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AI is a bad tool

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Re: AI is a bad tool

#31

Post by davidkwast »

wmichelin wrote: post #18
datakan wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you not enjoy coding? I'm not trying to be snarky, just a genuine question. People used to enjoy it but lately all I see are people talking about they "no longer have to do it" I see both sides of the argument people endless have over this. I have been hesitant to take a solid position, first because I suck at coding and second because I dont really have a dog in this fight. The only context I have is my friend in…

I enjoy building things. I do not enjoy the act typing out code by hand. > Do you not enjoy coding? I'm not trying to be snarky, just a genuine question To follow this debate through, to maximize coding enjoyment, shouldn't we be avoiding compilers? They take away a lot of the code we need to write. Frameworks as well?

I usually like to write elegant code using Python and frameworks like Django.

The pleasure comes from the "the only right lines of code" instead of "the most lines of code".

Re: AI is a bad tool

#32

Post by wrenky »

datakan wrote: post #16
m_w_ wrote: post #2

I can only imagine that people who say things like: > If you use AI for anything else, and in particularly if you use it to generate code, you're wasting your time. Have not used frontier models in at least a year. It is nearly inconceivable to me that I would ever go back to writing code by hand, in any context. Even if no new model was ever released, the combination of GLM 5.2 and DeepSeek V4 flash is more than suf…

Do you not enjoy coding? I'm not trying to be snarky, just a genuine question. People used to enjoy it but lately all I see are people talking about they "no longer have to do it" I see both sides of the argument people endless have over this. I have been hesitant to take a solid position, first because I suck at coding and second because I dont really have a dog in this fight. The only context I have is my friend in…

I personally love coding! unfortunately for me the agents are much faster at it and often more correct, especially after iteration. Guiding AI is more efficient currently.

Re: AI is a bad tool

#33

Post by buzzin__ »

In this article you can learn that it takes the same amount of effort to verify if a security hole is real, as it takes to find it in the first place. (?)

Re: AI is a bad tool

#34

Post by llm_nerd »

semiquaver wrote: post #15

Pure sophistry, divorced from reality. It starts with the assumption that nothing coming from AI can be useful or trusted and uses that to demonstrate that AI is not useful or safe.

Right at the outset it opines that AI finding vulnerabilities ("allegedly") is useless because people have to verify those vulnerabilities, which is such a logically braindead bit of nonsense that I knew it was going to be worthless, and somehow it got even worse with every subsequent paragraph.

I get that there are people who are scared, and the change is coming fast and hard and there is a lot of doom and concerns, but good god do people think authoring or upvoting shit like the submitted nonsense is going to stem the tide or change the path? Pathetic.

Re: AI is a bad tool

#35

Post by nextos »

champagnepapi wrote: post #14
m_w_ wrote: post #2

I can only imagine that people who say things like: > If you use AI for anything else, and in particularly if you use it to generate code, you're wasting your time. Have not used frontier models in at least a year. It is nearly inconceivable to me that I would ever go back to writing code by hand, in any context. Even if no new model was ever released, the combination of GLM 5.2 and DeepSeek V4 flash is more than suf…

How are you verifying all the code that's generated? Do you think that verifying properly would take you as much effort as the original implementation would've?

I think this is the real problem. I am sympathetic towards automated code synthesis.

But without formal verification and a human reviewing specifications to ensure alignment, I think code will end up being broken in unexpected ways or drift away from the original intent.

Re: AI is a bad tool

#36

Post by m_w_ »

datakan wrote: post #16
m_w_ wrote: post #2

I can only imagine that people who say things like: > If you use AI for anything else, and in particularly if you use it to generate code, you're wasting your time. Have not used frontier models in at least a year. It is nearly inconceivable to me that I would ever go back to writing code by hand, in any context. Even if no new model was ever released, the combination of GLM 5.2 and DeepSeek V4 flash is more than suf…

Do you not enjoy coding? I'm not trying to be snarky, just a genuine question. People used to enjoy it but lately all I see are people talking about they "no longer have to do it" I see both sides of the argument people endless have over this. I have been hesitant to take a solid position, first because I suck at coding and second because I dont really have a dog in this fight. The only context I have is my friend in…

I love coding and I always have - arguably moreso now, if you can still call it coding.

For me, it is not about the syntax nor the mechanics of typing though. My enjoyment comes from thinking about problems and breaking them down, or thinking about what architecture would best serve them. I guess I'm meant to be a systems design guy, so I'm lucky that AI-coding fits this well (AI models have limited context windows, relative to the size of codebases, so doing the big picture thinking is still important, and fun for me).

Re: AI is a bad tool

#38

Post by remich »

Ken_At_EM wrote: post #23
datakan wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you not enjoy coding? I'm not trying to be snarky, just a genuine question. People used to enjoy it but lately all I see are people talking about they "no longer have to do it" I see both sides of the argument people endless have over this. I have been hesitant to take a solid position, first because I suck at coding and second because I dont really have a dog in this fight. The only context I have is my friend in…

ok but a lot of coding used to be fighting package managers, discovering bugs in dependencies, dealing with deploy baloney, etc, not just "solving puzzles" or "architecting the backend"

Yeah the rose colored glasses some people seem to have about how fun doing everything by hand was in the past and how well most people did those things continues to astonish me

Re: AI is a bad tool

#39

Post by enraged_camel »

datakan wrote: post #16
m_w_ wrote: post #2

I can only imagine that people who say things like: > If you use AI for anything else, and in particularly if you use it to generate code, you're wasting your time. Have not used frontier models in at least a year. It is nearly inconceivable to me that I would ever go back to writing code by hand, in any context. Even if no new model was ever released, the combination of GLM 5.2 and DeepSeek V4 flash is more than suf…

Do you not enjoy coding? I'm not trying to be snarky, just a genuine question. People used to enjoy it but lately all I see are people talking about they "no longer have to do it" I see both sides of the argument people endless have over this. I have been hesitant to take a solid position, first because I suck at coding and second because I dont really have a dog in this fight. The only context I have is my friend in…

There's parts I enjoy, parts I dislike and parts I hate with a passion.

However, I love putting something in front of users, seeing them use it and get value out of it. And AI lets me get there 10x faster.

Re: AI is a bad tool

#40

Post by kenferry »

kierenj wrote: post #3

I'd welcome someone pointing out where I'm wrong in my critique of this critique.. "The reason AI is a bad tool is that generally speaking, it is completely opaque." "The real question is, who can verify that what the AI built is good and true?" Well, you? The developer? The person responsible for using the tool, no? Isn't this article just saying, "using a tool blindly and not checking the result" is bad? Which, of…

100%. Author's point is more like "don't vibe code if you have to maintain it".

The code is your responsibility, and it's your responsibility to understand it and maintain it (using the tools your have available).

Strange article. If their point was "…but vibe coding is really tempting, so you have to exercise a lot of discipline" I'd be on board.

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