What worries me about this is that the benefit of well practiced developers using AI to boost their productivity is there, but what happens to the new developers that piggyback off of LLM tooling too much and end up with worse understanding as a whole?
My AI skeptic friends are all nuts
741–750 of 1001 posts
Re: My AI skeptic friends are all nuts
#742What is the agent setup that I should try?
What I tried is indeed "set up Cursor" or "copy-paste ChatGPT", and it was all bad, I have no idea what is this "agent" and "MCP" stupp.
Re: My AI skeptic friends are all nuts
#743> Think of anything you wanted to build but didn’t. You tried to home in on some
> first steps. If you’d been in the limerent phase of a new programming
> language, you’d have started writing. But you weren’t, so you put it off, for a
> day, a year, or your whole career.
> I can feel my blood pressure rising thinking of all the bookkeeping and Googling and dependency drama > of a new project. An LLM can be instructed to just figure all that shit out. > Often, it will drop you precisely at that golden moment where shit almost works, and development means > tweaking code and immediately seeing things work better. That dopamine hit is why I code.
This is me . Just yesterday I finished something I have been putting off for 2 years. I maintain 2 mobile phones one because of work and i needed a way to see sms messages from the other phone. I wanted to write a simple andoird app that reads incoming messages and saves them somewhere for me to use for OTP's and other stuff. For the longest time I wanted to build something like this for myself but I have been putting it off just because of all the weird issues i had been getting with mobile development. A couple of days ago since I had some time and I fired up gemini and asked it to write me a simple flutter app for and to save the messages to supabase and voila it was amazing . With some help and some tweaking I have a fully functioning mobile app on andoird , a small tauri application on desktop to read the messages nicely formatted in a data table without much coding on my part at all. Truly remarkable.
Re: My AI skeptic friends are all nuts
#744Can someone guide me which AI tools are good? And their docs and tutorial
I want to see the hype but without paying up front. My focus area is c#, .net, js.
Re: My AI skeptic friends are all nuts
#745"If hallucination matters to you, your programming language has let you down."
But every time I try this,this happens. I've tried the same thing on multiple agents and they all make up some magic api that doesn't exist, even when I've used the right thing elsewhere in the code to do the same job with that function commented as such. Asking them to use that always fails.
This seems a massive flaw to me that is just hand waved away here.
Re: My AI skeptic friends are all nuts
#746well, I'm going to reference [1] a comment on the "Who Cares Era" that really stood out and maybe should get pinned somewhere.
What about that "superpower" we had to make something out of _nothing_ but our own brains? Sure, you may have looked up some code (do some research and learn), but that mental exercise.. just knowing your code inside-out, can never be compared to the "oh look at that, it actually works" with LLM stuff.
Well guess what, now, you traded that superpower for a subscription! (yes, you are now a middle man of software peddling - paying some company that stole other peoples code and ideas and did not pay _them anything_ in return), and eventually you will get to a point when the internet is down, you won't write any software that day cause you cant get the N model to work.
Did we go to the next step in software evolution? If it has a cost per month (and you pay thieves) (yes that what they are), its going to be a hard "no" for me, you just became a cow. Sure, now this is whats expected of you? OK. This has some strong neoliberalism drift, I assume I can be wrong so please comments welcome I am quite interested in this part.
yes, augmentations seem like amputations, is it McLuhan? I'm not sure, Will we retain our power to produce software? No! Humans dumb down very quickly, a generation is all it took to reduce reading to kids below expected educational levels [2]. There will be less professionals and lots of peddlers that have no skills, and software will be so junk it will be seriously scary to catch a plane in 10 years time.
Interesting times.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44116724 [2] https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2025/jun/02/gen-z-p...
Re: My AI skeptic friends are all nuts
#747When I ask chatGTP to generate the code for a M4F MCU that implements the VirtIO code for accessing the GPIO through RPMSG using FreeRTOS it produces two answers that are both incomplete and incorrect.
I wonder if "lack of data" problem is solvable within LLM. Humans can apply general programming language knowledge when using a new language, but LLMs have to have lots of concrete source code to work well.
Today these models fall apart very quickly once you step out of js/python/c land to rust/zig/ocaml.
With today LLM tech, feeding it language documentation does not work great.
Re: My AI skeptic friends are all nuts
#748I mean, the root cause of this is quite mundane.
People like to think that intelligence is some intrinsic force but it's far better thought of as situational. We are contextually smarter or dumber based on the emotions we're trying to process from a situation and how our motivation reasoning allows us to avoid certain negative emotions.
The subset of people the OP is trying to argue against are people who are otherwise normally intelligent but have an emotional need for AI to be unimportant that they're unable to process so they build a social community of terrible arguments.
The nature of the internet is that visibility is terribly correlated (and often anti-correlated) with popularity so OP thinks this is some large contingent of people when it's instead algorithmically served conflict generators.
Writing against that is also an algorithmic conflict generator, as evidenced by the number of upvotes here. The correct response is to realize that people putting up terrible arguments about AI don't actually care about AI, they're using this issue to process unresolved trauma from other, unrelated areas of their life and taking their ideas literally instead of seriously is a waste and diversion. There are plenty of smart people with far more nuanced views that still disagree with you where they're interested in the content of the argument.
Re: My AI skeptic friends are all nuts
#749[flagged]
Yes pretty much spot on. And if he thinks that
> they’re smarter than me. And when they get over this affectation, they’re going to make coding agents profoundly more effective than they are today.
Then I really hope he's in for a surprise.
Re: My AI skeptic friends are all nuts
#750What worries me about this is that the benefit of well practiced developers using AI to boost their productivity is there, but what happens to the new developers that piggyback off of LLM tooling too much and end up with worse understanding as a whole?
I think this has always been a problem; eg the students who do all their assignments in groups and coast through with a cursory understanding of their degree. Or those who cheat.
If someone doesn't want to learn, there have always been ways to avoid it. Now it's easier with LLMs, that's true. But for people who do want to learn, I think it's also easier now with LLMs.
I'm not sure where the equilibrium will land, in terms of whether we'll end up with more people with a deep understanding, or more people with a shallow understanding. Or maybe the ratio will end up being the same, but there will just be more people in both groups! Ie the ease of learning will pull some of the previously shallow learners into developing a deep understanding, and the ease of coasting will pull up people who were never into development before into being shallow learners.