61–70 of 345 posts
I'm always a little surprised at how many people out there want to develop software yet haven't put in the effort to gain even the most basic computer nerd programming chops. You see this all the time in the more newbie-friendly game engine communities. Maybe you don't want to pursue a career in software, but anyone can spend a week learning Python or JavaScript. I suspect/hope a lot of these people are just kids who…
It's your fault really. You don't build custom software for guys having the intellectual capacity and budget of a tractor driver unless you enjoy pain.
I had a related episode at work when my coworker asked me why his seemingly trivial 10 line piece of code was misbehaving inexplicably. It turned out he had two variables `file_name` and `filename` and used one in place of another. I asked him how he ended up with such code, he said he used copilot to create it. Using code from a generative AI without understanding what it does is never a good idea.
I knew a guy that made a good living as a freelance web developer decades ago. He would pretty much just copy and paste code from tutorials or stack overflow and had no real idea how anything worked. Using code without understanding it is never a good idea, it doesn’t need to be from AI for that to be true.
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Coding requires a willingness to understand and manipulate systems made of unbreakable rules. Most people don't want to deal with such an uncompromising method of communication.
And then there are those of us who find computers to be more bearable than people... At least computers don't think it's their god-given right to treat you like garbage.
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I knew a guy that made a good living as a freelance web developer decades ago. He would pretty much just copy and paste code from tutorials or stack overflow and had no real idea how anything worked. Using code without understanding it is never a good idea, it doesn’t need to be from AI for that to be true.
But he made a good living out of it, so in the end it was a good idea?
Unless he's so good at selling his services he can consistently find new clients. And if that's the case, he'd probably kill it in sales.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Coding requires a willingness to understand and manipulate systems made of unbreakable rules. Most people don't want to deal with such an uncompromising method of communication.
And then there are those of us who find computers to be more bearable than people... At least computers don't think it's their god-given right to treat you like garbage.
Computers treat people like garbage all the time.
One thing I loved about doing technical enterprise sales is that I’d meet people doing something I knew little or nothing about and who didn’t really understand what we offered but had a problem they could explain and our offering could help with.
They’d have deep technical knowledge of their domain and we had the same in ours, and there was just enough shared knowledge at the interface between the two that we could have fun and useful discussions. Lots of mutual respect. I’ve always enjoyed working with smart people even when I don’t really understand what they do.
Of course there were also idiots, but generally they weren’t interested in paying what we charged, so that was OK.
> Helping a customer solve challenges is often super rewarding, but only when I can remove roadblocks for customers who can do most of the work themselves.
So I feel a lot of sympathy for the author — that would be terribly soul sucking.
I guess generative grammars have increased the number of “I have a great idea for a technical business, I just need a technical co founder” who think that an idea is 90% of it and have no idea what technical work actually is.
This seems like a support issue, not an AI issue. AI is how the code was written, but the issue would be the same if it was amateurs writing bad code. If all you want to do is support your API, a support article outlining the issues you see over and over would be something to point your customers to. Warrant your API against errors, but point out that anything more is billable work. If you're not interested, partner…
So what was a difficult problem can quickly become insurmountable.
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I read a "Teach yourself $language in 10 days" book in a weekend, and was banging code on Monday to create the first v0.1 in a week. Of course the code was absolutely horrendous, but it worked. I still have a copy of that old database that was used, and over the years, I have turned to it as I've learned new things and have even rewritten the UI a couple of times. It has helped me stay up to date with new trends as i…
If I may make some assumptions about you: 1. You're a person of a particular frame of mind who finds it easy and natural to talk to computers in programming languages 2. You knew a different language before, perhaps one you learnt at a young age 3. You've messed around with computers for years now and have built up a conceptual model of what the hardware and software components are and how things fit together. So if…