Except it’s a computer writing the code that somebody probably ran once and said ‘looks good’ for their ‘happy path’ and committed it. So it’s inevitably probably full of weird edge case bugs…have fun.
AI code is not clever. It’s all developers averaged. Even if it worked properly, you’d get average quality code.
It’s rather lazy and cheap. This is where the quality is lacking.
Some of the JavaScript code I’ve seen I’d call ‘clever’ because it uses certain parts of the language that are technically in the spec or are just weird casting side effects that I hope no normal developer would actually use because it’s unreadable. I’m sure ‘somebody’ used it because the AI picked up on it but it’s not exactly something that should be replicated.
Some colleges are letting students use AI code to do their assignments. I’d expect that ‘average quality’ to get so much worse over time and I’m not sure the developers are going to be getting any better right along with it. They can continue to turn in work they probably don’t fully understand to begin with.
I don’t like the term “clever” in code, because sometimes it means “I’m too dumb to understand it”. Simply don’t touch clever code, unless you really understand it.
Best example is the fast inverse square root function in Quake. Yeah… it’s clever, but replace it by simple maths and let Quake have performance problems.
On the other hand, using AI for more than assisted coding is never clever. Some day some fuck will use it in medicine and will actually kill people. AI is not at fault here! It’s the programmer who killed a patient in this case by being irresponsible and lazy.
The pain in the arse which is debugging is what motivated me to, as my career progressed, improve my coding, improve my software design, improve my systems design, even improved my software development process and standards and eventually that even extended to getting those I worked with to also improving those things as I sometimes ended up having to debug their bugs.
Debugging definitelly makes better techies, IMHO, mainly because of the lengths people will go to in order the avoid having to do it.
I always claimed in job interviews to be good at debugging, but there are no certifications for debugging and there’s really no way for an interviewer to verify such a claim. So even though it is an incredibly important skill, companies just do not look for it. There is also the hilariously misguided belief that good coders do not produce bugs so there’s no need for debugging.
There is also the hilariously misguided belief that good coders do not produce bugs so there’s no need for debugging.
i’m terrified of people who think this way. my experience has been that they are much less inclined to check for bugs in their code and tend to produce much buggier code
There is also the hilariously misguided belief that good coders do not produce bugs so there’s no need for debugging.
Yeah, fuck this specifically. I’d rather have a good troubleshooter. I work in live events; I don’t care if an audio technician can run a concert and have it sounding wonderful under ideal conditions. I care if they can salvage a concert after the entire fucking rig stops working 5 minutes before the show starts. I judge techs almost solely on their ability to troubleshoot.
Anyone can run a system that is already built, but a truly good technician can identify where a problem is and work to fix it. I’ve seen too many “good” technicians freeze up and panic at the first sign of trouble, which really just tells me they’re not as good as they say. When you have a show starting in 10 minutes and you have no audio, you can’t waste time with panic.
Good programmers (and I don’t mean just at the coding level) make less bugs exactly because they want to avoid bug fixing as much as possible.
They still have to do debugging - and hence have to be good at it - just less often than if they didn’t invest any time into figuring out ways of working that reduce the rate of bugs in their work (and, again, this is at more levels than just coding).
I think that misconception of “good coders do not produce bugs” in anchored in the totally wrong idea that it’s at all possible to make code without bugs - the way I see it the path to being a “good coder” must go through being good at debugging and just wanting to avoid doing it as much because how how much more time it takes to have to go all the way down to using the debugger to find bugs than doing things like at least some analysis upfront of the program requirements, using proper naming conventions to reduce the likelihood of the kind of bugs that comes from confusing variables and structuring you code so that you don’t get lost or don’t forget things (especially for code you don’t see for months and later come back to having forgotten the logic you were following with it).
I’ve done some programming without proper debuggers (embedded stuff in shitty shit microcontrollers, shader programming) and it’s a total PITA.
Oh geez…who could have seen this coming?
Oh wait, every single senior developer who is currently railing against their moron AI-bandwagoning CEOs.
Middle and upper management are like little children - they’ll only learn that fire hurts by putting their hand in it.
See? AI creates jobs! Granted, it’s specialized mop up situations, but jobs!
It’ll be even more interesting in the future! Every now and then a T1000 will lose all hydraulic fluids right out it’s prosthetic anus and they’ll need someone there with a mop and bucket! Our economy lives on…
Having spent most of my career working as a senior contractor, which often meant landing on code bases with 3+ layers of fuckups, I can only imagine how painful it will be to end up having to clean and fix AI generated code, since that doesn’t even have a consistent coding style or pattern of design errors and bugs.
If by economy you mean some of us are needed to mop up hydraulic ass-juices at gunpoint I suppose you’re technically correct. At least they have to feed us, right?
…right?
What a surprise, right?
Eaxctly my point as well here… https://kbin.melroy.org/m/technology@lemmy.world/t/461269/-/comment/4095583
Sounds like the Sirius cybernetics corporation:
The fundamental design flaws are obscured by the superficial design flaws.
But are the shareholders pleased?
I’ve been laughing at this quote for 5 minutes straight
It’s so good
He knows he’s right
Also: I code sometimes, and all of my code is of masterpiece quality. I cannot debug my own code, I ask for outside help and we have to dismantle the NT kernel to find out what’s gone wrong
Lmao my job announced layoffs a few months back. They continue to parade their corporate restructuring plan in front of us like we give a fuck if shareholders make money. My output has dropped significantly as I search for another role. Whatever code I do write now is always just copy pasted from AI (which is getting harder to use…fuck you Copilot). I give zero fucks about this place anymore. Maybe if people had some small semblance of investment in their company’s success (i.e.: not milked by shareholders and beaten to dust by shitty profit driven metrics that take away from the core business), the employees might give enough fucks to not copy paste shitty third party code.
Additionally, this is a training issue. Don’t offload the training of your people onto the universities (which then trap the students into an insurmountable debt load leading them to take jobs they otherwise wouldn’t want to take just to eat and have a roof over their heads). The modern corporate landscape has created a perfect shitstorm of disincentives for genuine effort and diligence. Then you expect us to give a shit about your company even though the days of 40 years and a pension are now gone. We’re stuck with 401k plans and social security and the luck of the draw as to whether we can retire or not. Work your whole life for what? Fuck you. I’m gonna generate that AI code and enjoy my 30s and 40s.
A workforce trapped by debt, forced to prioritize job security and paycheck size over passion or purpose. People end up in roles they don’t care about, working for companies they have no investment in, simply to keep up with loan payments and the ever increasing cost of living.
“Why is my organization falling apart!?” Fucking look up from the stupid fucking metrics that don’t actually tell you anything you dumb fucks. Make an actual human decision and fix the wealth inequality. It’s literally always wealth inequality.
You are my spirit animal.
“People work in roles they don’t care about, for companies they have no investment in, to pay loans they shouldn’t have.”
That sounds like a fight club quote lol. I know you didn’t say “loans they shouldn’t have” but the cost of college is just stupidly high. It doesn’t have to be free but come on.
It doesn’t have to be free but come on.
I beg to differ! My degree was free for all intents and purposes, and no, it didn’t take away from the challenge or the quality of education. I cried blood tears in order to graduate but it was worth it.
Chuck Palahniuk leaking into my writing like the carrot out of the protagonist’s ass in Guts.
15 years ago I got a job where I wasn’t allowed to do anything. I hated it. I wanted to learn and be valuable and be valued. I left that job.
I worked for a bank and then Red Hat and I loved what I did and burned myself out trying to make them happy. Only to find out they still didn’t value me.
I switched jobs two years ago and increased my pay 30% overnight and back to a job doing nothing. And I’m totally fine with it now. I have a family and I focus on them and during work, if they don’t have anything for me to do I make my own happiness.
Fuck corporations. I’ll take your money, I’ll never again kill myself as I’ll never be valued anyway. Jobs aren’t worth it. People are.
I told my manager that I’ve been burned and can’t make myself work hard for another company again. She’s leaving so there’s no vested interest in the company for her. But yeah, fuck these cunts.
Similar trajectory for me, but I’m now being micromanaged on the daily. We got a new CIO recently who is micromanaging his direct reports and our culture has evaporated overnight. The shit is indeed rolling down hill and the writing is on the wall to leave. I know it’s not just me either. There will be an exodus when rates get cut and hiring picks up again. This place is fucked.
But that’s the key. If you can find something and lay low with minimal annoyance, hang onto that for as long as you can.
Are you also finding copilot to be less helpful of late? The other day it couldn’t follow the simplest of instructions
No, it isn’t. Poor code quality peer review checks and QA policies are more to blame. We shouldn’t care how an individual developer generates a solution, it should be irrelevant whether they wrote it in reference to docs, copy pasted from stack overflow or generated by AI. I encourage Jrs to use AI as I think it can be a great problem solving tool, but you better understand what you’re submitting to PR otherwise you’re an absolute schmuck.
as opposed to human-generated code
But at least that crappy bug-riddled code has soul!
no common sense allowed in this thread, sir. only AI hate bandwagon please.
Me and my team take our site down the old fashioned way. Code copied from some rando on the internet.
Reminds me of the time that I took down the corporate website by translating the entire website into German. I’d been asked to do this but I hadn’t realized that the auto translation Plug-In actually rewrote code into German, I thought it was just going to alter the HTML with JavaScript at runtime, but nope. It actually edited the files.
It also translated the password into German which was fun because it was just random characters so I have no idea what it translated into.
That’s fucking hilarious
Same happened with people using the Cloud To Butt extension which replaced every ‘cloud’ with ‘butt’ even for codes. Hilarity ensued.
I do have that extension installed. Never been bit so far. I don’t copy and paste anymore than a couple of lines at a time.
Copy pasting random snippets from search results and chatgpt until something works is how I do my job.
“until something works" At least you’re doing a better job than some people.
Some leave it at will ai told me so. And they don’t know better and put that into prod!
It’s pretty much the same as AIs do - copy and past random code from Stackoverflow - but they do it automatically.
Good old
curl|shCan we take a moment to ask ourselves - how the hell did piping to shell become ok? We have all kinds of method’s for deploying stuff - from the age old tarball to the new shinny flat pack. But somehow we also became ok with
Curl foo | shOftentimes as root.
As stated in the article, this has less to do with using AI, more to do with sloppy code reviews and code quality enforcement. Bad code from AI is just the latest version of mindlessly pasting from Stack Overflow.
I encourage jrs to use tools such as Phind for solving problems but I also expect them to understand what they’re submitting and be ready to defend it no differently to any other PR. If they’re submitting code they don’t understand that’s incredibly unprofessional and I would come down very hard on them. They don’t do this though because we don’t hire dickheads.
Bad code from AI is just the latest version of mindlessly pasting from Stack Overflow.
Humans literally can not scan all of SO to make a huge copypasta.
It takes much more time, effort, and thought to find various solutions on SO and patch them together into something that works well.
Yeah but… i asked chatgpt once how to style something in asciidoctor. It proposed me html syntax (some inline stuff can be done with html tags in asciidoctor, if output is html) instead of the external style.yml After the usual apology, it suggested some wrong yaml. Third try, because something was wrong in code, it mixed them both.
I mean, sure, some niche usecase in a somewhat obscure (lots of moving parts) lightweight markup. But still, this was a lesson.
Computer write shite code and the human still gets blamed.
The human turned the code in. They deserve 100% of the blame.
this has less to do with using AI, more to do with sloppy code reviews and code quality enforcement.
They are the same picture.
More specifically: the same kind of decision makers are behind both.
Shift-left eliminated the QA role.
Now we have AI generated shit code, with devs that don’t understand the low level details of both the language, and the specifics of the generated code.
So we basically have content entry (ai inputs) and extremely shitty QA bundled into the “developer” role.
As a 20 year veteran of the industry, people keep asking me if I think AI will make developers obsolete. I keep telling them “maybe some day, but today’s LLMs are not it. The AI bubble is going to burst, and a few legit use cases will make it through”
We used to have these shit developers and I accepted a lot of bad code back then – if it actually worked – because otherwise “code review” is full-on training, which is an entire other job from the one I was hired to do.
The client ditched that contracting firm, and the devs I work with now are worth putting in time on code review with – but damn, we got hella shit code in our codebase to deal with now. Some of it got tossed, some of it … we live with.
The point of the article isn’t that AI is outright useless as a coding tool but that it lulls programmers into a false sense of security regarding the quality and security of their code. They aren’t reviewing their work as frequently because of this new reliance on AI as a time saver, and as such are more likely to miss any mistakes that they or the AJ made.
The point of the article isn’t that AI is outright useless as a coding tool but that it lulls programmers into a false sense of security regarding the quality and security of their code.
Lulling them into a false sense of security is half of what makes it useless. The fact that it makes shitty code is the other half.
But the job of a software developer is not to write good code, it is to deliver features. People have been writing bad code without any AI for decades. Businesses often prioritize speed over quality, rewarding teams that deliver features quicker.
A computer lets you make more mistakes faster than any other invention with the possible exceptions of handguns and Tequila.
Now Even Faster™ with no exceptions thanks to “AI”
It basically just turns coders into debuggers.
Everyone is QA now.
Devs care to debug code only if they believe in its quality. Otherwise they write the code again from scratch. This is also cheaper than debugging.
I dare to say it: 70% of the devs are not quality focused to start with. They are already happy if something, somewhat, sort of, works. And then not even ship a unit test with it.
Now now, AJ may not know everything, but he’ll learn
Where’s the articles about humans doing the exact same shit for the last 40-50 fucking years and no one bats an eye. Looks at the prompts from people complaining about ai responses and see they don’t know how to use this shit any better than my grandparents can use a touchtone phone.
“Build an app”
Fails
“This ai is shit”.
Just like ever other piece of technology. Garbage in garbage out. If you can’t reliably describe what you want then no one is going to be able to do it. AI just blatantly points out your descriptive failures.
I’ve yet to see generative AI make an error that a human couldn’t make. Maybe that’s why people seem so hateful of it; they were expecting it to be superhuman but instead it’s too much like us.
Ai llms have learned from us. Good and bad. It doesn’t know the difference between good and bad unless you tell it.
So you have to know what’s good or bad from the get go before using it and trusting it yet.
And some blindly trust ai already… Which its far from that level of trust
That’s on them though. The other ones making the claim that it’s supposed to be The Culture, but I don’t think anyone at the companies is saying that it is.
Also it is pure junk. Chat-GPT code may come out fast on the screen but it’s garbage. I tried python and c++ both just pure garbage. Sure I got it to do what I wanted but only after a day of hair pulling repetitive madness. Simple task, open an image and invert it . Then we’ll it opened the image but didn’t invert. Or maybe it’s upside down. Can you open the image right side up and invert it…fuck fuck, why is the window full screen? Did I ask for full screen, shit heavens no! Anyway it’s a fuckin idiot just rambling code at me.
If old you said to me was open an image and invert it, I would probably turn it upside down as well. What are you trying to get it to do?
Probably make the bright pixels dark and the dark pixels bright.
So what they should have said is to make the image negative.
That’s being a standard image editing function since the days of film but you have to use the correct terminology.
It’s called invert in Photoshop:
https://www.adobe.com/creativecloud/photography/discover/invert-colors.html
I use it for Ansible, so not for code, and just to reduce the time my brain is exposed to Ansible.
Open it how using what at what size what codec where, for how long, for what purpose, using what data structures, use what libraries, what versions. You sound like my PO trying to request an update to software they have no comprehension of.
and here’s me learning C programming language from a selfhosted AI :/
It’s a great launching pad to learn how a language works, but beyond simple things, it get bad very fast.
I also use AI to look for terms in specific domains, which is really helpful as well.
