It depends. AI can help writing good code. Or it can write bad code. It depends on the developer's goals.
My goal is to write bad code
It depends. AI can help writing good code. Or it can write bad code
I'll give you a hypothetical: a company is to hire someone for coding. They can either hire someone who writes clean code for $20/h, or someone who writes dirty but functioning code using AI for $10/h. What will many companies do?
Many companies chose cheap coders over good coders, even without AI. Companies I heard of have pretty bad code bases, and they don't use AI for software development. Even my company preferred cheap coders and fast development, and the code base from that time is terrible, because our management didn't know what good code is and why it's important. For such companies, AI can make development even faster, and I doubt code quality will suffer.
I don't understand how build times magically decrease with AI. Or did they mean built?
You can get decent results from AI coding models, though...
...as long as somebody who actually knows how to program is directing it. Like if you tell it what inputs/outputs you want it can write a decent function - even going so far as to comment it along the way. I've gotten O1 to write some basic web apps with Node and HTML/CSS without having to hold its hand much. But we simply don't have the training, resources, or data to get it to work on units larger than that. Ultimately it'd have to learn from large scale projects, and have the context size to be able to hold if not the entire project then significant chunks of it in context and that would require some very beefy hardware.
and only if you're doing something that has been previously done and publically released
Well, not exactly. For example, for a game I was working on I asked an LLM for a mathematical formula to align 3D normals. Then I couldn't decipher what it wrote so I just asked it to write the code for me to do it. I can understand it in its code form, and it slid into my game's code just fine.
Yeah, it wasn't seamless, but that's the frustrating hype part of LLMs. They very much won't replace an actual programmer. But for me, working as the sole developer who actually knows how to code but doesn't know how to do much of the math a game requires? It's a godsend. And I guess somewhere deep in some forum somebody's written this exact formula as a code snippet, but I think it actually just converted the formula into code and that's something quite useful.
I mean, I don't think you and I disagree on the limits of LLMs here. Obviously that formula it pulled out was something published before, and of course I had to direct it. But it's these emergent solutions you can draw out of it where I find the most use. But of course, you need to actually know what you're doing both on the code side and when it comes to "talking" to the LLM, which is why it's nowhere near useful enough to empower users to code anything with some level of complexity without a developer there to guide it.
It’s WYSIWYG all over again…
OTOH humans did design the tracks in both images.
I gave it a harder software dev task a few weeks ago... Something that is not answered on the internet... It was as clueless as me, but compared to me, it made up shit that could never work.
I tried to give it a piece of ~200 lines of JS I was positive there was an error in, and it tried to gaslight me into thinking there wasn't any... I tried everything, pointed it specifically to suspicious bits, asked for breakdowns, assertions, test cases... which it then promptly copy-pasted to me straight from my own code... Took me a few hours to find, but there was, in fact, a rookie mistake in it, just hard to spot at a glance.
Welcome to Programmer Humor!
This is a place where you can post jokes, memes, humor, etc. related to programming!
For sharing awful code theres also Programming Horror.
