Mastodawn

I used AI. It worked. I hated it.

I used AI. It worked. I hated it. - Lemmy.World

cross-posted from: https://programming.dev/post/48191305 [https://programming.dev/post/48191305] > Or maybe that’s just me. I’ve been writing code for a good chunk of my life now. I find deep joy in the struggle of creation. I want to keep doing it, even if it’s slower. Even if it’s worse. I want to keep writing code. But I suspect not everyone feels that way about it. Are they wrong? Or can different people find different value in the same task? And what does society owe to those who enjoy an older way of doing things? > > If I could disinvent this technology, I would. My experiences, while enlightening as to models’ capabilities, have not altered my belief that they cause more harm than good. And yet, I have no plan on how to destroy generative AI. I don’t think this is a technology we can put back in the box. It may not take the same form a year from now; it may not be as ubiquitous or as celebrated, but it will remain. > > And in the realm of software development, its presence fundamentally changes the nature of the trade. We must learn how to exist in a world where some will choose to use these tools, whether responsibly or not. Is it possible to distinguish one from the other? Is it possible to renounce all code not written by human hands? > > https://taggart-tech.com/reckoning [https://web.archive.org/web/20260402210313/https://taggart-tech.com/reckoning/] [web-archive]

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ExtremeDullard 3d ago

I want to keep doing it, even if it’s slower. Even if it’s worse.

You haven’t tried AI long enough. It’s faster than you, but the code you create is way better.

AI is only superficially good. If you ask it to piss some code that does something, sure it’ll do it. The code will even be readable, well-formatted and decently correct. Where AI fails is when the code lives in a particular environment, has constraints in terms of compatibility, solves a particular problem in a complex environment… Then AI will fail you spectacularly, and if you get lulled into thinking it’s cleverer than the idiot savant it truly is, you’ll get bitten hard.

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saltesc

Yeah an LLM is like a fancy code completion tool. It’s useful for repetitive fast things you can’t be bothered with. Or looking at final code to see if there’s anything obvious or smarter way overlooked. That’s about it. It will hallucinate and fuck up about 1/5 times and contradict itself constantly. It’ll also argue a lot about non-existent functions working and stuff.

This can’t ever be improved because it’s algorithmic at the core. We’ll only ever be able to apply guardrail on guardrail on guardrail and get messy creative with the already established limit.