551–560 of 697 posts
Ironically this post comes across to me as written by an LLM. The em-dashes, the prepositions, the "not this, that" lines. As a college instructor, I can usually tell. I put it through GPTZero and it said it's 96% LLM written. GPTZero is not full-proof but I think it's likely right on this one and I find it very ironic.
fwiw, it's 'foolproof' not 'full-proof'
Yours Truly Captain Obvious
I'm 61 (retired when I was 57). I too began with BASIC (but closer to 1980). Although I wrote and published games for the Macintosh for a number of years as I finished up college, my professional career (in the traditional sense) began when I was hired by Apple in 1995 and relocated to the Bay Area. Yeah, what started out as a great just got worse and worse as time went on. I suspect though that to a large degree thi…
you also have bozo managers like my recent one measuring metrics like PR time open, review count while the team hasn't shipped anything useful in 6 months.
If a whole team is spinning its wheels at the behest of its manager I feel like the manager should get axed.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Where do you draw your line between plagiarism and creativity? I learned in art school this question is more difficult to answer than it appears when taken seriously.
That's a great question, I've never tried to draw a concrete line before. Code is inherently creative. But it's not art, it doesn't map 1:1 like that. But I wouldn't consider attempting to duplicate a painting, plagiarism if you painted it yourself with your hand (assuming you mention or reference the original author, or it's well know e.g. starry night) . I would consider it plagiarism if you duplicated it via photo…
I agree with you code and art are not the same thing, but I do suspect it can get a bit complicated, it still is for me. Even on your question about how I feel - I don't have a good answer for you because I won technical Emmy awards for working on abstractions, lots of people said our work was cheap and gimmicy, cool, we won Emmy's. I go back and forth often on what is "fair" (whatever that means).
Of all you said the last paragraph I can connect with the most, I tried to have someone thrown out of film school for the same type of thing, but as that same dean told me "life is too short man, you gotta chill out".
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> If you were a smart dev before AI, chances are you will remain a smart dev with AI. I don't think that's what people are upset about, or at least it's not for me. For me it's that writing code is really enjoyable, and delegating it to AI is hell on earth.
Why do you need to delegate writing code to AI? I don't do that. Is your job mandating that you vibe code? How would they know?
Oh, and I’m 57 and was programming the Commodore Pet when I was 11. I’m relieved to be (mostly) free of syntactic shackles.
Vote me down, but also prove me wrong.
My advice to everyone feeling existential vertigo over these tools is to remain confident and trust in yourself. If you were a smart dev before AI, chances are you will remain a smart dev with AI. My experience so far is that to a first approximation, the quality of the code/software generated with AI corresponds to the quality of the developer using the AI tool surprisingly well. An inexperienced, bad dev will still…
For me the problem is simple: we are in an active prisoner's dilemma with AI adoption where the outcome is worse collectively by not asking the right questions for optimal human results, we are defecting and using ai selfishly because we are rewarded by it. There's lots of potential for our use to be turned against us as we train these models for companies that have no commitment to give to the common good or return…
Clearly society wants me to strike out on my own; and that has been facilitated by the rise of agentic coding.
If you've not been paying attention to the news, caring for the common good/welfare is now obsolete and self destructive. We are in survival mode. It's everyone for themselves now.
My advice to everyone feeling existential vertigo over these tools is to remain confident and trust in yourself. If you were a smart dev before AI, chances are you will remain a smart dev with AI. My experience so far is that to a first approximation, the quality of the code/software generated with AI corresponds to the quality of the developer using the AI tool surprisingly well. An inexperienced, bad dev will still…
> My advice to everyone feeling existential vertigo over these tools is to remain confident and trust in yourself. I do try to do that and have convinced myself that nothing has really changed in terms of what is important and that is systems thinking. But it's just one more barrier to convincing people that systems thinking is important, and it's all just exhausting. Besides perhaps my paycheck, I have nothing but e…
My advice to everyone feeling existential vertigo over these tools is to remain confident and trust in yourself. If you were a smart dev before AI, chances are you will remain a smart dev with AI. My experience so far is that to a first approximation, the quality of the code/software generated with AI corresponds to the quality of the developer using the AI tool surprisingly well. An inexperienced, bad dev will still…
I agree with the quality comments. The problem with AI coding isn't so much the slop, it's the developers not realizing its slop and trying to pass it off as a working product in code reviews. Some of the stuff I've reviewed in the past 6 months has been a real eye opener.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
What happens when the AI does the hard stuff as well?
SkyNet. When it can do the hard stuff, why do you think we'll still be around for project management and prompting? At that point, we are livestock.
In fact, we are worse. At least livestock are cared for.