Ancestors

Written by Dan Gohman on 2024-11-21 at 16:37

I am a programmer in the year 2024 who doesn't use AI.

I'm not even curious about it.

It's not just the mistakes. Hallucinations. Artificial confidence.

It's not just the unconscionable energy use. Laundering and reinforcement of historical biases. Ripoff of creative works. Exploited workers. Scams. Bots. Political propaganda. Mass surveillance to train the beast. And this is just off the top of my head here.

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Written by Dan Gohman on 2024-11-21 at 16:37

It's not just about how the story of how AI will make us all so much more "productive" that we'll all have much more free time, which has been told many times in modern history and has never been broadly true.

It is all that.

And.

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Written by Dan Gohman on 2024-11-21 at 16:55

On a personal level.

I got curious about computers because they are things I'm able to be curious about. That's it. That's the spark. I can explore them and learn how they work.

Computers are hard sometimes. Sometimes we can figure out ways to make them easier. But if we instead automate doing hard things, using AI to make doing hard things less effort, it doesn't lead to a place I'm excited about.

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Written by Frederik Braun � on 2024-11-21 at 16:59

@sunfish wait, is this essentially "I like doing hard puzzles. Of course I don’t want to make them simple"?!

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Written by Dan Gohman on 2024-11-21 at 17:04

@freddy It's not about the hardness of the puzzle. I don't think I'm even that skilled at solving hard puzzles.

I like things like "if-else" constructs. I like how when I see one, I know what it does.

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Written by Florens Verschelde on 2024-11-21 at 17:48

@sunfish @freddy I wonder if it's just a matter of taste and personal interest, or if part of it is you understanding that good software requires people who understand how the software is written and how it works. Generating or modifying the software with AI creates an understanding debt that could be fatal to the software long-term (or medium-term, really).

So if your personal satisfaction relies on doing a good job, avoiding AI might be a good instinct.

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Written by Florens Verschelde on 2024-11-21 at 17:53

@sunfish @freddy See @baldur on how building and maintaining software requires building a theory of how the software works: https://www.baldurbjarnason.com/2022/theory-building/

Could be that AI code generators are not a big threat to this theory-building, but on the surface it does sound like shipping code that no-one has more than a fuzzy understanding of. I’ll wait for research showing that this downside is manageable and not too costly before jumping on that bandwagon.

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Written by GunChleoc on 2024-11-21 at 18:21

@fvsch @sunfish @freddy @baldur A friend of mine as tried out AI in VisualStudio and it's only marginally better to classic code completion. Any actual hard problem he has to resolve himself anyway.

AI can only suggest things that have frequently been solved before. It cannot solve new problems.

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Toot

Written by Moz on 2024-11-22 at 22:03

@gunchleoc @fvsch @sunfish @freddy @baldur yep, the "smart code completion" JetBrains supply is right about half the time and that can save a bit of typing. But it doesn't replace the thinking.

Bigger snippets of AI code end up creating work because first you have to do a very detailed review, then you can run a static analysis tool over it, then you start writing tests, and those tests have to be unusually thorough because AI makes mistakes that people don't.

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Descendants