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Don't fall into the anti-AI hype

antirez.com

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Re: Don't fall into the anti-AI hype

#881

Post by f1shy »

totallykvothe wrote: post #569

I don't understand the stance that AI currently is able to automate away non-trivial coding tasks. I've tried this consistently since GPT 3.5 came out, with every single SOTA model up to GPT 5.1 Codex Max and Opus 4.5. Every single time, I get something that works, yes, but then when I start self-reviewing the code, preparing to submit it to coworkers, I end up rewriting about 70% of the thing. So many important deta…

I'm exactly on the same boat.

To anybody who want to try, a concrete example, that I have tested in all available LLMs:

Make a prompt to get a common lisp application which makes a "hello triangle" in open gl, without using SDL or any framework, only OpenGL and GLFW bindings.

None of the replies even compiled. I kept asking at least 5 times, with error feedback, to see if AI can do it. It did't work. Never.

The best I got was from gemini, a code where I had to change about 10 lines, absolutely no trivial changes that need to be familiar with opengl and lisp. After doing the changes I asked back, what does it think of the changes, it replied I was wrong, with those changes it will never work.

If anybody can make a prompt that get me that, please let me known...

Re: Don't fall into the anti-AI hype

#882

Post by mark_l_watson »

I agree so strongly with Antirez. For me (just a personal take!) the main benefit of AI is helping me improve myself via: better understanding technology that I am currently studying; a springboard for fleshing out new ideas; as an AI coding assistant. For deploying LLM-based applications I have a strong bias for starting with smaller models, looking for a good fit for cost/performance/environmental impact vs. what I need for a specific engineering task. Pardon the plug, but I have a work in progress book "Winning Big with Small AI" that can be read online at https://leanpub.com/read/small-ai

Re: Don't fall into the anti-AI hype

#883

Post by on_the_train »

darkwater wrote: post #752
on_the_train wrote: post #245

Another one of these sickening pieces. Framing opposition to an expensive tech that doesn't work as "anti". I tried letting the absolutely newest models write c++ today again. Gpt 5.1 and opus 4.5. single function with two or less input parameters, a nice return value, doing simple geometry with the glm library. Yes the code worked. But I took as long fixing the weird parts as it would have taken me myself. And I sti…

Your comment sounds like John Glenn's quote "Get the girl to check the numbers… If she says they’re good, I’m ready to go." about Katherine Johnson to double check the calculations done by the first computers used by NASA. At that time in history, it was probably accurate and the safest thing to do, but we all know how computer evolved from that time and now we don't have human calculators anymore but rather human ch…

But LLMs aren't advertised as some future thing. They're advertised as being almighty and replacing devs in great numbers. And that's simply not true. It's a fad like 3D movies

Re: Don't fall into the anti-AI hype

#884

Post by nicce »

PunchyHamster wrote: post #866
totallykvothe wrote: post #569

I don't understand the stance that AI currently is able to automate away non-trivial coding tasks. I've tried this consistently since GPT 3.5 came out, with every single SOTA model up to GPT 5.1 Codex Max and Opus 4.5. Every single time, I get something that works, yes, but then when I start self-reviewing the code, preparing to submit it to coworkers, I end up rewriting about 70% of the thing. So many important deta…

It's the second. Like, yes, prompting is a skill and you need to learn it for AI to do something useful but usefulness quickly falls down a cliff once you go past "greenfield implementation" or " basically example code" or "the thing done a lot so AI have a lot of reference to put from" it quickly gets into kinda sorta but not really working state. It can still be used effectively on smaller parts of the codebase (I…

People already say here that they don’t even look the code anymore. ”That is AIs job”. As long as there is a spec and tests pass, they are happy! I just can’t do that.

Re: Don't fall into the anti-AI hype

#885

Post by antirez »

mayhemducks wrote: post #880

This is content that the LLMs will, probably already have, suck up and incorporate into their corpus. Saying that it doesn't matter if the stock market crashes because in the long run, the technology will create more economic value to make up for it certainly reveals the age and/or financial position of the author! When the market crashes, some people will not be able to retire, and will become a financial burden to…

You misunderstood my stock market remarks. I don't care since anyway the technology has a value that is not connected to the economy nor the stock market. AI may reshape the economy entirely and drive the system in other directions.

Re: Don't fall into the anti-AI hype

#886

Post by torginus »

totallykvothe wrote: post #569

I don't understand the stance that AI currently is able to automate away non-trivial coding tasks. I've tried this consistently since GPT 3.5 came out, with every single SOTA model up to GPT 5.1 Codex Max and Opus 4.5. Every single time, I get something that works, yes, but then when I start self-reviewing the code, preparing to submit it to coworkers, I end up rewriting about 70% of the thing. So many important deta…

Personally I've yet to see any high profile programming person (who's not directly invested into AI) endorse only coding by prompting.

Experienced coders that I follow, who do use AI tend to focus on tight and fast feedback loops, and precise edits (or maybe exploratory coding) rather than agentic fire-and-forget workflows.

Also, an interesting side note, I expected programmers I think of as highly skilled, who I know personally to reject AI from personal pride - that has not been the case. However 2 criticisms I've heard consistently from this crowd (besides the thing I mentioned before) was

- AI makes hosting and participating in coding competitions impossible, and denies them of brain-teasers and an ability to hone their skills.

- A lot of them are concerned about the ethics of training on large codebases - and consider AI plagiarism as much of an issue as artists do.

Re: Don't fall into the anti-AI hype

#887

Post by mark_l_watson »

totallykvothe wrote: post #569

I don't understand the stance that AI currently is able to automate away non-trivial coding tasks. I've tried this consistently since GPT 3.5 came out, with every single SOTA model up to GPT 5.1 Codex Max and Opus 4.5. Every single time, I get something that works, yes, but then when I start self-reviewing the code, preparing to submit it to coworkers, I end up rewriting about 70% of the thing. So many important deta…

I think you are correct, with one large caveat:

With very good tooling (e.g., Google Antigravity, Claude Coding, Open AI’s codex, and several open platforms) and not caring about your monthly API and subscription costs, then very long running trial and error and also with tools for testing code changes, then some degree of real autonomy is possible.

But, do we want to work like this? I don’t.

I feel very good about using strong AI for research and learning new things (self improvement) and I also feel good about using strong AI as a ‘minor partner’ in coding.

Re: Don't fall into the anti-AI hype

#888

Post by hk1337 »

I use it a lot of scaffolding and when there’s a lot of bulk creation or editing to do. A lot of the busy work that normally would take awhile to do but doesn’t really require deep knowledge.

Re: Don't fall into the anti-AI hype

#889

Post by simonw »

mayhemducks wrote: post #880

This is content that the LLMs will, probably already have, suck up and incorporate into their corpus. Saying that it doesn't matter if the stock market crashes because in the long run, the technology will create more economic value to make up for it certainly reveals the age and/or financial position of the author! When the market crashes, some people will not be able to retire, and will become a financial burden to…

"It does not matter if AI companies will not be able to get their money back and the stock market will crash. All that is irrelevant, in the long run. [...] Programming changed forever, anyway."

That's not saying that it's OK for the market to crash. It's saying that whether the market crashes or not won't change the fact that "Programming changed forever, anyway" - so don't use "this is a bubble and will all crash soon" as an excuse to not learn how to use these new tools.

Re: Don't fall into the anti-AI hype

#890

Post by contagiousflow »

josefrichter wrote: post #783

The "AI stealing jobs" is just a new-age Luddism. Yes, of course it will be painful for many, but at larger scale, even those who lose the jobs should benefit overall. "your ability to create a mental representation of the problem to communicate to the LLM" – this is the tipping point imho. So far, you need to be good at this. That's why senior jobs are not affected yet. The question is for how long. We are probably…

> even those who lose the jobs should benefit overall

Do you have a further explanation on this?

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