this post was submitted on 17 Dec 2024
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Big brain tech dude got yet another clueless take over at HackerNews etc? Here's the place to vent. Orange site, VC foolishness, all welcome.
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Let's be real here: when people hear the word AI or LLM they don't think of any of the applications of ML that you might slap the label "potentially useful" on (notwithstanding the fact that many of them also are in a all-that-glitters-is-not-gold--kinda situation). The first thing that comes to mind for almost everyone is shitty autoplag like ChatGPT which is also what the author explicitly mentions.
I'm saying ChatGPT is not useless.
I'm a senior software engineer and I make use of it several times a week either directly or via things built on top of it. Yes you can't trust it will be perfect, but I can't trust a junior engineer to be perfect either—code review is something I've done long before AI and will continue to do long into the future.
I empirically work quicker with it than without and the engineers I know who are still avoiding it work noticeably slower. If it was useless this would not be the case.
ah, a señor software engineer. excusé-moi monsoir, let me back up and try once more to respect your opinion
uh, wait:
whoops no, sorry, can't do it.
jesus fuck I hope the poor bastards that are under you find some other place real soon, you sound like a godawful leader
yep yep! as we all know, velocity is all that matters! crank that handle, produce those features! the factory must flow!!
fucking christ almighty. step away from the keyboard. go become a logger instead. your opinions (and/or the shit you're saying) is a big part of everything that's wrong with industry.
Please, señor software engineer was my father. Call me Bob.
snrk
Thank you for saving me the breath to shit on that person's attitude :)
yw
these arseslugs are so fucking tedious, and for almost 2 decades they've been dragging everything and everyone around them down to their level instead of finding some spine and getting better
word. When I hear someone say "I'm a SW developer and LLM xy helps me in my work" I always have to stop myself from being socially unacceptably open about my thoughts on their skillset.
and that’s the pernicious bit: it’s not just their skillset, it also goes right to their fucking respect for their team. “I don’t care about just barfing some shit into the codebase, and I don’t think my team will mind either!”
utter goddamn clownery
and you fucking know what? it's not even just me being a snide motherfucker, this rant is literally fucking supported by data:
and that's a report sponsored and managed right from the fucking lying cloud company, no less. a report they sponsor, run, manage, and publish is openly admitting this shit. that is how much this shit doesn't fucking work the way you sell it to be doing.
but no, we should trust your driveby bullshit. motherfucker.
Lol, using a survey to try and claim that your argument is "supported by data".
Of course the people who use Big Autocorrect think it's useful, they're still using it. You've produced a tautology and haven't even noticed. XD
christ, did someone fire up the Batpromptfondler signal
it may be a shock to learn this, but asking people things is how you find things out from them
I know it requires speaking to humans, alas, c’est la vie
It may be a shock to learn this, but asking people things is how you find out what they think, not what is true.
I know proof requires more than just speaking to humans, alas, c'est la vie.
did you know the report also publishes the details of its analysis methodology?
my god, where are you people coming from today
Did you know that all reputable surveys publish their methodology?
Did you know that, regardless of how you analyze the results, a survey is still just a survey?
If LLMs were worth the hype then you'd have actual proof of utility, not just sentiment.
you think I'm promptfan-posting? impressive.
This is a pretty funny interaction when you realise that you just misread the froztbyte's self-reply (and the survey) as pro-AI, so you were just aggressively agreeing with each other all along
(why I was not as harsh as in earlier comments)
The point of me saying that was to imply I've been in the industry for a couple of decades, and have a good amount of experience from before all this. It wasn't any kind of appeal to authority, but I can see how you can read it that way.
I'm sorry, do you trust junior engineers blindly? That's gonna lead to a much worse outcome than if they get feedback when they do something wrong. Frankly, I don't trust any engineer to be perfect, we're humans and humans make mistakes, that's why we do code review as a fundamental skill in this industry. It's one of the primary ways for people to develop their ability.
In an industry where many companies are tightening the belt, yes it's important to perform well—I kinda want to keep my job and ideally get a good bonus. It would be pretty foolish to leave free productivity on the table when the alternative is working harder to bridge the gap, where I could spend that energy doing more productive stuff.
as a starting position, fucking YES. you know why I hired that person? because I believe they can do the job and grow in it. you know what happens if they make a mistake? I give them all the goddamn backup they need to handle it and grow.
"this is why code review is so important" jfc. you're one of those "I've worked here for 4 years and I'm a senior" types, aren't you
@froztbyte @9point6 There's a distinct difference between "I have twenty years of experience" and "I've had the same ten minutes of experience over and over again, over a twenty year period" 🤷
yep. on topic of which, this excellent post
So you don't do code review? Something that's pretty much industry standard?
What on earth do you work on where it's inconsequential to trust someone new to the industry blindly?
If I could trust someone anything remotely close to "blindly", they absolutely would not have been hired as a junior.
yep yep. no code review. no version control either. that’s weak shit only babies use. over here you deploy patches by live editing app memory in production, and you update the codebase by editing the central repo using vscode remote. everyone has access to it because monorepos are what google do and so do we.
you have a 100% correct comprehension takeaway of what I said, well done!
jfc no wonder you’re fine with LLMs
Interesting you bring up reading comprehension because this whole thread started with me saying I would not trust a junior engineer to be perfect or trust them blindly.
You proceed to die on the hill that you would do that for some reason, despite now implying that you do, in fact, do code reviews—which we do because people can't be trusted to be perfect
projection belongs in cinemas and SFPs, don't go casting your misunderstandings onto me
Okay, I'm going to have to borrow this. Also, nice handle.
I, for one, am not in the industry and can’t figure out why people are coming at you with guns blazing. 🙄
Acting superior presses the dopamine button. Especially since the other poster keeps being mature and kind in their responses, really gets that feedback loop going.
your comment history is like a tendentiousness bot
til a new word
fuck you
"I just want to be a cog in the machiiiiiiine why are you bringing up these things that make me think?! ew ethics and integrity are so hard"
~~Senior software engineer~~ programmer here. I have had to tell coworkers "don't trust anything chat-gpt tells you about text encoding" after it made something up about text encoding.
ah but did you tell them in CP437 or something fancy (like any text encoding after 1996)? 🤨🤨🥹
Sadly all my best text encoding stories would make me identifiable to coworkers so I can't share them here. Because there's been some funny stuff over the years. Wait where did I go wrong that I have multiple text encoding stories?
That said I mostly just deal with normal stuff like UTF-8, UTF-16, Latin1, and ASCII.
Oh my god, an actual senior softeare engineer????? Amidst all of us mortals??
Nice, me too, and whenever some tech-brained C-suite bozo tries to mansplain to me why LLMs will make me more efficient, I smile, nod politely, and move on, because at this point I don't think I can make the case that pasting AI slop into prod is objectively a worse idea than pasting Stack Overflow answers into prod.
At the end of the day, if I want to insert a snippet (which I don't have to double-check, mind you), auto-format my code, or organize my imports, which are all things I might use ChatGPT for if I didn't mind all the other baggage that comes along with it, Emacs (or Vim, if you swing that way) does this just fine and has done so for over 20 years.
If LOC/min or a similar metric is used to measure efficiency at your company, I am genuinely sorry.
Good. Thanks for telling us your opinion's worthless.
In this and other use cases I call it a pretty effective search engine, instead of scrolling through stackexchange after clicking between google ads, you get the cleaned up example code you needed. Not a Chat with any intelligence though.
"despite the many people who have shown time and time and time again that it definitely does not do fine detail well and will often present shit that just 10000% was not in the source material, I still believe that it is right all the time and gives me perfectly clean code. it is them, not I, that are the rubes"
The problem with stuff like this is not knowing when you dont know. People who had not read the books SSC Scott was reviewing didnt know he had missed the points (or not read the book at all) till people pointed it out in the comments. But the reviews stay up.
Anyway this stuff always feels like a huge motte bailey, where we go from 'it has some uses' to 'it has some uses if you are a domain expert who checks the output diligently' back to 'some general use'.
A lot of the "I'm a senior engineer and it's useful" people seem to just assume that they're just so fucking good that they'll obviously know when the machine lies to them so it's fine. Which is one, hubris, two, why the fuck are you even using it then if you already have to be omniscient to verify the output??
"If you don't know the subject, you can't tell if the summary is good" is a basic lesson that so many people refuse to learn.
That ChatGPT can be more useful than a web search is really more indicative of how bad the web has got, and can only get worse as fake text invades it. It's not actually better than a functional search engine and a functional web, but the companies making these things have no interest in the web being usable. Pretty depressing.
Remember when you could read through all the search results on Google rather than being limited to the first hundred or so results like today? And boolean search operators actually worked and weren't hidden away behind a "beware of leopard" sign? Pepperidge Farm remembers.