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My AI skeptic friends are all nuts

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Re: My AI skeptic friends are all nuts

#441

Post by metaltyphoon »

TheRoque wrote: post #185

One of the biggest anti LLM arguments for me at the moments is about security. In case you don't know, if you open a file with copilot active or cursor, containing secrets, it might be sent to a server a thus get leaked. The companies say that if that file is in a cursorignore file, it won't be indexed, but it's still a critical security issue IMO. We all know what happened with the "smart home assistants" like Alexa…

At day job while someone was trying out windsurf, it simply picked up an environment variable that contained sensitive data and used it in code. This is wild.

Re: My AI skeptic friends are all nuts

#443

Post by [deleted] »

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…

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Re: My AI skeptic friends are all nuts

#444

Post by [deleted] »

grey-area wrote: post #169

I’d love to see the authors of effusive praise of generative AI like this provide the proof of the unlimited powers of their tools in code. If GAI (or agents, or whatever comes next …) is so effective it should be quite simple to prove that by creating an AI only company and in short order producing huge amounts of serviceable code to do useful things. So far I’ve seen no sign of this, and the best use case seems to…

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Re: My AI skeptic friends are all nuts

#445

Post by [deleted] »

davidclark wrote: post #145

>If you were trying and failing to use an LLM for code 6 months ago †, you’re not doing what most serious LLM-assisted coders are doing. Here’s the thing from the skeptic perspective: This statement keeps getting made on a rolling basis. 6 months ago if I wasn’t using the life-changing, newest LLM at the time, I was also doing it wrong and being a luddite. It creates a never ending treadmill of boy-who-cried-LLM. Why…

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Re: My AI skeptic friends are all nuts

#446

Post by [deleted] »

thoughtpeddler wrote: post #413

I was recently "pair-vibe-coding" with someone who's much 'smarter' than I am, certainly when it comes to coding, especially Python. He's always been in the LLM skeptic camp, and it was fascinating to see that because of his extensive Python knowledge, his prompting was actually very minimal and weak, one might even say 'lazy'. The output he got from o3 for our given task was therefore really mediocre, and had a few…

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Re: My AI skeptic friends are all nuts

#447

Post by [deleted] »

fooqux wrote: post #65

> "For art, music, and writing? I got nothing. I’m inclined to believe the skeptics in those fields." You've already lost me, because I view programming as an art form. I would no more use AI to generate code than I would use it to paint my canvas. I think the rest of the article is informative. It made me want to try some things. But it's written from the perspective of a CEO thinking all his developers are just sal…

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Re: My AI skeptic friends are all nuts

#448

Post by [deleted] »

lapcat wrote: post #255

> If you were trying and failing to use an LLM for code 6 months ago, you’re not doing what most serious LLM-assisted coders are doing. This sounds like the "No true Scotsman" fallacy. > People coding with LLMs today use agents. Agents get to poke around your codebase on their own. That's a nonstarter for closed source, unless everything is running on-device, which I don't think it is? > Part of being a senior develo…

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Re: My AI skeptic friends are all nuts

#449

Post by d_burfoot »

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.

It's a radical change in human/computer interface. Now, for many applications, it is much better to present the user with a simple chat window and allow them to type natural language into it, rather than ask them to learn a complex UI. I want to be able to say "Delete all the screenshots on my Desktop", instead of going into a terminal and typing "rm ~/Desktop/*.png".

Re: My AI skeptic friends are all nuts

#450

Post by thewebguyd »

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…

> get the encouragement and space to independently develop the experience they need to break out of the "vibe coding" phase?

I wonder this too, as someone who is entirely self-taught, when I started escaping “tutorial hell” was the hardest part of the journey, and took quite a bit of both encouragement and sheer willpower. Not sure I would have ever went beyond that if I had LLMs.

I worry for Juniors, and either we’ll need to find a way to mentor them past the vibe coding phase, or we hope that AI gets good enough before we all retire.

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