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The copilot delusion

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Re: The copilot delusion

#91

Post by lyu07282 »

tokioyoyo wrote: post #63
lyu07282 wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We will see, but I can also imagine the pile of shit you vibecoded around you collapsing on top of you.

Does it matter? The selling point of AI generated code is, eventually, you won't care what's happening in your code base and things just "work". It's like 95% of people who code (99%?) don't know what compilers do. Throw away what is collapsing, bring up new stuff, rinse and repeat.

There were always people who only cared if it "just works", that part isn't exactly new. I think what we are saying is that good code matters beyond what you can understand or appreciate, until it blows your face off. This isn't something we could ever convince you of, and...

> Throw away what is collapsing, bring up new stuff, rinse and repeat.

hearing you trying to explain yourself makes us even more worried than before.

Re: The copilot delusion

#92

Post by douglasisshiny »

tokioyoyo wrote: post #63
lyu07282 wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We will see, but I can also imagine the pile of shit you vibecoded around you collapsing on top of you.

Does it matter? The selling point of AI generated code is, eventually, you won't care what's happening in your code base and things just "work". It's like 95% of people who code (99%?) don't know what compilers do. Throw away what is collapsing, bring up new stuff, rinse and repeat.

This whole thread has to be satire.

Re: The copilot delusion

#93

Post by drekipus »

Jcampuzano2 wrote: post #39
lamename wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They will demand use of AI tools for "productivity" and then complain when there are bugs in prod without realizing the root cause.

They won't blame the AI as the root cause. They will blame you. This is why I mention you need to be competent enough to understand what is being generated or they will find someone else who does. There's no 2 ways around it. AI is here to stay.

> you need to be competent enough to understand what is being generated

We're all competent enough to understand what is generated. That's why everyone is doomer about it.

What insights do you have above us when the LLM generates

    true="false"
    while i
What's the deep philosophical understanding that you have about this that makes us all sheeple for not understanding how this is actually the business's goose laying golden eggs. Not the engineers.

Frankly. Businesses that use this, drop all their actual engineers, and then fall over when the slightest breeze comes.

I am actually in favour, in a accelerationist sense.

Re: The copilot delusion

#95

Post by seanmcdirmid »

anon7000 wrote: post #85
padolsey wrote: post #36

> if you want to sculpt the kind of software that gets embedded in pacemakers and missile guidance systems and M1 tanks—you better throw that bot out the airlock and learn. But the bulk of us aren't doing that... We're making CRUD apps for endless incoming streams of near identical user needs, just with slightly different integrations, schemas, and lipstick. Let's be honest. For most software there is nothing new und…

Yeah, and the article talks about those ways in which AI is useful. Overall, the author doesn’t have a problem with experts using AI to help them. The main argument is that we’re calling AI a copilot, and many newbies may be trusting it or leaning on it too much, when in reality, it’s still a shitty coworker half the time. Real copilots are actually your peers and experts at what they do. > Now? We’re building a worl…

> Btw, I say this as someone who does use AI coding assistants. I don’t think it’s all bad or all good. But we can’t just wave away the downsides just because it’s useful

Isn't this just the rehashed argument against interactive terminals in the 60s/70s (no longer need to think very carefully about what you enter into your punch cards!), debuggers (no longer spending time looking carefully at code to find bugs), Intellisense/code completion (no need to remember APIs!) from the late 90s, or stackoverflow (no need to sift to answer questions that others have had before!) from the 00s? I feel like we've been here before and moved on from it (hardly anyone complains about these anymore, no one is suggesting we go back to programming by rewiring the computer), I wonder if this time it will be any different? Kids will just learn new ways of doing things on top of the new abstractions just like they've done for the last 70 years of programming history.

Re: The copilot delusion

#96

Post by drekipus »

Jcampuzano2 wrote: post #45
nalekberov wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I really think a lot of the reason some people say it doesn't give them as much productivity as they would like is due largely to a desire to write "clean" code based on years and years of our own training, and due to having to be able to pass code review done by your peers. Machine doesn't get mad when an app takes forever to start or keeps constantly crashing, but we humans do. Writing "clean" code has the least…

People keep reading off this nonsense that AI generated code is always bad or slow. This is so far from the truth that I really think anybody who still says this has not actually used it for anything real in at least a couple years. Yes, I'm not saying it will always generate you the best code, sometimes it may even be bad. What I am saying is it CAN generate code that is reasonably performant, sometimes even more pe…

I can only assume that you have significant experience being a junior engineer

Re: The copilot delusion

#97

Post by [deleted] »

lyu07282 wrote: post #78
Jcampuzano2 wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most replies here make the claim that all AI generated code is "garbage". And I can't help but think most of the people who say that do not actually use it in their day to day with the most recent models and actually give it good instructions/requirements. No, it is not always perfect. Yes you will have to manually edit some of the code it generates. But yes it can and will generate good code if you know how to use i…

I think the root of the argument is that the AI critics are worried because they have the assumption that 1) you aren't experienced enough to know what "good code" looks like, and/or 2) you only care if it "works" and don't understand all the implications bad code will have downstream, again because of inexperience.

[deleted]

Re: The copilot delusion

#98

Post by joks »

Jcampuzano2 wrote: post #19

As a preface, I think lots of people will not like this take. A lot of people are going to have to come to the realization that has already been mentioned before but many find it hard to grasp. Your boss, stakeholders, and especially non-technical people literally give 0 fucks about "quality code" as long as it does what they want it to do. They do not care about tests insofar as if it works it works. Many have no cl…

And then you have 0 domain experts because nobody has built the mental model of the code and what it's doing that you inherently build when you're actually doing the problem solving and code-writing yourself.

Re: The copilot delusion

#99

Post by mplanchard »

abletonlive wrote: post #73
MeetingsBrowser wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Kind of brutal, but if LLMs drastically improved your productivity I think it speaks more to your baseline productivity than the power of LLMs.

What's more likely A) all of this money being funneled into tech to build out trillions of dollars worth of infrastructure, a month over month increasing user base buying subscriptions for these llm services, every company buying seats for LLM because of the value that it provides - these people are wrong B) yappers on hackernews that claim they derive no productivity boost out of llms while showing absolutely nothin…

Regarding A, first time on the hype train? VC and silicon valley funding is often completely divorced from any real value, and is one of the last places I’d look for reliable signal on quality.

Regardless, I’m sure it’s a little of A and a little of B, plus some of C) yappers on Hackernews who think that the majority of the work of software engineering is writing code, and who generally write code in sufficiently simple contexts for the LLMs to produce something equivalent to their normal output.

Re: The copilot delusion

#100

Post by joks »

tokioyoyo wrote: post #63
lyu07282 wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We will see, but I can also imagine the pile of shit you vibecoded around you collapsing on top of you.

Does it matter? The selling point of AI generated code is, eventually, you won't care what's happening in your code base and things just "work". It's like 95% of people who code (99%?) don't know what compilers do. Throw away what is collapsing, bring up new stuff, rinse and repeat.

The selling point to you is that you can't fix problems, you just have to reimplement everything every time anything fails?
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