da_667This is a very eloquently written adventure into what most of us know as ai fuckery. I don't want to ruin it for you. Read it yourself, please.
I'm always learning something from @mttaggart , and this is no exception.
I feel as though I'm in a similar position. I detest that this technology exists. The same way that I detest web3 exists. The same way that I detest how absolutely abysmal the cloud/CDNS are when we had an opportunity to make REAL CHANGE in internet-scale computing. The same way we all hate every major change in tech that is extremely poorly thought out.
I've actively avoided it, except in cases in which I used it to check for, and I'm not making this up, plagiarism/cheating in take-home exam for an internship position on our security team. Let me tell you how disheartening it is to find five different candidates from five different prestigious universities from around the country, all regurgitating the exact same incorrect answers from ChatGPT/Copilot.
I weep for critical thinking. I weep for I don't know. But I want to learn more.
Taggart@da_667 Thank you, my friend. I'm glad you found something in it. I'm sorry we're all in this mess together.
@mttaggart It is what it is. I still find it very scary that, even with all of the extremely tight guardrails you put up, it still hallucinated functionality that didn't exist out of thin air, and if not for the fact that rust is MILITANT about well, everything, that.... it would've just existed if it were another programming language.
I'm gonna live with that being a parasite itching in my mind that I can't scratch.
@da_667 Nobody's really talking about that part but I really can't imagine how much more annoying this would have been without all the safeties of the Rust toolchain.
@mttaggart that's the one part that really blew my mind. How many unintentional logic bombs or Heisenbugs are people just... dropping into a codebase that will explode 10+ years later?
@da_667 At the risk of logrolling, the Lobste.rs conversation was surreal.
https://lobste.rs/s/7d8dxv/i_used_ai_it_worked_i_hated_it
Here is Simon Willison, one of the preeminent advocates, saying that I should let the thing make more changes at once and review in bulk, which sounds more efficient but also more prone to missing something. And then contending that it's all about building a sufficient safety structure around your process.
That could well be so, but I think we know that onerous best practices become rare finds in reality.
@mttaggart jesus christ THAT is nightmare fuel.
@mttaggart In my mind, it feels like letting an intern take the wheel behind a major project, and having to repeatedly code review it.
Code review is a very arduous task. Even with one's own code. I can't imagine taking a bulk block of code that was generated all at once and having to nitpick it all in one go, and find EVERY single problem all at once.
We're human beings. We're not machines. We don't work that way. If I had to do it, and is painstaking as it was, your way was the best way. Iteration and constant back and forth.
Johan Sköld@da_667 @mttaggart Feels similar in vein to reviewing code that was written by outsourced contractors in bulk. Something that is painfully relevant to me currently, and definitely not something I would want to repeat regularly...