I don’t have a personal or professional workflow that would benefit from AI. I have not been impressed with any generated art or writing (knowingly, so far). I pretty much only know it for the enshittification of search results. It might be great at coding, I’ll never know because in my first 49 years of life I’ve only needed to code enough to get a D+ in my Pascal class. It might get great at generating art but I haven’t had to generate art since my sophomore year of high school. I hear it’s good at scanning lab test results which is great for future me when I need a lab test result but doesn’t come up for me in the day-to-day. There are plenty of other useful things I’m sure it can do for other people but the stuff they say it can do for me right now is nothing I’m interested in having done for me.
This is really more a case of possibility #2. Specifically, why are you rolling your own in the first place? The whole reason the output of the AI is “probably flawless”, is because this operation already has a million implementations. What’s the value in conjuring up another one and adding it to the code that needs to be maintained? Yeah, binary trees aren’t terribly complicated, but neither is struct Vector3 { floatx, y, z; }; or any of its operations, until you realise you’ll be running those operations an awfully lot, so it would be better if it had the right alignment and SIMD instructions were used in its operations, and of course, if you have Vector3 you’ll probably also need a Matrix4x3 and a Quaternion etc., so in the end it’s just better to use an existing solution.
This is what I mean with turning good devs into mediocre ones: the worst solution becomes the easiest solution, so that’s what people will lean towards.
Of course, there can also be situations like you have a very specific use-case and using something off-the-shelf would be sub-optimal, or you’re working with old code and making their own was the decision the previous person or your dumbass past-self made, so that’s just what you have to work with. But the AI is going to struggle more with those cases too.
Lastly, I also mentioned “energy”. If you’re trying to put in words things that aren’t easily conveyed in English (or any other natural language) all the time, you burn through your cognitive endurance like crazy. This is why you don’t want to be in a highly technical meeting in the morning, so being in one all day with a moron you can’t really come to common understanding with (beyond the size of its context window) is even worse.
Human slop code existed way before we had auto-complete in our IDEs, way before Copilot start writing small functions and thus bad code is not because of LLM. AI slop is no different than Human slop, it uses a shit ton of ressource to generate it and is faster at getting a working output but bad codebase is not new.
My first couple of programming classes were in Pascal. Then there was the third class where the professors had written their own pseudo language that existed only on the chalkboard and in their own heads. At least I learned recursion from them. I had to teach myself every language I ever used on the job. I was EE instead of CS, so I suppose I shouldn’t complain too hard, perhaps there were more practical classes deeper into the CS tree.
Multiple Pascal classes for EE thats interesting. You’re not much older than I am and when we did Pascal my teacher said something like its not really used as much now but its a great learning language, but the 2nd class just moved onto C.
I had a friend doing EE and they had Perl as their programming class a few years later.
If I had to guess id say its Python now? That’d be practical as well.
I also leaned every language i used outside of school on my own.
It works great as a fancy search engine. Google results have been atrocious for quite some time, and DDG isn’t that much better. When you’re looking for something hard to find, you may have to check dozens of results or try several searches. LLMs can do this and process the results much faster than you can, and can even give you the sources. Which you do need to check, because sometimes they still spout garbage.
Most other uses are crap unless it’s used by an expert in the subject matter. But search can be useful for anyone. Note: this is not the AI results at the top of the search results; those are still crap. I’m talking about telling the LLM to do a thorough search with a lot more relevant context than the search usually has.
They still.kind of suck gibe you an answer and you say but blah. And itnfoes oh yes in version x.x they changed. I mean if unwanted old outdated in found use Google. Since looking for technical studfnis hard cause so much is out of date.
I don’t have a personal or professional workflow that would benefit from AI. I have not been impressed with any generated art or writing (knowingly, so far). I pretty much only know it for the enshittification of search results. It might be great at coding, I’ll never know because in my first 49 years of life I’ve only needed to code enough to get a D+ in my Pascal class. It might get great at generating art but I haven’t had to generate art since my sophomore year of high school. I hear it’s good at scanning lab test results which is great for future me when I need a lab test result but doesn’t come up for me in the day-to-day. There are plenty of other useful things I’m sure it can do for other people but the stuff they say it can do for me right now is nothing I’m interested in having done for me.
It’s not great at coding. I’m on about my fifth “rewrite large system that’s a pile of AI slop” job this year, trust me.
Shitty devs will write shitty code using AI
Good devs will write good code faster with AI
I have for sure seen far worse hand written code than AI would produce
If it takes less time and energy to describe what you want in natural language than to just write the code, there are two possibilities:
In the end, only shitty devs benefit, while being prevented from becoming good devs, while good devs turn into mediocre devs.
“I want a method that inverts a binary tree”
Can you code that quicker than you can describe it in natural language?
No obviously not, AI could give that to you in ~30 seconds.
And it would probably be flawless, but you can review it yourself to double check
This is really more a case of possibility #2. Specifically, why are you rolling your own in the first place? The whole reason the output of the AI is “probably flawless”, is because this operation already has a million implementations. What’s the value in conjuring up another one and adding it to the code that needs to be maintained? Yeah, binary trees aren’t terribly complicated, but neither is
struct Vector3 { float x, y, z; };or any of its operations, until you realise you’ll be running those operations an awfully lot, so it would be better if it had the right alignment and SIMD instructions were used in its operations, and of course, if you haveVector3you’ll probably also need aMatrix4x3and aQuaternionetc., so in the end it’s just better to use an existing solution.This is what I mean with turning good devs into mediocre ones: the worst solution becomes the easiest solution, so that’s what people will lean towards.
Of course, there can also be situations like you have a very specific use-case and using something off-the-shelf would be sub-optimal, or you’re working with old code and making their own was the decision the previous person or your dumbass past-self made, so that’s just what you have to work with. But the AI is going to struggle more with those cases too.
Lastly, I also mentioned “energy”. If you’re trying to put in words things that aren’t easily conveyed in English (or any other natural language) all the time, you burn through your cognitive endurance like crazy. This is why you don’t want to be in a highly technical meeting in the morning, so being in one all day with a moron you can’t really come to common understanding with (beyond the size of its context window) is even worse.
Human slop code existed way before we had auto-complete in our IDEs, way before Copilot start writing small functions and thus bad code is not because of LLM. AI slop is no different than Human slop, it uses a shit ton of ressource to generate it and is faster at getting a working output but bad codebase is not new.
Did they make you take Pascal in school, or did you choose it and then not like it?
That’s pretty cool if it was required (or some form of programming), it is something I think everyone should at least try and be shown how it works.
My first couple of programming classes were in Pascal. Then there was the third class where the professors had written their own pseudo language that existed only on the chalkboard and in their own heads. At least I learned recursion from them. I had to teach myself every language I ever used on the job. I was EE instead of CS, so I suppose I shouldn’t complain too hard, perhaps there were more practical classes deeper into the CS tree.
Multiple Pascal classes for EE thats interesting. You’re not much older than I am and when we did Pascal my teacher said something like its not really used as much now but its a great learning language, but the 2nd class just moved onto C.
I had a friend doing EE and they had Perl as their programming class a few years later.
If I had to guess id say its Python now? That’d be practical as well.
I also leaned every language i used outside of school on my own.
Umm Spartan, what is your profession?
It works great as a fancy search engine. Google results have been atrocious for quite some time, and DDG isn’t that much better. When you’re looking for something hard to find, you may have to check dozens of results or try several searches. LLMs can do this and process the results much faster than you can, and can even give you the sources. Which you do need to check, because sometimes they still spout garbage.
Most other uses are crap unless it’s used by an expert in the subject matter. But search can be useful for anyone. Note: this is not the AI results at the top of the search results; those are still crap. I’m talking about telling the LLM to do a thorough search with a lot more relevant context than the search usually has.
They still.kind of suck gibe you an answer and you say but blah. And itnfoes oh yes in version x.x they changed. I mean if unwanted old outdated in found use Google. Since looking for technical studfnis hard cause so much is out of date.
They’re bad at dates and age too. That’s absolutely true. Like I said: always verify. They’re good for finding stuff, not at being correct.
I got a stroke reading this.