123
AI Coding Is Massively Overhyped, Report Finds
(futurism.com)
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 30 Sep 2025
123 points (96.9% liked)
Technology
84041 readers
871 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related news or articles.
- Be excellent to each other!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
- Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.
Approved Bots
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
I mean.. At best it's a stack overflow/google replacement.
There's some real perks to using AI to code - it helps a ton with templatable or repetitive code, and setting up tedious tasks. I hate doing that stuff by hand so being able to pass it off to copilot is great. But we already had tools that gave us 90% of the functionality copilot adds there, so it's not super novel, and I've never had it handle anything properly complicated at all successfully (asking GPT-5 to do your dynamic SQL calls is inviting disaster, for example. Requires hours of reworking just to get close.)
More reliable ones.
I’ve had plenty of success using it to build things like docker compose yamls and the like, but for anything functional, it does often take a few tries to get it right. I never use its raw for anything in production. Only as a leaping off point to structure things.
Fair, I've used it recently to translate a translations.ts file to Spanish.
But for repetitive code, I feel like it is kind of a slow down sometimes. I should have refactored instead.
Some code is boilerplate and can’t be distilled down more. It’s nice to point an AI to a database schema and say “write the Django models, admin, forms, and api for this schema, using these authentication permissions”. Yeah I’ll have to verify it’s done right, but that gets a lot of the boring typing out of the way.
I use it for writing code to call APIs and is a huge boon.
Yeah, you have to check the results, but it’s way faster than me.
That's fair.
So much of the AI hype has been pointing to ten year old technology repackaged in a slick new interface.
AI is the iPod to the Zune of yesteryear.
Repackaging old technology in slick new interfaces is what we have been calling progress in computer software for 40+ years.
I mean... I like to think we've done a bit more than that. FFS, file compression alone has made leaps and bounds since the 3.25" floppy days.
Also, as a T-SQL guy, I gotta say there's a world of difference between SQL 2008 and SQL 2022.
But I'll spot you that a lot of the last 10-15 years has produced herculean efforts in answering the question "How can we squeeze a few more ads into your GUI?"
Similarly I find it very useful for if I've written a tool script and really don't want to write the command line interface for it.
"Here's a well-documented function - write an argparser for it"
...then I fix its rubbish assumptions and mistakes. It's probably not drastically quicker but it doesn't require as much effort from me, meaning I can go harder on the actual function (rather than keeping some effort in reserve to get over the final hump).
Maybe it's the dynamic SQL calls themselves that are inviting disaster?
Dynamic SQL in of itself not an issue, but the consequences (exacerbated by SQL's inherent irrecoverability from mistakes - hope you have backups) have stigmatized its use heavily. With an understanding of good practice, a proper development environment and a close eye on the junior devs, there's no inherent issue to using it.
I found that it only does well if the task is already well covered by the usual sources. Ask for anything novel and it shits the bed.
That's because it doesn't understand anything and is just vomiting forth output based on the code that was fed into it.
At absolute best.
My experience is it's the bottom stack overflow answers. Making up bullshit and nonexistent commands, etc.
In the beginning there were manufacturer's manuals, spec sheets, etc.
Then there were magazines, like Byte, InfoWorld, Compute! that showed you a bit more than just the specs
Then there were books, including the X for Dummies series that purported to teach you theory and practice
Then there was Google / Stack Overflow and friends
Somewhere along there, where depends a lot on your age, there were school / University courses
Now we have "AI mode"
Each step along that road has offered a significant speedup, connecting ideas to theory to practice.
I agree, all the "magic bullet" AI hype is far overblown. However, with AI something I new I can do is, interactively, develop a specification and a program. Throw out the code several times while the spec gets refined, re-implemented, tried in different languages with different libraries. It's still only good for "small" projects, but less than a year ago "small" meant less than 1000 lines of code. These days I'm seeing 300 lines of specification turn into 1500-3000 lines of code and have it running successfully within half a day.
I don't know if we're going to face a Kurzweilian singularity where these things start improving themselves at exponential rates, or if we'll hit another 30 year plateau like neural nets did back in the 1990s... As things are, Claude helps me make small projects several times faster than I could ever do with Google and Stack Overflow. And you can build significant systems out of cooperating small projects.