258
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 03 Jun 2026
258 points (97.1% liked)
Programming
27148 readers
573 users here now
Welcome to the main community in programming.dev! Feel free to post anything relating to programming here!
Cross posting is strongly encouraged in the instance. If you feel your post or another person's post makes sense in another community cross post into it.
Hope you enjoy the instance!
Rules
Rules
- Follow the programming.dev instance rules
- Keep content related to programming in some way
- If you're posting long videos try to add in some form of tldr for those who don't want to watch videos
Wormhole
Follow the wormhole through a path of communities !webdev@programming.dev
founded 3 years ago
MODERATORS
Hooray! It's good to see another retired dev with 40 years exp respond more eloquently than I ever can to the flood of anti-AI rage. What gets me most about the rage is the absolutism - the flat assumption that anyone who uses AI is either stupid or evil. Period. There's almost no genuine engagement on the topic, mostly just angry shouting. But you see that a lot online - some people think social media is Fight Club.
If you read through the comments here you'll see a ton of nuanced comments, I think undercutting your claim. At the same time, this is also an interesting issue because you're trying to play the centrist role. But on this issue there is no centrist role, and actually you've just played the pro AI role while pretending you didn't do that.
Because think about what happened. The developer used AI and it introduced bugs and that was bad for people. These are the facts. So the people are saying hey can you stop using AI and the developer is shrugging their shoulders.
What's the middle ground that you're looking for here? Recognizing that it's possible to use AI harmlessly? But that's not what happened. If it had been harmless used then no one would have brought up the issues in the first place.
Was it the AI that introduced bugs, or them, while working with AI there or in other parts?
Would the bugs not have occurred if they made the changes without AI?
Would they have made any changes without AI? Would we be better off without changes for security robustness?
You make it sound like a direct correlation. Having read their response, that seems like an assumption without reasonable foundation.
Changes always have a risk of introducing bugs.
I'm no friend of using AI without the necessariy expertise, but from their response, they seem to have taken a very thorough, reasonable approach, and they seem to have the expertise to do so.
When I rant about polarization of AI discussions I'm talking about on social media generally, not this one remarkably civil thread. But even your use of the term "roles" is doing it - you're assigning black hats and white hats to the participants instead of focusing on what they're saying.
Speaking of which, where do you get the idea that the author introduced bugs by using AI? He says that in his work to improve rsync by beefing up test suites, integration testing etc he used AI to do grunt work, and thoroughly reviewed every bit of it. He explains this very clearly, and I don't see the part where his use of AI created more bugs.
I am pro-AI - I'm interested in its development and looking forward to it getting better. What we have right now can be very useful, but it's kind of like 1980s 8-bit graphics video games. It hallucinates too often and is unconscionably resource-heavy. I'm very much against its overdeployment and misuse. Companies are charging into implementing AI like middle school boys who just figured out how to find free porn. They see it as yet another magic wand to reduce headcount - which is their endless quest. But blaming AI itself for this is like blaming a saw for wasting lumber or for not being a better saw. Blame shitty carpenters who use it wrong.
I think there is more nuance or spectrum than good or bad. Vibe is one extreme, but along the dial from traditional to pure vibe are degrees of involvement. I'd characterize the degrees something like:
In 3 of those 4, the human is fundamentally the one owning the output, and AI is an accelerator and potentially an influence, kind of like pair programming. And even the SDD workflow can be a human-in-the-loop approach, although the more agents produce autonomously, the harder it might be for a human to be effective at reviewing the output.
So I'll agree that "use it or don't" is a binary, but I'd just add that there's still a spectrum of how it's used.