BurgersMcSlopshot

If only it was a gong show. It's more like shoveling coal into a dead horse and expecting a locomotive to spring forth

I feel this, I was dealing with this at a prior employer.

Like I ever stopped...

I just had one of those "brain-doing-brain-stuff-good" moments (I think normal people call them delusions?) pondering about why it is that AI code extruders are seeing widening adoption.

tl;dr - there's a bunch of people uncurious about the nature of the abstractions they use and it's a tragedy.

First a moment of background: My first software dev position was using Lisp and one of the most powerful concepts built into the language runtime was the macro facility, the ability to write code that writes code. The main downsides of Lisp are obsequious Lisp developers and hard-to-master C foreign function interfaces, so what you have is a toolchain of abandoned dependencies made by some real annoying characters, but I digress. The ability to write code that writes code is a powerful concept.

I moved on to working with .Net which sometime around the 4.6 version release got enhancements to built-in language utilities. This led to better code-generators for numerous purposes (certain DI containers started to do dependency resolution at build time for example).

I did Scala for a time, which had a macro facility that was hot garbage and was rewritten between 2 and 3, so I never bothered to learn it. Around this time the orgs I worked for were placing an emphasis on OpenAPI / swagger specs for reasons I don't know because while there was tooling that could be used to generate both the entire http client and the set of interfaces used by the surface, we did neither (where I am at right now we still do neither form of code gen).

Anyways, things like code generation whether via external tooling or internal facilities is magical but it is deterministic magic: Identical input should yield the same result. It is also hard to use well. The ergonomics of the OpenAPI / Swagger codegen tooling is pretty bad though not impossible, and the whole thing under the hood is powered by mustache templates. The .Net stuff is still there and works well, but I don't think many work places want to invest in really understanding that tooling and how it can be employed. Lisp well always be Lisp, good job Lisp. There are other examples of code generation used for practical ends I am sure.

The point is that code generation requires being able to think and define certain forms of abstractions outside of the target functionality of a single program and while it's not hard to do that thinking, it's just high enough of a bar that your typical enterprise engineer won't engage with that (but will always be amazed by the results!).

AI Code Extruders change the cognitive burden that would be required for code generation into something that I guess appeals to engineers. You can specify something in the abstract and a Do-What-I-Mean machine may churn up something minimally useful, determinism be damned. Not only would an engineer not need to consider the abstraction layer between their input and the code but they would be unable to fully interrogate that abstraction because the code extruder does not need to show its work.

Just a thought. Probably a very silly thought.

It could produce the stupidest outcome though, where Claude finally manages to either destroy or leak the contents of (or both!) a business-critical system that nobody understands how to rebuild.

Some sort of Zitron-induced psychosis, that's a new one.

I really need a way to forget things in manner where I at least remember that I do not need to know certain things.

Unfortunately booze is the blunt instrument I have, so bottoms up.

stupid question I probably asked already in the past: dafuq is a ladybird?

Jesus fucking christ I need to invent a time machine so I can go back and make my past self be an electrician instead because this. Commercial software engineering has absolutely been captured by some of the silliest people and trends out there.

Scott Shambaugh mulls about an AI alignment issue following his run-in with a bot last week

"Quitting your job is not just fun, it's invigorating!"

That's not just smart, that's capital-J Jenius.