this post was submitted on 12 Apr 2025
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Programming
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Unsurprisingly, it's necessary to understand a problem to solve it - just like the proverbial infinite monkey would in theory produce the entire body of work of Shakespeare given enough time, in reality, only Shakespeare managed to write proper Shakespeare the first time out.
AI is the infinite monkey of coding. I, as a senior developer, have spend entirely too many hours of my working life fixing code written by monkeys, and I have already had to correct AI code (thankfully small and generated by a colleague who promptly apologized and decided to do his homework and study the problem at hand instead of winging it with Crapilot).
Consider yourself lucky. My boss doesn't have any idea what a llm "ai" is, but he's pushing us to use it, at every opportunity he can find.
Forget about telling him it's bullshitting code, that's just a model that it's guessing the next word... It's magic for him.
Once, he showed me how cool "prompting" was for something that he generated. It took him 10 minutes to "prompt" it, while doing it would have taken 5.
"Yeah, but it's getting better every year".
Living in the promise of a brighter future; I am still waiting for all the cancer cures and the flying cars...
AI coding is an improvement on infinite monkey Shakespeare in the sense that it only types whole words from a dictionary. Although that dictionary has been built from a mix of classic literature and SNS posts.
I am indeed lucky because the company I work for cares about its employees. It's literally written in the company statutes: the company exists to make money of course, but first and foremost to serve its workforce and the community, and takes decisions to maximize the well-being and the personal growth of the employees and the community.
We took an honest look at including AI in our workflow, but we decided it wasn't worth the social destruction. Only a few employees use it - mostly the marketdroids to generate illustrations on the sales literature.
I am aware that this is a rare type of company and I cherish that job.
infinite monkey. I love it. borrowed.