"We did it, Patrick! We made a technological breakthrough!"
A place for all those who loathe AI to discuss things, post articles, and ridicule the AI hype. Proud supporter of working people. And proud booer of SXSW 2024.
Well if it helps for y'all to know, if I can't put my measly webpage making skills to decent use in the course of a weeks time, I'll be buying the services of a freelancer because hoooooly shite am I rusty.
(I need to update my basic website and am terribly lazy. Maybe making some extra cash would make a kid somewhere happy.)
((Don't message me here though I don't check messages))
Here's a fun thing. Using the latest AI to code backend and front-end code. Every couple of weeks, have to stop, go through every line and module, and throw out pretty much 90% of the code, manually refactor, and rewrite it.
It offers a good starting point, but the minute things get slightly complicated, you have to step in. I feel bad for people who think this will make it so they don't need experienced developers and architects. They're in for a rough ride.
An interesting point I heard the other day: if AI can replace entry level jobs, doing simple scripts that AI can definitely do (because it essentially just spits out the stack overflow/Reddit/etc training data verbatim), then companies no longer need entry level programmers.
If they don't need entry level programmers, how do you get future senior programmers? Skipping directly to advanced stuff without getting practical experience on the simple stuff is incredibly hard.
What happens when the current senior programmers retire in larger numbers, and there's very few replacements because the ladder is gone?
That's a problem for Q72 and they're incapable of looking past Q4. Besides, they'll have already jumped ship by then, what do the execs care if they make this quarter just ever so slightly more profitable
Agree. Software engineering is a marathon - not a sprint. These AI tools are useful to get something up real quick, but I have a hard time seeing how they can be useful for long term maintenance work.
Software engineering is a marathon - not a sprint.
Oh BOY do I have this 'brand new shiny' thing called Agile at almost every fucking company ever.
Agile doesn't claim that a project can be completed in a sprint.
It’s still a marathon, even if the name ”sprint” is used. The point is the same: software engineering is about ensuring long term maintenance. It’s about building software that can sustain through multiple sprints.
The typical code from an AI agent can barely sustain a single sprint without having to restart from scratch.
Every couple of weeks, have to stop, go through every line and module, and throw out pretty much 90% of the code
It offers a good starting point
It doesn't sound like a good starting point if you have to throw out 90% of it every couple of weeks.
It's not possible to make you unskilled if you're skilled. At worst, you'd get rusty. It is possible that your skills might not be in high demand anymore though.
The only thing that would make programmers not be in demand is if "vibe coding" were truly producing a better product than traditional programming. So far, the only ones making that claim are the ones desperately trying to sell "AI" before the bubble bursts. It's true that there are some companies that really want to believe it. But, companies are always desperately hoping for something that can allow them to fire their expensive workers. It's rare that that works out.
It's been aggressively pushed upon new programmers though, a whole generation who might potentially never develop skills to begin with
You are thinking to short term
This is not about you, but the next generations
It's exactly the opposite of teaching a man to fish, this is telling that man to depend on whatever floats down the river and just pick whatever seems edible, if the man gets enough or poisons himself nobody will know, because the skill to fish would have been lost.
Like people who only had a smartphone for everything, they'll never know the advantages of an actual computer and will struggle with it when they need to use one.
I have no idea what vibe coding is, can someone ELI5 it to me?
I have tried AI to get some rough C# for my hobby game but even that was unusable.
‘Vibe coding’ is where you code only with prompts and never look at the generated code.
Seems like a great way to create insecure unmaintainable code if you ask me.
Vibe coding is basically having no idea about coding and using the AI to make snippets of Code for you
Like if you want to programm snake, you would prompt it:
then it would tell you like:
so you tell it like:
and so forth, then you just paste everything into a txt and ask the AI to debug it for you and hope it works
I run free local models...
This, i hope we just dislike the monopolization of AI here and not the technology in general. Self hosting is the way.
The output is still slop, no matter if it's local or oligarch-owned.
I'll go against the grain here: I'm not worried. If you actually care about what you do, even vibe coding can teach you something, it could be a starting point. The internet is not going away, and just looking up this or that thing the AI spit out will help you learn what you're working with.
Is it the same as an uni CS course? No of course, but how many of us got our start just tinkering with stuff we didn't understand?
The internet is not going away, and just looking up this or that thing the AI spit out will help you learn what you’re working with.
I think you mean "sifting through several pages of worthless search results while looking for something the AI spit out"
The internet is worse and it can still get worse.
Yeah definitely not our profit driven models.
AI can do it cheaper... so just have the AI do it. Its that simple, people really don't like it when things are so simple but can't do anything about it. So they just make shit up like this.
He still got a point, but premise is pretty ridiculous.
I think this so much less convincing than selling AI as a replacement for skilled labor, not as a way to intentionally deskill actual software engineers.
Capitalism already has a way of preventing you from making your own commodities - you sell your time, and the less they pay you for it relative to how much you need to live, the less time you have for yourself to put towards self sufficiency. We don't have many FOSS products, not because nobody has the knowledge or skill to make them, but because nobody has the time to make them.
There are plenty of reasons to hate corporate-owned AI products, we don't need to be hallucinating new ones.