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The copilot delusion

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Re: The copilot delusion

#151

Post by dlnovell »

Beautiful and witty prose to say "vibe coding sucks". He's not at all wrong about the state of AI coding in May of 2025. The 3 hours I just burned trying to get it to correct output bugs in a marimo notebook (which I started learning this week) is demonstrable evidence.

But it completely ignores the fact that AI generated code is getting better on a ~weekly basis. The author acknowledges that it is useful in some contexts for some uses, but doesn't acknowledge that the utility is constantly growing. We certainly could plateau sometime soon leaving us in the reckless intern zone, but I wouldn't bet on it.

Re: The copilot delusion

#152

Post by nick3443 »

chrismorgan wrote: post #150
throwaway314155 wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't mind your rebuttal of the article, but to suggest that this particular article is AI generated is foolish. The style the author presents is vivid, uses powerful imagery and metaphor and finally, at times, is genuinely funny. More qualitatively, the author incorporates a unique identity that persists throughout the entirety of a long form essay. All of that is still difficult to get an LLM to do. This isn't AI…

Yeah, it feels a very different style of unhinged to LLMs. I can’t yet imagine an LLM producing such a beautiful and contextually-appropriate sentence as “They’ll be out there trying to duct-tape horses to an engine block, wondering why it doesn’t fly.”

This brought tears to my eyes:

But you—at your most frazzled, sleep-deprived, raccoon-eyed best—you can try. You can squint at the layers of abstraction and see through them. Peel back the nice ergonomic type-safe, pure, lazy, immutable syntactic sugar and imagine the mess of assembly the compiler pukes up.

Amazing

Re: The copilot delusion

#153

Post by seanmcdirmid »

sgarland wrote: post #102
seanmcdirmid wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Btw, I say this as someone who does use AI coding assistants. I don’t think it’s all bad or all good. But we can’t just wave away the downsides just because it’s useful Isn't this just the rehashed argument against interactive terminals in the 60s/70s (no longer need to think very carefully about what you enter into your punch cards!), debuggers (no longer spending time looking carefully at code to find bugs), Inte…

Interactive terminals didn’t write code for you, and also unlocked entirely new paradigms of programs. Debuggers, if anything, enabled deeper understanding. Intellisense is in fact a plague and should not exist. Stack Overflow, when abused, is nearly as bad as AI.

I think we should just agree to disagree. All of those opened up new paradigms for programming, and so will AI even if we aren’t quite sure what that new paradigm is yet. There will always be people claiming the old-fashioned way is better, like Dijkstra’s famous complaint about kids not using punch cards anymore and how that meant they weren’t learning how to be good programmers.

Re: The copilot delusion

#154

Post by OnionBlender »

The author is clearly a C++ programmer. I've been noticing that these AI tools are worse at C++ than other languages, especially scripting languages. Whenever I try to learn from people that are using these tools successfully, they always seem to be using a scripting language and working on some CRUD app.

Re: The copilot delusion

#155

Post by [deleted] »

Jcampuzano2 wrote: post #19

As a preface, I think lots of people will not like this take. A lot of people are going to have to come to the realization that has already been mentioned before but many find it hard to grasp. Your boss, stakeholders, and especially non-technical people literally give 0 fucks about "quality code" as long as it does what they want it to do. They do not care about tests insofar as if it works it works. Many have no cl…

[deleted]

Re: The copilot delusion

#156

Post by lukan »

lyu07282 wrote: post #78
Jcampuzano2 wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most replies here make the claim that all AI generated code is "garbage". And I can't help but think most of the people who say that do not actually use it in their day to day with the most recent models and actually give it good instructions/requirements. No, it is not always perfect. Yes you will have to manually edit some of the code it generates. But yes it can and will generate good code if you know how to use i…

I think the root of the argument is that the AI critics are worried because they have the assumption that 1) you aren't experienced enough to know what "good code" looks like, and/or 2) you only care if it "works" and don't understand all the implications bad code will have downstream, again because of inexperience.

If the code is a isolated module or function, all is well.

Otherwise often not. But I am not worried. Give me a AI tool that can work with my whole codebase reliable and I gladly use it.

Re: The copilot delusion

#157

Post by pona-a »

seanmcdirmid wrote: post #153
sgarland wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interactive terminals didn’t write code for you, and also unlocked entirely new paradigms of programs. Debuggers, if anything, enabled deeper understanding. Intellisense is in fact a plague and should not exist. Stack Overflow, when abused, is nearly as bad as AI.

I think we should just agree to disagree. All of those opened up new paradigms for programming, and so will AI even if we aren’t quite sure what that new paradigm is yet. There will always be people claiming the old-fashioned way is better, like Dijkstra’s famous complaint about kids not using punch cards anymore and how that meant they weren’t learning how to be good programmers.

We're actually quite certain what this new paradigm is, because some poor souls are already practicing it: slop coding. You prompt-whisper poorly-defined changes to make, and if the machine chokes on its own vomit along the way, you delete everything and try again.

It feels reasonable, consistent to see it as another "old man yells at the skies" scenario, but I do think it's unprecedented for a machine to automate thought itself on an unbounded domain and with such unreliability. We know calculators made people worse at mental math, but at least calculators don't give you off-by-one errors 40–60% of the time with no method of verification.

The reason why we haven't lost literacy to Speakwrites and screen readers is because they required more time and effort than doing it yourself. With AI, the supposed time savings are obvious: you don't put hours into reading the source to write an essay, you just ask ChatGPT, you don't learn programming fundamentals, you just ask for a script that does X, Y, and Z, etc... It feels like a good choice, but you're permanently crippling you education, both in a structured course and in the wild, and the supposed oracle is a slot machine, costing you $avg_tokens*$model_rate a pull. The poor news is slot machines sell.

Re: The copilot delusion

#158

Post by queenkjuul »

abletonlive wrote: post #73
MeetingsBrowser wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

What's more likely A) all of this money being funneled into tech to build out trillions of dollars worth of infrastructure, a month over month increasing user base buying subscriptions for these llm services, every company buying seats for LLM because of the value that it provides - these people are wrong B) yappers on hackernews that claim they derive no productivity boost out of llms while showing absolutely nothin…

Honestly millions of nobodies buying a product from a tech company is basically proof it's nonsense, in my limited mind. Which one have they bought in droves that actually had a massive impact on you as a developer?

Re: The copilot delusion

#159

Post by ivape »

whattheheckheck wrote: post #134
ivape wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s funny because I made a few funny clips (to my taste) on Google Whisk and figured, hey why not, let’s make a TikTok. Did you know that all of TikTok is full of millions of ai generated stuff or other people just copying each others stuff? I really thought there was something to this “original creation” stuff. We are all so simply reproducible. No one’s making anything special, anywhere, for the most part. If we a…

There's literally genocide and war going on, solve that

The genocide is televised, it appears no one cares.

Re: The copilot delusion

#160

Post by queenkjuul »

dlnovell wrote: post #151

Beautiful and witty prose to say "vibe coding sucks". He's not at all wrong about the state of AI coding in May of 2025. The 3 hours I just burned trying to get it to correct output bugs in a marimo notebook (which I started learning this week) is demonstrable evidence. But it completely ignores the fact that AI generated code is getting better on a ~weekly basis. The author acknowledges that it is useful in some con…

Far as I'm concerned, it's getting better every week in the way Tesla self driving got better every week. Is it closer to its goal? Yes. Does it give value to its users? Arguably yes, but not really.

Is it, in 2025, actually better than a real human at its designated task? Pretty universally no.

So i won't be surprised when the "last 10%" of software AI takes 30 years to close the gap that 20 years of "immanent self driving" is still yet to close.

We should all understand, i would think, that the last 10% is the hard part.

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