Nothing else.

Re: I'm tired of fixing customers' AI generated code

#154
post #137
post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or maybe you’re just exaggerating. I’ve done my fair share of copy pasting and it never worked to just do it without understanding what’s going on. I think the problem with “AI” code is that many people have almost a religions belief. There’re weirdos on internet who say that AGI is couple years away. And by extension current AI models are seen as something incapable of making a mistake when writing code.

The other downside to AI code vs stackoverflow is that a stackoverflow post can be updated, or a helpful reply might point out the error. With the advent of LLMs we may be losing this communal element of learning and knowledge-sharing.

We aren't. LLMs may have been useful for a moment in time, before the trick "it's now MY OWN creation, no IP strings attached - when it comes through the plagiarism machine" became apparent, and before the models started eating their own tail. Now they're just spiralling down, and it will IMNSHO take something else than an iterative "a future version will surely fix this, One Day, have faith."

Re: I'm tired of fixing customers' AI generated code

#155
post #25
post #3

I'm always a little surprised at how many people out there want to develop software yet haven't put in the effort to gain even the most basic computer nerd programming chops. You see this all the time in the more newbie-friendly game engine communities. Maybe you don't want to pursue a career in software, but anyone can spend a week learning Python or JavaScript. I suspect/hope a lot of these people are just kids who…

Game dev is a fun hobby some people like to mess around with, just like any other hobby. Doesn’t mean they’ll be experts or know what they’re doing, but they’ll try and probably ask some basic questions online. I mess around in goody and game maker and can write some shitty code there, but I’ve never written a line of code for work. I just like messin around for fun

its nice to have a hobby. I make Operating systems as a hobby. But because I am not an Army of dilligent engineers with a knowledge based in all history of computing and computer science, i would not dare to ship my code to an unwitting user and allow them to connect to the internet. Thats dangerous in these times.

Do you know how many botnets exist because of shit game-engines that are easily exploited and connected peer-to-peer etc.

Lovely frameworks and engines... but really harmful if you ask me. People are unwitting victims of other peoples hobby projects.

You need to be responsible in this day and age. If you don't want to do the due dilligence, or are stapped for resources (time, knowledge, etc.) then it's best to for example, make a singleplayer game, or LAN only and disallow any IP addresses in your game not defined as internal class ranges.

Do have a hobby, and do have fun, but do so responsibly. You wouldn't want one of your works of love and passion to end up hurting someone would you? Simple steps can be taken to project the consumers of your lovecraft from the vicious world out there. It's sad this is needed, but that's no excuse not to do it. Humans should be better, but they are not.

Re: I'm tired of fixing customers' AI generated code

#156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It certainly puts a ceiling on a career. And I'd argue it probably gave him a pretty rough shelf life. At some point he has to understand what he's doing. Unless he's so good at selling his services he can consistently find new clients. And if that's the case, he'd probably kill it in sales.

sales engineer is quite a lucrative career. don't have to be really good at it, just enough to be useful.

Sales engineers have to be good enough to bluff their way through the layers of hyperbole/minor exaggeration/utter bullshit (delete as applicable) the sales team have spun. Whether their conscience gets involved before the deal closes, different question.

Re: I'm tired of fixing customers' AI generated code

#157
post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The other downside to AI code vs stackoverflow is that a stackoverflow post can be updated, or a helpful reply might point out the error. With the advent of LLMs we may be losing this communal element of learning and knowledge-sharing.

We aren't. LLMs may have been useful for a moment in time, before the trick "it's now MY OWN creation, no IP strings attached - when it comes through the plagiarism machine" became apparent, and before the models started eating their own tail. Now they're just spiralling down, and it will IMNSHO take something else than an iterative "a future version will surely fix this, One Day, have faith."

There are signs of a decline in people asking and answering questions on sites like stack exchange: https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/387278/has-stack-ex...

So I hope you're right, but the evidence is currently that you're wrong. Let's see how it plays out, I suppose.

Re: I'm tired of fixing customers' AI generated code

#158
post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Probably one of the variables is undefined, and static typing could catch that.

Is it the compiler that would catch it?

Yes. This would be caught by the compiler in C, C++, Java, Rust, Haskell, etc.: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1517582/what-is-the-diff...

Many statically typed languages do have escape hatches to do some dynamic typing at runtime, but this is not the default (hence the classification), and it requires some additional effort to use.

Re: I'm tired of fixing customers' AI generated code

#159
post #68

> Helping a customer solve challenges is often super rewarding, but only when I can remove roadblocks for customers who can do most of the work themselves. One thing I loved about doing technical enterprise sales is that I’d meet people doing something I knew little or nothing about and who didn’t really understand what we offered but had a problem they could explain and our offering could help with. They’d have deep…

Your second quote is the same as the first one. Did you copy the same one twice by accident?

Re: I'm tired of fixing customers' AI generated code

#160

Someone mentioned "hallucination-based API design" on twitter (I cannot find it now). It's designing API by LLM hallucination. If there is a common hallucination API call, just add that API. This will make the API more "friendly" and resemble common similar APIs. Considering that LLM can hallucinate in different ways unpredictably, not sure whether it will work in practice.

I doubt LLM hallucinations will produce good secure code. In my opinion, using code from LLMs, which might see your program come to life a bit quicker, will only enhance the time needed for debugging and testing, as there might be bugs and problems in there ranging from trivial things (unused variables) to very subtle and hard to find logic issues which require a deeper knowledge of the libraries and frameworks cobbl…

The description here isn't about using LLM hallucinations as code. It's using them as example API users and seeing what they get stuck on.

Let's say you've got some rest API. Are they trying to send PATCH requests but you only support POST? Do they keep trying to add pagination or look for a cursor? Do they expect /things to return everything and /things/id to return a single one but you have /things and /thing/1 ?

None of this is to say you must do whatever they are trying to do but it's a very cheap way of seeing what introducing your API/library to a new user might be like. And, moreover, you can only ever introduce someone once but you can go again and again with a LLM. Review the things they're doing and see if actually you've deviated from broad principles and if a change/new endpoint actually would make things much easier.

Fundamentally you can break this down to "if there's someone who can do some coding but isn't a top class programmer, how much do I need to explain it to them before they can solve a particular problem?"

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