Technology

Explain this too me AI. Reads back exactly what's on the screen including comments somehow with more words but less information Ok....

Ok, this is tricky. AI, can you do this refactoring so I don't have to keep track of everything. No... Thats all wrong... Yeah I know it's complicated, that's why I wanted it refactored. No you can't do that... fuck now I can either toss all your changes and do it myself or spend the next 3 hours rewriting it.

Yeah I struggle to find how anyone finds this garbage useful.

"Using something that you're not experienced with and haven't yet worked out how to best integrate into your workflow slows some people down"

Wow, what an insight! More at 8!

As I said on this article when it was posted to another instance:

AI is a tool to use. Like with all tools, there are right ways and wrong ways and inefficient ways and all other ways to use them. You can’t say that they slow people down as a whole just because some people get slowed down.

no shit. ai will hallucinate shit I’ll hit tab by accident and spend time undoing that or it’ll hijack tab on new lines inconsistently

Experienced software developer, here. "AI" is useful to me in some contexts. Specifically when I want to scaffold out a completely new application (so I'm not worried about clobbering existing code) and I don't want to do it by hand, it saves me time.

And... that's about it. It sucks at code review, and will break shit in your repo if you let it.

Fun how the article concludes that AI tools are still good anyway, actually.

This AI hype is a sickness

Writing code is the easiest part of my job. Why are you taking that away?

I study AI, and have developed plenty of software. LLMs are great for using unfamiliar libraries (with the docs open to validate), getting outlines of projects, and bouncing ideas for strategies. They aren't detail oriented enough to write full applications or complicated scripts. In general, I like to think of an LLM as a junior developer to my senior developer. I will give it small, atomized tasks, and I'll give its output a once over to check it with an eye to the details of implementation. It's nice to get the boilerplate out of the way quickly.

Don't get me wrong, LLMs are a huge advancement and unbelievably awesome for what they are. I think that they are one of the most important AI breakthroughs in the past five to ten years. But the AI hype train is misusing them, not understanding their capabilities and limitations, and casting their own wishes and desires onto a pile of linear algebra. Too often a tool (which is one of many) is being conflated with the one and only solution--a silver bullet--and it's not.

This leads to my biggest fear for the AI field of Computer Science: reality won't live up to the hype. When this inevitably happens, companies, CEOs, and normal people will sour on the entire field (which is already happening to some extent among workers). Even good uses of LLMs and other AI/ML use cases will be stopped and real academic research drying up.

Code reviews take up a lot of time, and if I know a lot of code in a review is AI generated I feel like I'm obliged to go through it with greater rigour, making it take up more time. LLM code is unaware of fundamental things such as quirks due to tech debt and existing conventions. It's not great.

Great! Less productivity = more jobs, more work security.

I’ve used cursor quite a bit recently in large part because it’s an organization wide push at my employer, so I’ve taken the opportunity to experiment.

My best analogy is that it’s like micro managing a hyper productive junior developer that somehow already “knows” how to do stuff in most languages and frameworks, but also completely lacks common sense, a concept of good practices, or a big picture view of what’s being accomplished. Which means a ton of course correction. I even had it spit out code attempting to hardcode credentials.

I can accomplish some things “faster” with it, but mostly in comparison to my professional reality: I rarely have the contiguous chunks of time I’d need to dedicate to properly ingest and do something entirely new to me. I save a significant amount of the onboarding, but lose a bunch of time navigating to a reasonable solution. Critically that navigation is more “interrupt” tolerant, and I get a lot of interrupts.

That said, this year’s crop of interns at work seem to be thin wrappers on top of LLMs and I worry about the future of critical thinking for society at large.

Just the other day I wasted 3 min trying to get AI to sort 8 lines alphabetically.