🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦AI is both impressive and ridiculous. I have a little command line Python script that does some basic text reformatting stuff for me. I wanted a version that I could use on my phone. I gave Gemini the script, and asked it to make "a version of this program with the same functionality that I can use on my iphone, but with a textbox and some buttons instead of command line options." I expected it to rewrite this extremely simple Python file into JavaScript or something and give me an HTML file. Or if it wanted to do things the hard way, maybe swift. Nope! It installed uvicorn and requests and fastapi and a bunch of stuff and then rewrote the python script so it could import the existing functionality into the web app it just built. To be fair, it worked perfectly the first time, either on the command line or as a web server. But the original script was about 100 lines of Python! Rewriting it in JavaScript would've been much faster. And not required a reverse proxy and a bunch of deployment work. I guess it took "the same functionality" way too literally and decided the best way to achieve that would be to run the exact same code. When we talk about the impact of #AI, nobody seems to be talking about the impact caused by running AI generated code for years to come. If I didn't know better, and was just an AI vibe coder, I'd now be running an entire docker and reverse proxy setup for something that could be done in the browser with a hundred or so lines of JavaScript. That's honestly a tiny impact individually, but over the course of hundreds and thousands of people and companies, it's going to add up.
MostlyBlindGamer@fastfinge I dunno, I think I’ve been talking about this for a bit. The risk there, that I’ve also observed at work, is that the LLM will run with it, no questions asked. What I expect from a developer, and insist on doing myself, is to ask “do you mean like serve this as a web app, rewrite in JavaScript or do you just want to run this on excel?”
@MostlyBlindGamer Right. I admit that my problem was a bit underspecified. But if I'd handed you, a real human, a hundred lines of Python that does a bunch of string replacements and uses some regular expressions, and said I wanted to run this on my iPhone, your first reaction would probably not have been "turn it into a web app". Actually, your first reaction would have probably been "so install iSH and stop bothering me" LOL.
@fastfinge and I wouldn’t even have used enough water and power to keep entire families alive!
William Whitlow@MostlyBlindGamer @fastfinge I have taken the time to play around with Codex and Claude Code. In my experience Claude Code is a little more inclined to think about frameworks and tech stacks. Now, I often supply long prompts trying to encapsulate the details from a programmer's perspective. I'm agreeing with everyone else that this only highlights how tech skills are still non-negotiable. Even if a model can handle the grunt work of writing. This simply makes more developers, project managers.
@wwhitlow @fastfinge not everybody’s cut out to be a project manager or wants to be one. I’ve met people who like to do exactly what their Jira ticket says, but will sink their teeth into a problem and optimize creatively. That’s the kind of people’s homework LLMs are cheating off of. We need those people.
That said, the people with that inclination that aren’t leaders in that niche, and who don’t ask the right questions, are some of the easiest to fire - not to replace, mind you, to have management think they’re replaceable.
That said, the people with that inclination that aren’t leaders in that niche, and who don’t ask the right questions, are some of the easiest to fire - not to replace, mind you, to have management think they’re replaceable.
I certainly agree with this. That doesn't make the direction and manner the industry is going to progress clear though.
@wwhitlow @fastfinge to air traffic controller-like strikes, maybe? I’m not optimistic.