this post was submitted on 12 Apr 2025
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Programming

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[–] [email protected] 1 points 7 minutes ago

I wouldn't trust current models to do any real work. Aaand I think humans will be cheaper than LLMs for a long time to come. Ultimately all costs are labor and if you need to give the power plant people (running the plant, mining the fuel, building the plant) sandwiches to get them to provide power for your llm, you're probably better off giving a human programmer sandwiches instead.

The ai bubble pops when investors decide they want dividends instead of speculative gains.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 hour ago* (last edited 48 minutes ago)

they will anyway.

and fuck them tbh, let it ruin their codebases.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 5 hours ago (1 children)

Don't worry, it is ready to replace human coders for writing bug.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 hour ago

rebugging, if you will

[–] [email protected] 1 points 5 hours ago

Nope, it's a hell of a good assistant tho (according to my friend who uses it daily for coding).

[–] [email protected] 27 points 13 hours ago (2 children)

As an engineer, I’m not looking forward to the entire generation(s?) of vibe coders who couldn’t explain what a byte is and the ways one might be stored on a system.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 5 hours ago (2 children)

Manual memory management is already relatively niche and not needed for most programming tasks

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 hour ago (1 children)

Bytes is a way to store data. Its unrelated to memory management, even if its automatic.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 hour ago* (last edited 1 hour ago)

I wouldn't say unrelated, but anyway what's the broad term for what you are doing when you are being concerned with how bytes are stored then? Whatever that is, there's a generation of coders already who aren't doing so much of it

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 hours ago

While you're not wrong, we still need to understand it at least well enough to avoid RCE and fix memory-related bugs

[–] [email protected] 5 points 6 hours ago

A byte is what you eat obv bruh

[–] [email protected] 33 points 14 hours ago* (last edited 14 hours ago) (2 children)

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).

[–] [email protected] 1 points 5 hours ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 14 hours ago

infinite monkey. I love it. borrowed.

[–] [email protected] 25 points 14 hours ago (2 children)

Ai isn't replacing coding either.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 13 hours ago* (last edited 13 hours ago) (1 children)

No, but it constraining the labor market. AI is a hammer that employers are enthusiastically wielding to “discipline” labor, and to put developers “in their place” and accustomed to asking for and accepting less.

AI (and the threat of AI) is being used to end the days of developers enjoying high pay and strong market leverage. Investors and c-levels don’t care about the craft of software, they care about profit. Labor costs are an impediment to more profit.

If one senior level developer can be replaced with AI plus two or three entry level devs in India cranking out shit that barely works but still sells, at half the cost, then you know what will happen.

They do not care about you, your job, or your craft. You are seen as a tool in their designs, and you have had too much power for too long. They want to dispense with as many expensive, opinionated knowledge workers as quickly as possible. Even AI that half works is better than a competent but uppity expensive employee, from their POV.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 12 hours ago

I agree, this is the real impact of Ai. It won't replace developers, but make them work for less money. But I actually think real programmers will be even more needed in the future, if there is ton of bad code written by non coders with Ai or even by real coders with the support of Ai. That means we get more code, that needs to be reviewed and worked on by real programmers.

Therefore on one hand it will lessen the money earned for real programmers, on the other hand they will be more useful and needed in the future.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 14 hours ago

"we'll all be peasants by 2027" 🥴

[–] [email protected] 5 points 12 hours ago (1 children)

Not really for writing yet either. Its an assistant. It can write code sections and comments that then have to be reviewed and edited a bit. Rather than a coder having to go back and forth between a search engine as they write they are more likely to be able to stay in the ide.

[–] [email protected] -1 points 1 hour ago (1 children)

If you google stuff all the time you have serious problems.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 hour ago

Have you actually worked in a programming role before? Googling things is absolutely the norm. Most people don't know every single in and out of every library/framework they're using, especially when learning new ones. This goes double for more complex or sprawling frameworks where it may be less than obvious how to perform a particular task from the documentation alone or when running into undocumented limitations or bugs (although admittedly an in-IDE assistant won't be too useful for that anyway).

[–] [email protected] 6 points 14 hours ago (1 children)

And presumably debugging is a lot more work as AI is just a fancy template lookup and has no idea what it is doing.

Basically quickly generate crap code then hope you can debug it into something acceptable.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 14 hours ago

If you want debug code, then hopefully it isn't written by an Ai agent. Otherwise good luck (besides simple functions or code blocks off course).