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The copilot delusion

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Re: The copilot delusion

#191

Post by ghaff »

bluefirebrand wrote: post #175
ghaff wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Coordinating teams, talking to stakeholders/customers (including spending a lot of time with them), having someone manage individual contributors at some level, etc. is work that can't just be ignored at a company of any size. The only way to avoid (a lot of) it is to be very small and that has its own set of issues.

Sure, but do we really need four layers of people to do all of that? It's really common to see just layers and layers of management at companies that get big enough

For a big enough company? Probably. Someone isn't going to effectively manage 100 or 500 people.

Re: The copilot delusion

#192

Post by MeetingsBrowser »

abletonlive wrote: post #187
queenkjuul wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

copilot and openai have changed my entire development work process. if it hasn't for you then you are being left behind. it's that simple. i've made two QA roles obsolete on my team already...there's more to come

Can you give a detailed example of how LLMs have changed your entire process? Your experience does not match mine and I would genuinely like to know why. I would love to be more efficient.

Re: The copilot delusion

#193

Post by icedchai »

drekipus wrote: post #93
Jcampuzano2 wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They won't blame the AI as the root cause. They will blame you. This is why I mention you need to be competent enough to understand what is being generated or they will find someone else who does. There's no 2 ways around it. AI is here to stay.

> you need to be competent enough to understand what is being generated We're all competent enough to understand what is generated. That's why everyone is doomer about it. What insights do you have above us when the LLM generates true="false" while i What's the deep philosophical understanding that you have about this that makes us all sheeple for not understanding how this is actually the business's goose laying gol…

Have you actually tried using AI to generate code? Try it with a hobby project. You might be surprised!

Re: The copilot delusion

#194

Post by WarOnPrivacy »

Ferret7446 wrote: post #179
agos wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

from TFA: > Maybe you’ll never write the code that keeps a plane in the sky. Maybe you’ll never push bits that hold a human life in the balance. Fine. Most don’t. But even if you're just slapping together another CRUD app for some bloated enterprise, you still owe your users respect. You owe them dignity.

> you still owe your users respect. You owe them dignity. This is moral grandstanding. You owe your customers a good product at a low cost. If you don't use a tool that can lower costs, you are wronging your users and will go out of business. Handcrafted CRUD will go the same way as handcrafted anything; an expensive niche hobby.

> This is moral grandstanding.

I disagree. For the kind of relationships I want with other humans, respect and dignity are my end of the bargain.

Re: The copilot delusion

#195

Post by mwcampbell »

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…

> 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.

We've all already heard this message a thousand times. There's no need to keep repeating it. Don't discourage people, especially young people, who want to do great work.

Re: The copilot delusion

#196

Post by dlnovell »

queenkjuul wrote: post #160
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…

It's a fair point. It's hard to know where we are in the S curve. Considering how much better it's gotten in the past 12 months I don't get the sense that we're decelerating towards a plateau of capability, but it's certainly possible

Re: The copilot delusion

#197

Post by tokioyoyo »

lyu07282 wrote: post #91
tokioyoyo wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does it matter? The selling point of AI generated code is, eventually, you won't care what's happening in your code base and things just "work". It's like 95% of people who code (99%?) don't know what compilers do. Throw away what is collapsing, bring up new stuff, rinse and repeat.

There were always people who only cared if it "just works", that part isn't exactly new. I think what we are saying is that good code matters beyond what you can understand or appreciate, until it blows your face off. This isn't something we could ever convince you of, and... > Throw away what is collapsing, bring up new stuff, rinse and repeat. hearing you trying to explain yourself makes us even more worried than b…

Don't get me wrong, I don't support it, but at this point, I've heard enough from the upper-stakeholders to get what they're imagining in their head. Basically, think of a system that takes a long list of requirements, then just magically makes a working code out of it. Then automagically takes bug reports, fixes them, and adds it to the list of the requirements. Rinse and repeat to make sure things just work. The higher up you go in the chain of command, the more you realize that, genuinely nobody cares about code quality, engineers and etc. in any of the companies that are not solely tech companies.

Again, the selling point to higher ups is that you won't need to deal with code anymore, because things will just "work". How? I don't know, but that's what they're imagining and trying to cash into.

Re: The copilot delusion

#198

Post by tokioyoyo »

joks wrote: post #100
tokioyoyo wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does it matter? The selling point of AI generated code is, eventually, you won't care what's happening in your code base and things just "work". It's like 95% of people who code (99%?) don't know what compilers do. Throw away what is collapsing, bring up new stuff, rinse and repeat.

The selling point to you is that you can't fix problems, you just have to reimplement everything every time anything fails?

Not to me, to anyone who is buying up the solution. We work in very general paradigm of "write code, see something wrong, fix it up, deploy, now it works without that problem". The one that's being desired is "here's list of things i want to work, make it automagically work". How it gets there, doesn't matter, because, only us, engineers, care about code. If it needs to be reimplemented to fix up a bug or introduce a new feature, let it be.

Re: The copilot delusion

#199

Post by MrVandemar »

nozzlegear wrote: post #135
boxed wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe he meant it was long. Some people seem to think that long walls of text is how you spot AI slop.

And god forbid you use an emdash these days.

I'm unapologetic about using em-dashes. They're in my toolbox, and I reach for them. I can and do manually type em-dashes manually in both Linux and Microsoft Windows using the key-codes.

Anyone who is basing their opinion of the provenance of a piece of writing on whether em-dashes are used, then that opinion is emminently discardable lemming-babble.

Re: The copilot delusion

#200

Post by Glyptodon »

My point of comparison of choice is overseas contractors, not pair programming.

Copilot or Cursor or whatnot is basically a better experience because you do not have to get on Zoom calls (after Slack has failed) to ask why some chunk of your system that cares about root nodes has mysteriously gained a function called isChild (not hasChildren) that returns a boolean based on whether or not the node has children and not whether it has a parent. Or to figure out why a bunch a API parameters that used to accept arrays now don't. Or why an ask to not show a constant literal in a menu resulted in algorithmic derivation of ordinals rather than using i18n.

With AI you probably don't have those kinds of things happen, but if you do, you can instantly tell it, sorry, that's wrong, this is why, and have it changed in a minute. Whereas with contractors, you waste a lot of time on things like communication and understanding gaps and language barriers that are mostly gone with AI.

The second you can interact really easily w/ AI from Jira Tickets, most engineers are going to turn into ticket writers and overseers for 80% of their work. (And yes, you'll still need engineers, because Product can't actually write decent engineering tickets, though telling the AI to write engineering tickets will probably get close, and because somebody with a clue needs to be in the loop, though many organizations will try to forget this and have things they don't understand go terribly wrong.)

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