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AI Stole the Joy of Programming

paulefou.com

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Re: AI Stole the Joy of Programming

#91

Post by nunez »

uh_uh wrote: post #32
pluc wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sounds about right. Let's throw more money, power and natural resources at it and see if the scale tips the other way! If not well nothing of value will have been lost right? What's shortening humanity's lifetime in comparison to the potential productivity gains!

Aren't you at least a little bit excited for the potential benefits?

I’m excited about AI technologies that supplement human capability, like driving autonomy and document search.

I’m not excited about AI technologies that replace human capabilities, like pretty much everything that seems to be getting investment dollars these days.

AI-generated art aside (which is mostly terrible), I’m already having a tough time telling what’s real and what’s not online. The thought of this bleeding into daily life in big ways is depressing.

I’m also not thrilled about a generation of people that struggle to write a paragraph of critical or original thought because of AI dependency.

The last act of Up was supposed to be a warning, not an end-goal.

Re: AI Stole the Joy of Programming

#92

Post by dsissitka »

beyang wrote: post #63
dsissitka wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's frustrating. Cody's autocomplete used to work really well for me. Then they switched to DeepSeek. Now I regularly get suggestions that are irrelevant, incomplete, and contain syntax errors. I'm not sure what it's like these days but I had a similar experience with Copilot a while back. I wonder if good autocomplete is just too expensive.

Hi there, Cody contributor here—sorry to hear you had a bad experience! In our evals, our DeepSeek variant outperformed previous models and other alternatives. If it's working worse for you know, would be open to sending us some examples/screenshots of poor completions examples? We'd like to incorporate these into our eval set so we can capture a more representative distribution of codebases and how Cody performs!

I can do that. What's the best way to get them to y'all?

Re: AI Stole the Joy of Programming

#93

Post by neverartful »

nunez wrote: post #90
neverartful wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is my big fear about pervasive use of AI. I'm afraid that companies, policy makers, regulators, etc. all start letting AI make important decisions without any human understanding of the reasoning behind the decision and the human puppets hiding behind it with no accountability. I imagine scenarios where AI could be given complete authority to decide who is hired/fired, who gets medical care, who gets food, who g…

Haven’t books been written about this exact scenario?

I have no idea, but it wouldn't surprise me if there were.

Re: AI Stole the Joy of Programming

#94

Post by jdorfman »

dsissitka wrote: post #92
beyang wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hi there, Cody contributor here—sorry to hear you had a bad experience! In our evals, our DeepSeek variant outperformed previous models and other alternatives. If it's working worse for you know, would be open to sending us some examples/screenshots of poor completions examples? We'd like to incorporate these into our eval set so we can capture a more representative distribution of codebases and how Cody performs!

I can do that. What's the best way to get them to y'all?

Ping community@sourcegraph.com and I'll get a thread going. :)

Re: AI Stole the Joy of Programming

#95

Post by neuronet »

miningape wrote: post #62
neuronet wrote: post #43

If I were a trained professional software engineer who found joy in writing tests and TDD, maybe I'd feel differently, but I write software to help with basic scientific analysis, and ChatGPT has been an absolute game changer for writing tests. I personally find writing tests to be soul-crushing, boring, work. I never really learned it properly, and when I have a well-documented function, CGPT typically does a decent…

The difference with the internet is that it was not the people on the inside calling it useless (engineers). It was the business people and others who had no understanding of the technology and possibilities. In this case it is the opposite, the best ML/software engineers today think this is a passing phase. It's the general population and business people who are claiming it to be revolutionary. Only time will tell t…

There is reasonable debate about their scope and limits, but it's hard to find anyone who understands how LLMS work that thinks they are a passing phase.

The pushback I see is from people who were raised to write everything from scratch, who don't trust the output of LLMS because of "hallucinations" or other crappy outputs. The problem is, the people making these claims are really out of touch with prompt engineering, and how students are currently learning to code with AI in-the-loop (and for basic coding and testing etc for common libraries, LLMs are really, really good at explaining things and writing entry-level code and tests -- this is not arguable: people that are fighting this are graybeards that haven't learned to code at a basic-to-intermediate level in a long time).

A good software developer, with a nose for code smells, will not just accept any old code an LLM produces, you have to use it intelligently, push back on bizarre constructions. Hence, for me, who hates writing tests, it is an amazing tool. If I had an intern or an undergrad who loved grindout out tests I'd use them, but that's basically my LLM at this point (and for the "but ackshually" guys yes obviously you can't use them mindlessly, we are writing code not drawing doodles).

Re: AI Stole the Joy of Programming

#96

Post by kamaal »

KaoruAoiShiho wrote: post #78
friggeri wrote: post #27

I've had the absolute opposite experience, AI has brought back a lot of the joy of programming and building products for me. I've been using Cursor extensively these past few months, for anything ranging from scaffolding to complex UIs. The trick, I've found, is to treat the AI like I would work with a junior engineer, giving in concrete detailed tasks to accomplish, breaking the problem down myself into manageable c…

That's because you don't find joy in programming, you find joy in game design. Actually, game design can be automated too just the interfaces are not as advanced as cursor. We'll get there soon.

How does one learn game design? Any pointers for absolute noobs?

Re: AI Stole the Joy of Programming

#97

Post by max6zx »

neverartful wrote: post #35
KaoruAoiShiho wrote: post #6

It's just the start, it's about to steal the joy of everything in life pretty soon.

This is my big fear about pervasive use of AI. I'm afraid that companies, policy makers, regulators, etc. all start letting AI make important decisions without any human understanding of the reasoning behind the decision and the human puppets hiding behind it with no accountability. I imagine scenarios where AI could be given complete authority to decide who is hired/fired, who gets medical care, who gets food, who g…

I think the scale of applying AI to generate contents will cripple search engine even before your scenarios become true.

I have a hobby with natural photos, and in the last 2 years, I have stopped spending time browsing pages as most of them are garbages generated by AI.

One thing many people hype about generative AI as they believe human also make mistake the same way as AI do, so at worst you have something similar to human mistake. Yes, but the volumes generated by AI are at magnitude bigger, and only a limited amount of human can validate and filter it out. If there is nothing change, this volumes of garbages will surely overflow and there is no way we can differentiate bad and good, fake and authentic contents.

Re: AI Stole the Joy of Programming

#98

Post by player1234 »

neuronet wrote: post #95
miningape wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The difference with the internet is that it was not the people on the inside calling it useless (engineers). It was the business people and others who had no understanding of the technology and possibilities. In this case it is the opposite, the best ML/software engineers today think this is a passing phase. It's the general population and business people who are claiming it to be revolutionary. Only time will tell t…

There is reasonable debate about their scope and limits, but it's hard to find anyone who understands how LLMS work that thinks they are a passing phase. The pushback I see is from people who were raised to write everything from scratch, who don't trust the output of LLMS because of "hallucinations" or other crappy outputs. The problem is, the people making these claims are really out of touch with prompt engineering…

Excellent strawman, good job!
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