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My AI skeptic friends are all nuts

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Re: My AI skeptic friends are all nuts

#401

Post by SpicyLemonZest »

paradox242 wrote: post #392

I like Thomas, but I find his arguments include the same fundamental mistake I see made elsewhere. He acknowledged that the tools need an expert to use properly, and as he illustrated, he refined his expertise over many years. He is of the first and last generation of experienced programmers who learned without LLM assistance. How is someone just coming out of school going to get the encouragement and space to indepe…

I suppose the counterargument is, how many experienced programmers today have seen a register or a JMP instruction being used?

Re: My AI skeptic friends are all nuts

#402

Post by Mofpofjis »

forty wrote: post #173

Why would anyone rather read and fix someone else code rather than writing the code themselves? I do a lot of code review for other human code and it use so much more energy than writing my own code (and surely, as I have competent colleagues, this is not even as bad as if I expected that the code that I'm reading could be totally random shit)

> Why would anyone rather read and fix someone else code rather than writing the code themselves?

Because their own review standards are low (so they find reviewing "easy"), and/or because they can't appreciate the emotional & mental fulfillment that coding provides.

Re: My AI skeptic friends are all nuts

#404

Post by Mofpofjis »

aucisson_masque wrote: post #200

> Professional software developers are in the business of solving practical problems for people with code. We are not, in our day jobs, artisans. Steve Jobs was wrong: we do not need to carve the unseen feet in the sculpture. Nobody cares if the logic board traces are pleasingly routed. If anything we build endures, it won’t be because the codebase was beautiful. I think it comes all down to that, do you have pride i…

> I make a wall with bricks, even if it will be covered with coating i will do my best to have regular joints and pacing.

Absolutely. This is at the core of it.

Re: My AI skeptic friends are all nuts

#405

Post by Mofpofjis »

deadbabe wrote: post #216

I can’t wait for the day when people no longer manually write text messages to each other, but instead just ask LLMs to read and respond from a few prompted words.

next level: use AI agents in their dating apps on both sides to decide if they want to hook up

Re: My AI skeptic friends are all nuts

#407

Post by wvenable »

gdubs wrote: post #6

One thing that I find truly amazing is just the simple fact that you can now be fuzzy with the input you give a computer, and get something meaningful in return. Like, as someone who grew up learning to code in the 90s it always seemed like science fiction that we'd get to a point where you could give a computer some vague human level instructions and get it more or less do what you want.

I literally pasted these two lines into ChatGPT that were sent to me by one of sysadmin and it told me exactly what I needed to know:

    App1: requestedAccessTokenVersion": null
    App2: requestedAccessTokenVersion": 2
I use it like that all time. In fact, I'm starting to give it less and less context and just toss stuff at it. It's more efficient use of my time.

Re: My AI skeptic friends are all nuts

#408

Post by CapsAdmin »

mlsu wrote: post #362

I tried the agent thing on: - Large C codebase (new feature and bugfix) - Small rust codebase (new feature) - Brand new greenfield frontend for an in-spec and documented openAPI API - Small fixes to an existing frontend It failed _dramatically_ in all cases. Maybe I'm using this thing wrong but it is devin-level fail. Gets diffs wrong. Passes phantom arguments to tools. Screws up basic features. Pulls in hundreds of…

This is my experience too most of the time. Though sometimes it does work, and sometimes a solution is found that I never thought of. But most of the time I have to change things around to my liking.

However, a counter argument to all this;

Does it matter if the code is messy?

None of this matters to the users and people who only know how to vibe code.

Re: My AI skeptic friends are all nuts

#409

Post by dvt »

Fully agree with @tptacek here:

> But AI is also incredibly — a word I use advisedly — important. It’s getting the same kind of attention that smart phones got in 2008, and not as much as the Internet got. That seems about right.

However, I just don't think the AI coding part is that interesting or future-thinking. We're seeing so much more progress in semantic search, tool calling, general purpose uses, robotics, I mean, DeepMind just won a Nobel for goodness' sake.

Don't get me wrong, I use ChatGPT to write all kinds of annoying boilerplate, and it's not too bad at recalling weird quirks I don't remember (yes, even for Rust). But hard problems? Real problems? Zero shot. Novel problems? No way.

> But I’ve been first responder on an incident and fed 4o — not o4-mini, 4o — log transcripts, and watched it in seconds spot LVM metadata corruption issues on a host we’ve been complaining about for months.

I'm going to go ahead and press (X) to doubt on this anecdote. You've had an issue for months and the logs were somehow so arcane, so dense, so unparseable, no one spotted these "metadata corruption issues?" I'm not going to accuse anyone of blatant fabrication, but this is very hard to swallow.

Listen, I also think we're on the precipice of re-inventing how we talk to our machines; how we automate tasks; how we find and distribute small nuggets of data. But, imo, coding just ain't it. Donald Knuth calls computer programming an art, and to rob humanity of effecting not just coding—but any art, I'd argue—would be the most cardinal of sins.

Re: My AI skeptic friends are all nuts

#410

Post by grishka »

gdubs wrote: post #6

One thing that I find truly amazing is just the simple fact that you can now be fuzzy with the input you give a computer, and get something meaningful in return. Like, as someone who grew up learning to code in the 90s it always seemed like science fiction that we'd get to a point where you could give a computer some vague human level instructions and get it more or less do what you want.

But when I'm doing my job as a software developer, I don't want to be fuzzy. I want to be exact at telling the computer what to do, and for that, the most efficient way is still a programming language, not English. The only place where LLMs are an improvement is voice assistants. But voice assistants themselves are rather niche.
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