Anyway, I'm not in a programming job, just a tedious one with decent pay. Since I am tech savvy and they have no trainers to bring up my proficiencies, I spend down time vibe coding my job.

It was a real piece of shit at first, but then co-pilot transformed me into some sort of code architect wizard. I am certainly not a programmer, but I know how to map out where functions and classses should live, and how the folder hierarchy should look. Yelling OOP, "best practices", DRY and what the "tree /f" should look like helps a lot. Also being really snarky when it's wrong or it'll just plow along.

I want to discuss because I think we all agree to some extent that AI is the next surveillance tool and we're probably the biggest targets for big corpro. Like, is using it maybe awful? Or maybe my success with AI is more correlated witb my effort than the tool? Is anyone else seeing incredible return from their ventures with AI? Do you see your bosses peddle AI but don't understand any meaningful ways to apply it?

[–] Tamo240@programming.dev 6 points 4 months ago (1 children)

I'm a software engineer and I'll discuss it with you, rather than just down voting and walking away.

Your use case for AI allows it to excel. Writing self contained scripts and small pieces of functionality for automation is a great use case for AI, but it isn't what software engineers do. There is a saying that you won't have a design problem in a code base under 10,000 lines, then all you have is design problems, and this is what AI is bad at. It can't maintain or update or extend much larger code bases, and it can't interpret user vagueries into concrete requirements and features.

For me it is useful for prototyping, and for boilerplate code where I know exactly what I want but its faster to prompt it than to type it all out. I wouldn't use it for anything critical without carefully reviewing every line it generates, which would take longer than just writing the damn code.

I also have a big problem with the reliance a lot of people are building on AI. Remember how every other service you've used goes through 'enshitification'? This will happen to AI. Once they need to be profitable and the shareholders need to get paid, the features will get worse and the prices will go up, and you will have to pay those prices if you can't work without it. Just something to bear in mind.

Use it if it's useful. Don't become reliant on it. You seem interested in coding, why not try coding something simple yourself? Try looking up the documention to see if you can use your wet brain first, and only go to the AI after. You might find you actually enjoy it, or solve problems faster because you remember how you solved them before.

[–] Gaja0@lemmy.zip 2 points 4 months ago

You seem interested in coding, why not try coding something simple yourself?

Actually, the first script for the app I did myself. It was a calculation taken out of excel. I made it with better decision-making and compliance to standards. It was simple, but I used AI to review and realized the gap between my speed and skill and the AI, which is where the dependence began. The codebase is well beyond 10,000 at this point, but it's pretty close to done.

This was done in python, but I mostly dabble in engineering hobbies using C, my favorite being my QMK split keyboard. Again, lot of dependence, but in both cases, I'm learning way more than I ever did spending $40k at college. I should look up software engineering because it seems interesting.

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