The problem is not about quality of the code, it simply almost never works. Just tried some models still in beta on the code of one of the C projects and, while some pieces were okay and could be used as is, some are complete garbage and wouldn't even compile. Maybe few years later it will not become a problem but right now they are useless. For the AI-assisted research and internet search, that's a different thing and works pretty well already.
My AI skeptic friends are all nuts
581–590 of 1001 posts
Re: My AI skeptic friends are all nuts
#582[deleted]
Re: My AI skeptic friends are all nuts
#583I’m an AI skeptic. I’m probably wrong. This article makes me feel kinda wrong. But I desperately want to be right. Why? Because if I’m not right then I am convinced that AI is going to be a force for evil. It will power scams on an unimaginable scale. It will destabilize labor at a speed that will make the Industrial Revolution seem like a gentle breeze. It will concentrate immense power and wealth in the hands of pe…
The downsides you list aren’t specific to AI. Globalization and automation have destabilized labor markets. A small handful of billionaires control most major social media platforms and have a huge influence on politics. Other types of technology, particularly crypto, use large amounts of energy for far more dubious benefits.
AI is just the latest in a long list of disruptive technologies. We can only guess about the long term ramifications. But if history is any indicator, people in a few decades will probably see AI as totally normal and will be discussing the existential threat of something new.
Re: My AI skeptic friends are all nuts
#584I’m an AI skeptic. I’m probably wrong. This article makes me feel kinda wrong. But I desperately want to be right. Why? Because if I’m not right then I am convinced that AI is going to be a force for evil. It will power scams on an unimaginable scale. It will destabilize labor at a speed that will make the Industrial Revolution seem like a gentle breeze. It will concentrate immense power and wealth in the hands of pe…
> So I’ll keep being skeptical, until it’s over.
I feel you've misunderstood the moment. There is no "over". This is it.
Re: My AI skeptic friends are all nuts
#585The argument that I've heard against LLMs for code is that they create bugs that, by design, are very difficult to spot. The LLM has one job, to make code that looks plausible. That's it. There's no logic gone into writing that bit of code. So the bugs often won't be like those a programmer makes. Instead, they can introduce a whole new class of bug that's way harder to debug.
This can happen, but in practice, given I'm reviewing every line anyway, it almost never bites me.
Re: My AI skeptic friends are all nuts
#586Can someone explain to me what this means? > People coding with LLMs today use agents. Agents get to poke around your codebase on their own. They author files directly. They run tools. They compile code, run tests, and iterate on the results. ... Is this what people are really doing? Who is just turning AI loose to modify things as it sees fit? If I'm not directing the work, how does it even know what to do? I've bee…
I let an agent upgrade some old C code that wouldn’t compile and had 100’s of warnings. It was running builds on its own, looking at new errors, etc. It even wrote some tests! I could’ve done this myself but it was a hobby project and tedious work. I was impressed.
Re: My AI skeptic friends are all nuts
#587interesting are LLMs a lot better at Go than Rust?
Re: My AI skeptic friends are all nuts
#588I love LLMs, and I really like programming with Cursor, but I never managed to get the "agents with tons of stuff in their context" mode to work for me. I use Cursor like a glorified code completer, 4-5 lines at a time, because otherwise the LLM just makes too many mistakes that compound. If you let it run in the "write my code for me" mode, and ask it to fix some mistake it made, it will always add more code, never…
Not a full solution, but one thing I've learned not to do is tell Cursor "you got that wrong, fix it like this". Instead, I go back to the previous prompt and click "Restore Checkpoint", edit the prompt and possibly the Cursor rules to steer it in the right direction.
When the model has the wrong solution in its context, it will use it when generating new code, and my feeling is that it doesn't handle the idea of "negative example" very well. Instead, delete the bad code and give it positive examples of the right approach.
Re: My AI skeptic friends are all nuts
#589I’m an AI skeptic. I’m probably wrong. This article makes me feel kinda wrong. But I desperately want to be right. Why? Because if I’m not right then I am convinced that AI is going to be a force for evil. It will power scams on an unimaginable scale. It will destabilize labor at a speed that will make the Industrial Revolution seem like a gentle breeze. It will concentrate immense power and wealth in the hands of pe…
One does not need to be a skeptic about machine learning and its potential as technology to refuse to engage with its practical applications when they are clearly based on suspect ethics (e.g., IP theft[0]).
The ends do not justify the means. It is a similar judgement as when refusing to buy products of forced labour or disproportionate environmental impact, or to invest in war and bloodshed. Everyone makes one for themselves.
Coincidentally (or not), if said suspect ethics were properly addressed, it would ameliorate some of the reservations even the actual skeptics have. Licensing training data would make everyone involved aware of what is happening, give them an ability to vote and freedom to choose, soften the transition as opposed to pulling ground from under people’s feet.
[0] Control over intellectual property has given us fantastic things (cf. Linux, Blender, etc.; you can’t have copyleft without an ability to defend it, and IP laws provide that ability). If yesterday we were sued for singing the happy birthday song in public, and today we see corporations with market caps the size of countries pretending that IP ownership is not much of a thing, the alarm bells should be deafening.
Re: My AI skeptic friends are all nuts
#590This article is very well-written. Obviously not written by AI.