I can be a bad programmer without using AI generated code. 😤
Not using AI Generated Code won't make you programmer at all. It's just another way to start a journey to alcoholism and loneliness in front of computer screen. The only difference is that this time you travel with junior developer for poor people.
I was saying AI for coding is bad until saw two pictures:
I don’t love AI, but programming is engineering. The goal is to solve a problem, not to be the best at solving a problem.
Also I can write shitty code without help anyway
The issue with engineering is that if you don't solve it efficiently and correctly enough, it'll blow up later.
Sounds like a problem for later
Flippancy aside: the fundamental rule in all engineering is solving the problem you have, not the problem you might have later
POITROAE
It's rarely the case. You rarely work in vacuum where your work only affects what you do at the moment. There is always a downstream or upstream dependency/requirement that needs to be met that you have to take into account in your development.
You have to avoid the problem that might come later that you are aware of. If it's not possible, you have to mitigate the impact of the future problems.
It's not possible to know of all the problems that might/will happen, but with a little work before a project, a lot of issues can be avoided/mitigated.
I wouldn't want civil engineers thinking like that, because our infrastructure would be a lot worse than it is today.
That doesn't apply to all engineering. In ChE, it'll literally blow up later...
“Not blowing up later” would be part of the problem being solved
Engineering for future requirements almost always turn out to be a net loss. You don’t build a distillation column to process 8000T of benzene if you only need to process 40T
Try programming for a day without syntax highlighting or auto-completion, and experience how pathetic you feel without them. If you're like me, you'll discover that those "assistants" have sapped much of your knowledge by eliminating the need to memorize even embarrassingly simple tasks.
That's...how the world works. We move on. We aren't programming computers by flipping toggle switches or moving patch cables around anymore either.
'Try directly hand-coding bits into regions of memory without a compiler/linker and experience how pathetic you feel without it.'
'Try directly hand-coding bits into regions of memory without a compiler/linker and experience how pathetic you feel without it.'
There was article about programming atmega with pulling electrodes in and out of salty water.
What a dumb take (in your quote). Autocompletion showing me all the members of an object is nothing like ChatGPT hallucinating members that don't exist. Autocomplete will show you members you haven't seen, or aren't even documented.
Not to mention they said syntax highlighting is a bad thing... Why use computers at all? Go back to the golden days of punchcards
From later in the article (emphasis author's)
Earlier in this article I intimated that many of us are already dependent on our fancy development environments—syntax highlighting, auto-completion, code analysis, automatic refactoring. You might be wondering how AI differs from those. The answer is pretty easy: The former are tools with the ultimate goal of helping you to be more efficient and write better code; the latter is a tool with the ultimate goal of completely replacing you.
Without syntax highlighting?? Sorry I guess my pretty colors are a weakness. Some people just want to be curmudgeons
Naw man, the other day I pulled a moth out of my code.
I've been coding in Vim for decades. Depending on my terminal emulator, I don't always get console colors (and so, no syntax highlighting). Never bothered me.
People keep trying to tell me to use an IDE "to keep track of everything", that they couldn't keep it all in their heads.
I keep telling them that their code is too [complicated|bloated], or they need to [study|document] it [more|better].
Different strokes for different folks. The colors help my ADHD brain. I only have to quickly glance at it to know what it is without even reading it as I'm juggling seven different things at once in my head. It does the job of grouping things together, like "these are variables, this is a class, this is a member of an enumerated list, this is a macro" and so on and so forth. And I can quickly get that info from the color alone faster than I can from reading it and trying to remember what is was or trying to drill down where it came from.
Using an LLM to code is like using a block of wood as a hammer. It's fast, and it'll do a very specific thing quickly, but eventually it'll splinter to the point of uselessness.
I can't wait until all the copy/code is created by LLMs, and they run out of things to train the LLMs on that won't result in immediate hallucinations.
Maybe they'll start working on a real AI to replace the LLMs, instead of just marketing LLMs as AI.
(probably not)
Good. There's a lot of non-programmers who are now bad ones and are using AI to make their ideas real. It's made programming way more accessible to people who would never learn before.
Great, the next generation of software will be bug-ridden, insecure, single-use shit.
The next generation?
I got back into programming because I can ask an Ai my stupid questions I'm too dumb to google correctly. I haven't otherwise wrote code since college and kinda revived a long dead hobby. It removes a barrier to entry that I otherwise gave up on. Been working on a project to teach myself python the last few months, with Ai replacing the roll of google for the most part.
Copy-pasting Ai code still blows up in your face just as much as code you stole from stack overflow...
Copy-pasting Ai code still blows up in your face just as much as code you stole from stack overflow...
Show me difference:
They are the same.
Why we gotta do Derpy like that?
Because we just don't know what went wrong.
I wouldn't say you're dumb when it comes to Google. Their search is just a broken mess of dog shit now.
The issue isn't you doing your hobby projects however you want, it's people being paid and produce LLM generated code.
And the biggest issue is managers/c-suites thinking that LLMs can replace senior devs.
And the biggest biggest issue is that the LLMs in their current mainstream form are terribly bad for the environment.
Why wouldn't you use AI as a shortcut if you can? Can you actually replace senior devs with AI? I'm sure that depends on the company and what they consider a "senior dev". Maybe there's some not-so-senior senior devs that should be worried.
Learning how to do research is a big part of being an engineer. You should be able to either find an answer, or build your own. Being told how to do something is not learning.
No...stack I can usually figure out from the context of questions what went wrong. AI will very confidently and eloquently give you a very subtle bullshit answer.
Can confirm. Using AI for coding for a couple of months now. There sure is a lot of copy and paste, trail and error, but without the assistance I would not have been able to enhance and customize code like that. Now I am some steps further and was even able to question the AI output, correct it, made it better. I am getting there: learning, optimizing, creating new stuff. It is fun. And when I compile the code, it runs. If not, I debug. Unthinkable for me a year ago.
I've never had AI create working code anyway.
But it will generally point me in the right direction. It's useful for:
You need to be skilled to spot the mistakes it will definitely make.
Our computer science professor in some programming course at university told us we were not supposed to take advice from the internet or answers from Stack Overflow for half a year... Until we learned the ropes. And could asses for ourselves what's right and what is wrong. (And I believe that was some C/C++ course where you get lots of opportunuties to do silly things that might somehow work but for all of the wrong reasons.)
I think he was right. There is lots of misinformation out there that isn't a proper design pattern. And with copy-pasting stuff, you don't necessarily learn anything. Whereas learning with some method is efficient and works.
And I'm pretty sure I'm not super intelligent, but all of that isn't really hard. I mean if someone codes regularly, they might as well learn how to do it properly. It takes a bit of time initially... But you get that time back later on. Though... I'd let AI write some boilerplate code. Or design a website if I'm not interested at all how the HTML and CSS works... I think that's alright to do.
The real learning comes from debugging the garbage code you copied from stack overflow
I mean it also contains great stuff. Niche workarounds, ways to do something more efficiently than some standard library function does.
You just need a means of telling apart the good and the bad. Because there's also people smashing their forehead on the keyboard until it happens to be something that compiles. And people repeating urban legends and outdated info. You somehow need background knowledge to tell which is which. AI didn't invent phrasing some nonesense with full conviction. It is very good at doing exactly that, but we humans also have been doing that since the beginning of time.
Debugging only teaches logic. Not structure. No amount cut, paste, debug with teach you the factory pattern.
I'll confess I only skimmed the article, but it seems like just a bunch of unsubstantiated opinions and I don't buy it.
Using AI generated code is like pair programming with a junior programmer. You tell the junior what to do and then you correct their mistakes by telling them how to do better. In my experience, explaining things to someone else makes you better at your craft. Typically this cycle includes me changing the code manually at the end, and then possibly feeding it back to ChatGPT for another cycle of changes.
Apart from letting me realize and test my ideas quicker, this allows me to raise the abstraction level of my thinking. I can spend more time on architecture and on seeing the bigger picture, and less time being blinded by the nitty gritty details. I would say it makes me both a faster and a better programmer.
You mean I can go from being a terrible programmer to merely a bad one? I'm in.
Unironically, yes. It'll generally generate working code, but not necessarily the most correct or efficient. And it may not do exactly what you want.
If you treat an AI like anything other than the rubber duck in Rubber Duck Programming you're using it wrong.
Not a coder. I can understand most python code and powershell scripts that others have done, but I don't remember syntax, if I need to make something from scratch. Doing that involves ton of googling and reading awful documentation that still leaves some things out. I do this maybe twice a year.
For someone like me AI coding is a god sent.
doing that involves a ton of googling and reading awful documentation
Yes. That is programming.
To most of us, the syntax is the easy part to remember, and our IDEs take care of most of it. Being able to bang our heads through the documentation and experiment with libraries is pretty much what our jobs are.
AI coding is basically a shortcut to some of the stuff we have to repeat with slight changes in our software. It's also useful for setting up more complex code that we know we'll have to tweak.
Expecting it to produce something with the desired results is a recipe for disaster. It's basically a cheaper outsourcing method that can't actually compile and run it's code before giving it to you.
What's really ugly is it makes really good code with fucking terrible bugs. My last job for all of six weeks was trying to fix and integrations wrapper of an integrations wrapper on a 3rd party library of integrations.
It looked like really good code, but the architecture was fucked beyond repair. I was supposed to support it for a fortune 50. I quit before they could put me in the on call rotation.
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
