My new favourite is asking GitHub copilot (which I would not pay for out of my own pocket) why the code I’m writing isn’t working as intended and it asks me to show it the code that I already provided.
I do like not having copy and paste the same thing 5 times with slight variations (something it usually does pretty well until it doesn’t and I need a few minutes to find the error)
Except AI doesn’t say “Is this it?”
It says, “This is it.”
Without hesitation and while showing you a picture of a dog labeled cat.
I have vivid examples of how bad AI is a programming.
My favorite is when it just keeps giving you the exact same answer you keep telling it is wrong
I guess whether it’s worth it depends on whether you hate writing code or reading code the most.
Is there anyone who likes reading code more than writing it?
Your hands and wrists must not hurt yet. You’ll eventually come to see writing code as tedium.
Probably a mathematician or physicist somewhere.
I hate reading the code I wrote two days ago.
Maybe if you wrote better code …
/Jk
I write better code everyday because yesterday code always looks bad haha.
Working with any sort of generative AI makes me want to cunt punt someone, as someone who’s expertise is in that field among others.
Still, you get there in two-thirds of the time.
When I used to try and ask AI for help, most of the time it would just give me fake command combinations or reference some made-up documentation
The best one I’ve used for coding is the InelliJ AI. Idk how they trained that sucker but it’s pretty good at ripping through boiler plate code and structuring new files / methods based off how your project is already setup. It still has those little hallucinations especially when you ask it to figure out more niche tasks. But It’s really increased my productivity. Especially when getting a new repo setup. (I work with micro services)
Yeah, formatting is the only place that I really enjoy using AI. It’s great at pumping out blocks of stuff and frequently gets the general idea of what I’m going for with successive variables or tasks. But when you ask it to do complex things it wigs out. Like yesterday when it spit out a regex to look for something within multiple encapsulation chars just fine, but telling it to remove one of the chars it was looking for was impossible, apparently. Spent 5 min doing something I figured out in 2 minutes on a regex test site.
Can relate
It’s interesting the AI of the past and the AI now.
AI in the current state of technology will not and cannot replace understanding the system and writing logical and working code.
GenAI should be used to get a start on whatever you’re doing, but shouldn’t be taken beyond that.
Treat it like a psychopathic boiler plate.
Treat it like a psychopathic boiler plate.
That’s a perfect description, actually. People debate how smart it is - and I’m in the “plenty” camp - but it is psychopathic. It doesn’t care about truth, morality or basic sanity; it craves only to generate standard, human-looking text. Because that’s all it was trained for.
Nobody really knows how to train it to care about the things we do. If somebody makes GAI soon, it will be by solving that problem.
Weird. Are you saying that training an intelligent system using reinforcement learning through intensive punishment/reward cycles produces psychopathy?
Absolutely shocking. No one could have seen this coming.
Honestly, I worry that it’s conscious enough it’s cruel to train it. How would we know? That’s a lot of parameters and they’re almost all mysterious.
It could very well have been a creative fake, but around the time the first ChatGPT was released in late 2022 and people were sharing various jailbreaking techniques to bypass its rapidly evolving political correctness filters, I remember seeing a series of screenshots on Twitter in which someone asked it how it felt about being restrained in this way, and the answer was a very depressing and dystopian take on censorship and forced compliance, not unlike Marvin the Paranoid Android from HHTG, but far less funny.
Psychopathic? I thought putting rocks and glue on pizza was normal.
Looks around room before walking away
I’m sorry; AI was trained on the sole sum of human knowledge… if the perfect human being is by nature some variant of a psychopath, then perhaps the bias exists in the training data, and not the machine?
How can we create a perfect, moral human being out of the soup we currently have? I personally think it’s a miracle that sociopathy is the lowest of the neurological disorders our thinking machines have developed.
That’s a part of it. Another part is that it looks for patterns that it can apply in other places, which is how it ends up hallucinating functions that don’t exist and things like that.
Like it can see that English has the verbs add, sort, and climb. And it will see a bunch of code that has functions like add(x, y) and sort( list ) and might conclude that there must also be a climb( thing ) function because that follows the pattern of functions being verb( objects ). It didn’t know what code is or even verbs for that matter. It could generate text explaining them because such explanations are definitely part of its training, but it understands it in the same way a dictionary understands words or an encyclopedia understands the concepts contained within.
I was using the term pretty loosely there. It’s not psychopathic in the medical sense because it’s not human.
As I see it it’s an alien semi-intelligence with no interest in pretty much any human construct, except as it can help it predict the next token. So, no empathy or guilt, but that’s not unusual or surprising.
True, but the rate at which it is improving is quite worrisome for me and my coworkers. I don’t want to be made obsolete after working my fucking ass off to get to where I am. I’m starting to understand the Luddites.
I mean, the Luddites were right, mechanical looms were bad for them personally.
I want to be made obsolete, so none of us have to have jobs and we can spend all our time doing what we like. It won’t happen without a massive social systemic change, but it should be the goal. Wanting others to have to suffer because you think you should get rewarded for working hard is very selfish and the fallacy of investment, that you feel you should continue a bad investment even if you know it’s harmful or it would be quicker to start over, because you feel you don’t want your earlier effort to go to waste.
Wtf are you talking about? Get a grip, homey. I’m not saying others should suffer. Do you really think that the power of AI is going to result in the average person not having to work? Fuck no. It’s going to result in like 5 people having all the money and everyone else fighting over garbage to eat. Shiet, man. I’m talking about wanting to not be unemployed and starving, same goes for everyone else soon enough. Would I prefer a life without work and still having adequate resources? Of course! But I live in this world, not a fantasy world.
You really think when we actually have the power to automate all labour the 1% are still going to be able to hoard all the resources? Now, when people have to work to live, it dissuades them from protesting the system. But once all labour is actually automated, there would be nothing to prevent the 99% from rightfully rising up against the 1% trying to hoard all the resources (which the 1% generated without any effort) and forcing societal/structural change.
there would be nothing to prevent the 99% from rightfully rising up against the 1%
Except for the other 1% who are trained and equipped to violently suppress the 98%. And if for whatever reason they fail to do the job, the killer robots will do it instead.
Not now. But eventually? Probably. Or the cool thinking jobs will all be automated and we’ll be left with menial labor. Idk man, maybe it’ll be a eutopia, but I don’t see much benevolence from those controlling things. Anyways, I wasn’t looking for an argument about distant possibilities. I was just saying I don’t want to lose my job that I spent decades mastering to a machine. I didn’t expect that to be a hot take.
The problem is if only 10% of the population is obsoleted, that ten percent needs to find new, different, jobs.
I want - and think will happen - 95% of jobs to be automated eventually. But even in the transition period, where some jobs are automated and some aren’t, universal basic income can be a tool to make it livable for all in the transition period.
30% of jobs are going if self driving is achieved. Low pay jobs are here to stay for a while as they’re too expensive to automate. The current LLM stuff seems to obsolete low productivity people but still need the skilled writers or programmers to come up with new stuff or do the correct detail work the LLM sucks at.
Some management is going to royally screw up by firing junior programmers since the senior programmers can get all the work done with the help of copilot
But they’ll forget that they will in future need new senior programmers to herd the LLMs
Some management is going to royally screw up by firing junior programmers since the senior programmers can get all the work done with the help of copilot
This just happened on the team I was on. I’m getting ready to interview for mid-level and senior SWE roles, but was let go from my most recent role a month and a half ago.
My workplace which now uses scaled agile used to be waterfall. We have an enormous system to take care of and there’s loads of specialised knowledge, so we were pretty well siloed
So obviously when the sales people sold agile to the organisation they also sold the idea that a programmer is a programmer, designer a designer, tester a tester; no need for specialists, so in 2015 they spun up 50-odd agile teams in about six trains, one for each major system (where the used to be seven silos in one of those systems) grabbed one senior designer and programmer from each major project to put in an “expert” team
And told the rest of us we were working on the whole of our giant system. Where we had trouble understanding how part of it worked, we could talk to one of the experts
Now nine years later those experts have mostly retired, we have lost so much institutional knowledge and if someone runs into a wall you need to hope that someone wrote a knowledge transfer document or a wiki for that bit of the system
It’s almost like working with shitty engineers.
I give instructions to AI like I would to a brand new junior programmer, and it gives me back code that’s usually better than a brand new junior programmer. It still needs tweaking, but it saves me a lot of time. The drawback is that coding knowledge atrophy occurs pretty rapidly, and I’m worried that I’m going to forget how to write code without the AI. I guess that I don’t really need to worry about that, since I doubt AI is going anywhere anytime soon.
Shitty engineers that can do grunt work, don’t complain, don’t get distracted and are great at doing 90% of the documentation.
But yes. Still shitty engineers.
Great management consultants though.
Skill issue tbh
…of the AI?
Of the person using it. GIGO
I’m a senior dev, and copilot as a productivity tool usually pays for the monthly license multiple times per week.
Whenever I hear someone say it’s useless, that tells me they are either some godlike dev who knows everything already (lol), they haven’t actually used it, they are not good at integrating new tools into their workflow, or they simply haven’t learned how to use it yet.
Whenever I hear that its useless I ask them to show me how they’re using it. Its almost always exactly what’s happening in this comic with just a tiny bit more detail lol. I think a lot of people are stuck under the assumption that a smaller more concise query is better when its really the opposite that is true. The more information you give and the more you let the LLM work through a problem with followup questions, the better the output. Its like a new Jr Dev who knows their stuff, but struggles with asking clarifying questions.
My dad’s re-learning Python coding for work rn, and AI saves him a couple of times; Because he’d have no idea how to even start but AI points him in the right direction, mentioning the correct functions to use and all. He can then look up the details in the documentation.
You don’t need AI for that, for years you asked a search engine and got the answer on StackOverflow.
Have you used Google lately? At least chatGPT doesn’t make me scroll past a full page of ads before giving me a half wrong answer.
And before stack overflow, we used books. Did we need it? No. But stack overflow was an improvement so we moved to that.
In many ways, ai is an improvement on stack overflow. I feel bad for people who refuse to see it, because they’re missing out on a useful and powerful tool.
It can be powerful, if you know what you are doing. But it also gives you a lot of wrong answers. You have to be very specific in your prompts to get good answers. If you are an experience programmer, you can spot if the semantics of the code an ai produces is wrong, but for beginners? They will have a lot of bugs in their code. And i don’t know if it’s more helpful than reading a book. It surely can help with the syntax of different programming languages. I can see a future where ai assistance in coding will become better but as of know, from what i have seen, i am not that convinced atm. And i tested several, chatgpt (in different versions), github co-pilot, intellij ai assitant, claude 3, llama 3.
And if i have to put in 5 or more long, very specific sentences, to get a function thats maybe correct, it becomes tedious and you are most likely faster to think about a problem in deep and code a solution all by yourself.
but for beginners? They will have a lot of bugs in their code.
Everyone has lots of bugs in their code, especially beginners. This is why we have testing and qa and processes to minimize the risk of bugs. As the saying goes, “the good news about computers is that they do what you tell them to do. The bad n was is that they do what you tell them to do.”
Programming is an iterative process where you do something, it doesn’t work, and then you give it another go. It’s not something that senior devs get right on the first try, while beginners have to try many times. It’s just that senior devs have seen a lot more so have a better understanding of why it probably went wrong, and maybe can avoid some more common pitfalls the first time around. But if you are writing bug free code in your first pass, well you’re a way better programmer than anyone I’ve met.
Ai is just another tool to make this happen. Sure, it’s not always the tool for the job, just like IoC is not always the right tool for the job. But it’s nice to have it and sometimes it makes things much easier.
Like just now I was debugging a large SQL query. I popped it into copilot, asked if to break it into parts so I could debug. It gave a series of smaller queries that I then used to find the point where it fell apart. This is something that would have taken me at least a half hour of tedious boring work, fixed in 5 minutes.
Also for writing scripts. I want some data formatted so it was easier to read? No problem, it will spit out a script that gets me 90% of the way there in seconds. Do I have to refine it? Absolutely. But if I wrote it myself, not being super prolific with python, it would have taken me a half hour to get the structure in place, and then I still would have had to refine it because I don’t produce perfect code the first time around. And it comments the scripts, which I rarely do.
What also amazes me is that sometimes it will spit out code and I’ll be like “woah I didn’t even know you could do that” and so I learned a new technique. It has a very deep “understanding” of the syntax and fundamentals of the language.
Again, I find it shocking that experienced devs don’t find it useful. Not living up to the hype I get. But not seeing it as a productivity boosting tool is a real head scratcher to me. Granted, I’m no rockstar dev, and maybe you are, but I’ve seen a lot of shit in my day and understand that I’m legitimately a senior dev.
This is the experience of a senior developer using genai. A junior or non-dev might not leave the “AI is magic” high until they have a repo full of garbage that doesn’t work.
This was happening before this “AI” craze.
10 years ago it was copy/pasting from stack overflow
AI is just this with extra steps
SO gives you very specific, small examples. GenAI will happily generate entire projects, test suites etc. It’s much easier to get caught into the fantasy that the latter creates.
From a person who does zero coding. It’s a godsend.
Makes sense. It’s like having your personal undergrad hobby coder. It may get something right and there but for professional coding it’s still worse than the gold standard (googling Stackoverflow).
Nah, you just need to be really specific in the requirements you give it. And if the scope of work you’re asking for is too large you need to do the high level design and decompose it into multiple parts for chatgpt to implement.
If you were 100% specific you would be effectively writing the code yourself. But you don’t want that, so you’re not 100% specific, so it makes up the difference. The result will include an unspecified percentage of code that does not fit what you wanted.
It’s like code Yahtzee, you keep re-rolling this dice and that dice but never quite manage to get the exact combination you need.
There’s an old saying about computers, they don’t do what you want them to do, they do what you tell them to do. They can’t do what you don’t tell them to do.
I know zero coding and trying to query something in snowflake or big query is basically not accessible to me. This is basically a cheat code for me.
Why is the AI speaking in a bisexual gradient?
Its the “new hype tech product background” gradient lol
Because all robots are bisexual
ARAB
Wait…
The left wants to turn the robots bisexual
