Programming

It's not even a junior dev. It might "understand" a wider and deeper set of things than a junior dev does, but at least junior devs might have a sense of coherency to everything they build.

I use gen AI at work (because they want me to) and holy shit is it "deceptive". In quotes because it has no intent at all, but it is just good enough to make it seem like it mostly did what was asked, but you look closer and you'll see it isn't following any kind of paradigms, it's still just predicting text.

The amount of context it can include in those predictions is impressive, don't get me wrong, but it has zero actual problem solving capability. What it appears to "solve" is just pattern matching the current problem to a previous one. Same thing with analysis, brainstorming, whatever activity can be labelled as "intelligent".

Hallucinations are just cases where it matches a pattern that isn't based on truth (either mispredicting or predicting a lie). But also goes the other way where it misses patterns that are there, which is horrible for programming if you care at all about efficiency and accuracy.

It'll do things like write a great helper function that it uses once but never again, maybe even writing a second copy of it the next time it would use it. Or forgetting instructions (in a context window of 200k, a few lines can easily get drowned out).

Code quality is going to suffer as AI gets adopted more and more. And I believe the problem is fundamental to the way LLMs work. The LLM-based patches I've seen so far aren't going to fix it.

Also, as much as it's nice to not have to write a whole lot of code, my software dev skills aren't being used very well. It's like I'm babysitting an expert programmer with alzheimer's but thinks they are still at their prime and don't realize they've forgotten what they did 5 minutes ago, but my company pays them big money and get upset if we don't use his expertise and probably intend to use my AI chat logs to train my replacement because everything I know can be parsed out of those conversations.

Or maybe don't try and drive a screw in with a hammer?

It's just not good for 99% of the shit it's marketed for. Sorry.

WALL OF TEXT that says inadvertently that junior devs should be treated like machines not people.

Vibe coding guy wrote unit tests for our embedded project. Of course, the hardware peripherals aren’t available for unit tests on the dev machine/build server, so you sometimes have to write mock versions (like an “adc” function that just returns predetermined values in the format of the real analog-digital converter).

Claude wrote the tests and mock hardware so well that it forgot to include any actual code from the project. The test cases were just testing the mock hardware.

That's weird. I've made it write a few tests once, and it pretty much made them in the style of other tests in the repo. And they did have assertions.

Hahaha 🤣

if you reject her pull requests, does she fix it? is there a way for management to see when an employee is pushing bad commits more frequently than usual?

My take exactly. Especially the bits about unit tests. If you cannot rely on your unit tests as a first assessment of your code quality, your unit tests are trash.

And not every company runs GitHub. The metrics he's talking about are DevOps metrics and not development metrics. For example In my work, nobody gives a fuck about mean time to production. We have a planning schedule and we need the ok from our customers before we can update our product.

Yeah it is, it brings up a lot of good points that often don't get talked about by the anti-AI folks (the sky is falling/AI is horrible) and extreme pro-AI folks ("we're going to replace all the workers with AI")

You absolutely have to know what the AI is doing at least somewhat to be able to call it out when it's clearly wrong/heading down a completely incorrect path.

recent attempt to rewrite SQLite in Rust using AI

I think it is talking 100% vibe code. And yea it's pretty useful if you don't abuse it

checking the code is much harder than coming up with it yourself

That's always been true. But, at least in the past when you were checking the code written by a junior dev, the kinds of mistakes they'd make were easy to spot and easy to predict.

LLMs are created in such a way that they produce code that genuinely looks perfect at first. It's stuff that's designed to blend in and look plausible. In the past you could look at something and say "oh, this is just reversing a linked list". Now, you have to go through line by line trying to see if the thing that looks 100% plausible actually contains a tiny twist that breaks everything.

This is very different from my experience, but I've purposely lagged behind in adoption and I often do things the slow way because I like programming and I don't want to get too lazy and dependent.

I just recently started using Claude Code CLI. With how I use it: asking it specific questions and often telling it exactly what files and lines to analyze, it feels more like taking to an extremely knowledgeable programmer who has very narrow context and often makes short-sighted decisions.

I find it super helpful in troubleshooting. But it also feels like a trap, because I can feel it gaining my trust and I know better than to trust it.

Sure we did.

"Lines Of Code" is a good one, more code = more work so it must be good.

I recently had a run in with another good one : PR's/Dev/Month.

Not only it that one good for overall productivity, it's a way to weed out those unproductive devs who check in less often.

This one was so good, management decided to add it to the company wide catchup slides in a section espousing how the new AI driven systems brought this number up enough to be above other companies.

That means other companies are using it as well, so it must be good.

Exactly. I’ve heard the phrase “falling behind” from many in upper management.