Generative AI coding tools and agents do not work for me

Post by skydhash » Tue, Jun 17, 2025, 11:37 AM UTC

anelson wrote: post #299

rwmj wrote: post #275

> What I think happens is that these people save time because they only spot review the AI generated code, or skip the review phase altogether, which as I said above would be a deal breaker for me. In my experience it's that they dump the code into a pull request and expect me to review it. So GenAI is great if someone else is doing the real work.

I’ve experienced this as well. If management is not competent they can’t tell (or don’t want to hear) when a “star” performer is actually a very expensive wrapper around a $20/mo cursor subscription. Unlike the author of the article I do get a ton of value from coding agents, but as with all tools they are less than useless when wielded incompetently. This becomes more damaging in an org that already has perverse inc…

Post by skydhash » Tue, Jun 17, 2025, 11:41 AM UTC

jumploops wrote: post #273

b112 wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is absolutely true, and AI cannot think, reason, comprehend anything it has not seen before. If you're getting answers, it has seen it elsewhere, or it is literally dumb, statistical luck. That doesn't mean it knows the answer . That means it guessed or hallucinated correctly. Guessing isn't knowing. edit: people seem to be missing my point, so let me rephrase. Of course AIs don't think, but that wasn't what I was…

> It is absolutely true, and AI cannot think, reason, comprehend anything it has not seen before. The amazing thing about LLMs is that we still don’t know how (or why) they work! Yes, they’re magic mirrors that regurgitate the corpus of human knowledge. But as it turns out, most human knowledge is already regurgitation (see: the patent system). Novelty is rare, and LLMs have an incredible ability to pattern match and…

Post by 0x000xca0xfe » Tue, Jun 17, 2025, 11:51 AM UTC

socalgal2 wrote: post #236

nottorp wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You remember when Google used to do the same thing for you way before "AI"? Okay, maybe sometimes the post about the stack trace was in Chinese, but a plain search used to be capable of giving the same answer as a LLM. It's not that LLMs are better, it's search that got entshittified.

I remember when I could paste an error message into Google and get an answer. I do not remember pasting a 60 line stack trace into Google and getting an answer, though I'm pretty sure I honestly never tried that. Did it work?

Post by danielbln » Tue, Jun 17, 2025, 11:52 AM UTC

rwmj wrote: post #275

> What I think happens is that these people save time because they only spot review the AI generated code, or skip the review phase altogether, which as I said above would be a deal breaker for me. In my experience it's that they dump the code into a pull request and expect me to review it. So GenAI is great if someone else is doing the real work.

Post by danielbln » Tue, Jun 17, 2025, 11:53 AM UTC

rsanheim wrote: post #249

b112 wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is absolutely true, and AI cannot think, reason, comprehend anything it has not seen before. If you're getting answers, it has seen it elsewhere, or it is literally dumb, statistical luck. That doesn't mean it knows the answer . That means it guessed or hallucinated correctly. Guessing isn't knowing. edit: people seem to be missing my point, so let me rephrase. Of course AIs don't think, but that wasn't what I was…

It's just Pattern matching. Most APIs, and hell, most code is not unique or special. Its all been done a thousands of times before. Thats why an LLM can be helpful on some tool you've written just for yourself and never released anywhere. As to 'knows the answer', I'm don't even know what that means with these tools. All I know is if it is helpful or not.