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AI Made Writing Code Easier. It Made Being an Engineer Harder

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Re: AI Made Writing Code Easier. It Made Being an Engineer Harder

#281

Post by lelanthran »

wolletd wrote: post #77
altmanaltman wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My point is that there's nothing to be written there "instead", it just is not needed text that is added to make the text longer, typical of AI writing that parrots the same points over and over to make up for word count. Here's another example from the blog: > Here is something that gets lost in all the excitement about AI productivity: most software engineers became engineers because they love writing code. > Not m…

I don't know... The part you'd like to remove ("Not managing code...") may be not required to convey the objective meaning of the sentence, but humans have emotions, too. I could have written stuff like that. To build up a bigger emotional picture. > The act of thinking through a problem, designing a solution, and expressing it precisely in a language that makes a machine do exactly what you intended. This sentence m…

> Because humans write like this. Not when they do professional writing maybe, but when they just ramble.

I keep seeing this assertion and I keep responding "Please, point to the volume of writing with this specific cadence that has a date prior to 2024" and I keep getting... crickets!

You're asserting that this is a common way for humans to write, correct? Should be pretty easy, then, to find a large volume of examples.

Re: AI Made Writing Code Easier. It Made Being an Engineer Harder

#282

Post by lelanthran »

SecretDreams wrote: post #19
Spide_r wrote: post #11

Its worth mentioning that this essay has some signs of being either partially AI generated or heavily edited through an LLM. Some of the signs are there (It's not X, it's Y), With the blog having gone from nearly zero activity between 2015 and 2025 to have it explode in posts and text output since then also raises an eyebrow.

I feel like it's such a lack of self respect and respect for others when people write using AI on personal blogs. Reading AI code is very pleasant. It's well annotated and consistent - how I like to read code (although not how I write code LOL). Reading language/opinions is not meant to be this way. It becomes repetitive, boring, and feels super derivative. Why would you turn the main way we communicate with each oth…

> I feel like it's such a lack of self respect and respect for others when people write using AI on personal blogs.

Not so sure about the respect aspect: I have lots of self-respect, but I don't generally broadcast respect for random other people when I write my blogs - the most recent one even called readers stupid, IIRC!

I feel it's more a matter of expression of contempt: if you can't be bothered to write it, WTF are you expecting people to read it?

Re: AI Made Writing Code Easier. It Made Being an Engineer Harder

#283

Post by amelius »

aerhardt wrote: post #228
amelius wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AI learned this figure of speech from humans. Even the frequency in which it is used is copied from humans. So you can't really use it to determine if something is written by an AI or not.

Bro, it reeks of AI.

I find this a better argument.

Re: AI Made Writing Code Easier. It Made Being an Engineer Harder

#284

Post by sarchertech »

Majromax wrote: post #264
sarchertech wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah I tried that but without tests it couldn’t keep the look and feel the same. And spending time thinking deeply enough about it to understand and specify what exactly I don’t want it to change just goes back to my point that coding isn’t the hard part.

Prompting all the way down? Have the AI create tests that document existing, known-good behaviours, then refactor while ensuring those tests pass.

That doesn’t work because tests for Luke and feel are difficult at best and nearly impossible when the code wasn’t designed for it. It’s a chicken and egg problem that you need to refactor to be able to test things reasonably.

It’s not an impossible problem to solve. I could probably setup a test harness that uses the existing game as an oracle that checks to see if the same sequence of inputs produces the same outputs. But by the time one done all, got it to clean up the code, and then diagnosed and fixed the issue, I doubt I would have saved very much time at all if any.

Re: AI Made Writing Code Easier. It Made Being an Engineer Harder

#285

Post by lelanthran »

rhubarbtree wrote: post #49
oytis wrote: post #12

> you are not imagining things. The job changed. The expectations changed. And nobody sent a memo. Looks like something AI would say. Regardless of how it really was written

Why is AI such a bad writer? Phrasing like this feels like reading Fox News.

> Why is AI such a bad writer?

A better question is "Why can't the devs producing code with AI spot the same poor patterns in the code they are generating?"

Maybe my point is that, to a poor speaker of English, the AI blogpost looks good and reads well. In much the same way, to a poor programmer, the AI produced code looks good and reads well.

In a nutshell, if it generates poor English, WTF would anyone think it generates anything but poor code?

Re: AI Made Writing Code Easier. It Made Being an Engineer Harder

#286

Post by hsuduebc2 »

herodoturtle wrote: post #278

Lots of comments here critiquing the article for allegedly being written by AI. I see the post is even flagged now. Irrespective of who wrote it or how it was written, the essay is packed with wisdom. I’ve been programming for 30+ years and leading teams for the last 20 - and I found the essay deeply insightful. I realise I’m a sample size of 1, but just figured I’d comment here to advocate against this post being fl…

I agree with you. I found it interesting too.

Re: AI Made Writing Code Easier. It Made Being an Engineer Harder

#287

Post by lelanthran »

phyzome wrote: post #150
jatins wrote: post #131

The post itself is 100% AI written https://www.pangram.com/history/6572a5c4-f548-46e2-977d-9813...

Reminder that AI-writing detection tools are largely junk.

> Reminder that AI-writing detection tools are largely junk.

In what way? False positives or false negatives?

Re: AI Made Writing Code Easier. It Made Being an Engineer Harder

#288

Post by randomtoast »

herodoturtle wrote: post #278

Lots of comments here critiquing the article for allegedly being written by AI. I see the post is even flagged now. Irrespective of who wrote it or how it was written, the essay is packed with wisdom. I’ve been programming for 30+ years and leading teams for the last 20 - and I found the essay deeply insightful. I realise I’m a sample size of 1, but just figured I’d comment here to advocate against this post being fl…

I would prefer to have the prompt he used to generate the article. Similarly, for compiled binaries, I would rather have the source code that produced them, instead of just an .exe file.

Re: AI Made Writing Code Easier. It Made Being an Engineer Harder

#289

Post by lelanthran »

simianwords wrote: post #4

The post is right superficially. It made being an engineer harder because it took away the easy parts that anyone can do and it forces engineers to think of the hard ones. No jobs get easier with automation - they always move a step up in abstraction level. An accountant who was super proficient in adding numbers no longer can rely on those skills once calculator was invented.

> The post is right superficially. It made being an engineer harder because it took away the easy parts that anyone can do and it forces engineers to think of the hard ones.

I dunno about that. Look at blogging as an example - AI took away the "easy"[1] part of blogging, and now we are left with 90% crap AI-generated "articles" like the one you just read.

I feel it's the other way around - AI took away the hard parts, of both blogging and programming, and now what have to look forward to every single damn day is a deluge of AI slop of absolutely poor quality.

Continuing with the literature analogy (because this article was written by an AI), adding AI as a tool for authors isn't producing the next Terry Pratchett quicker, it's delaying the production of the next Terry Pratchett because the next Terry Pratchett will be drowned out by an unstoppable volume of AI slop.

After all, if you can't recognise obvious AI blog posts, what makes you think you can recognise poor code?

---------------------

[1] I am using the term as you are using it. I don't really believe that it took away the easy part.

Re: AI Made Writing Code Easier. It Made Being an Engineer Harder

#290

Post by satisfice »

simonw wrote: post #135
thinkingemote wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's now almost certain that every submission about LLMs will be written (or assisted) by LLMs. That this kind of writing puts a great number of us off is not important to many who seek their fortune in this industry. I hear the cry: "it's my own words the LLM just assisted me". Yes we have to write prompts.

My current policy on this is that if text expresses opinions or has "I" pronouns attached to it then it's written by me. I don't let LLMs speak for me in this way. I'll let an LLM update code documentation or even write a README for my project but I'll edit that to ensure it doesn't express opinions or say things like "This is designed to help make code easier to maintain" - because that's an expression of a rational…

my policy as well
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