- cross-posted to:
- fuck_ai@lemmy.world
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The general comments that Ben received were that experienced developers can use AI for coding with positive results because they know what they’re doing. But AI coding gives awful results when it’s used by an inexperienced developer. Which is what we knew already.
That should be a big warning sign that the next generation of developers are not going to be very good. If they’re waist deep in AI slop, they’re only going to learn how to deal with AI slop.
As a non-programmer, I have zero understanding of the code and the analysis and fully rely on AI and even reviewed that AI analysis with a different AI to get the best possible solution (which was not good enough in this case).
What I’m feeling after reading that must be what artists feel like when AI slop proponents tell them “we’re making art accessible”.
Art is already accessible. Plenty of artists that sells their art dirt cheap, or you can buy pen and papers at the dollar store.
What people want when they say “AI is making art accessible” is they want high quality professional art for dirt cheap.
What people want when they say “AI is making art accessible” is they want high quality professional art for dirt cheap.
…and what their opposition means when they oppose it is “this line of work was supposed to be totally immune to automation, and I’m mad that it turns out not to be.”
…and this opposition means that our disagreements can only be perceived through the lens of personal faults.
There is already a lot of automation out there, and more is better, when used correctly. And that’s not talking about the outright theft of the material from these artists it is trying to replace so badly.
See I would frame it as practicioners of some of the last few non-bullshit jobs (minimally bullshit jobs) - fields that by necessity require a kind of craft or art that is meaningful or rewarding - being routed around by economic forces that only wanted their work for bullshit results. Like, no matter how passionate you are about graphic design you probably didn’t get into the field because shuffling the visuals every so often is X% better for customer engagement and conversion or whatever. But the businesses buying graphic design work are more interested in that than they ever were in making something beautiful or functional, and GenAI gives them the ability to get what they want more cheaply. As an unexpected benefit they also don’t have to see you roll your eyes when they tell you it needs to be “more blue” and as an insignificant side effect it brings our culture one step closer to finally drowning the human soul in shit to advance the cause of glorious industry in it’s unceasing march to An Even Bigger Number.
I think they also want recognition/credit for spending 5 minutes (or less) typing some words at an image generator as if that were comparable to people who develop technical skills and then create effortful meaningful work just because the outputs are (superficially) similar.
Watched a junior dev present some data operations recently. Instead of just showing the sql that worked they copy pasted a prompt into the data platform’s assistant chat. The SQL it generated was invalid so the dev simply told it “fix” and it made the query valid, much to everyone’s amusement.
The actual column names did not reflect the output they were mapped to, there’s no way the nicely formatted results were accurate. Average duration column populated the total count output. Junior dev was cheerfully oblivious. It produced output shaped like the goal so it must have been right
As an artist, I can confirm.
When they say “art” they mean “metaphorical lead paint” and when they say “accessible” they mean “insidiously inserted into your neural pathways”
That should be a big warning sign that the next generation of developers are not going to be very good.
Sounds like job security to me!
“I want the people I teach to be worse than me” is a fucking nightmare of a want, I hope you learn to do better
So there’s this new thing they invented. It’s called a joke. You should try them out sometime, they’re fun!
“oh shit I got called out on my shitty haha-only-serious comment, better pretend I didn’t mean it!” cool story bro
If people say that sort of thing around you not as a joke, you need to spend your time with better people. I dunno what to tell you - humor is a great way to deal with shitty things in life. Dunno why you would want to get rid of it.
jesus fuck how do you fail to understand an a post of this kind this badly
maybe train your model better! I know I know, they were already supposed to be taking over the world… alas…
“How dare you not find me funny. I’m going to lecture you on humor. The lectures will continue until morale improves.”
So, there’s this new phenomenon they’ve observed in which text does not convey tone. It can be a real problem, especially when a statement made by one person as a joke would be made by another in all seriousness — but don’t worry, solutions have very recently been proposed.
I dunno what kind of world you are living in where someone would make my comment not as a joke. Please find better friends.
you’re as funny as the grave
space alien technology!!~
I dunno. I feel like the programmers who came before me could say the same thing about IDEs, Stack Overflow, and high level programming languages. Assembly looks like gobbledygook to me and they tell me I’m a Senior Dev.
If someone uses ChatGPT like I use StackOverflow, I’m not worried. We’ve been stealing code from each other since the beginning.“Getting the answer” and then having to figure out how to plug it into the rest of the code is pretty much what we do.
There isn’t really a direct path from an LLM to a good programmer. You can get good snippets, but “ChatGPT, build me a app” will be largely useless. The programmers who come after me will have to understand how their code works just as much as I do.
fuck almighty I wish you and your friends would just do better
LLM as another tool is great. LLM to replace experienced coders is a nightmare waiting to happen.
IDEs, stack overflow, they are tools that makes the life of a developers a lot easier, they don’t replace him.
I mean past a certain point LLMs are strictly worse tools than Stack Overflow was on its worst day. IDEs have a bunch of features to help manage complexity and offload memorization. The fundamental task of understanding the code you’re writing is still yours. Stack Overflow and other forums are basically crowdsourced mentorship programs. Someone out there knows the thing you need to and rather than cultivate a wide social network you can take advantage of mass communication. To use it well you still need to know what’s happening, and if you don’t you can at least trust that the information is out there somewhere that you might be able to follow up on as needed. LLM assistants are designed to create output that looks plausible and to tell the user what they want to hear. If the user is an idiot the LLM will do nothing to make them recognize that they’re doing something wrong, much less help them fix it.
LLM are terrible because the data they were trained on is garbage, because companies don’t want to pay for people to create a curated dataset to produce acceptable results.
The tech itself can be good in specific cases. But the way it is shoved in everything right now is terrible
it can’t be that stupid, you must be training it wrong
weren’t you also here having shitty opinions like a week ago?
e: yes
Looking at your history, keep on being edgy and contributing to the stereotype.
What stereotype? The stereotype that awful.systems posters are hostile to people who praise LLMs? Good.
I can make slop code without ai.
All the newbs were just copying lines from stackexchange before AI. The only real difference at this point is that the commenting is marginally better.
Stack Overflow is far from perfect, but at least there is some level of vetting going on before it’s copypasta’d.
In so many ways, LLMs are just the tip of the iceberg of bad ideology in software development. There have always been people that come into the field and develop heinously bad habits. Whether it’s the “this is just my job, the only thing I think about outside work is my family” types or the juniors who only know how to copy paste snippets from web forums.
And look, I get it. I don’t think 60-80 hour weeks are required to be successful. But I’m talking about people who are actively hostile to their own career paths, who seem to hate programming except that it pays good and let’s them raise families. Hot take: that sucks. People selfishly obsessed with their own lineage and utterly incurious about the world or the thing they spend 8 hours a day doing suck, and they’re bad for society.
The juniors are less of a drain on civilization because they at least can learn to do better. Or they used to could, because as another reply mentioned, there’s no path from LLM slop to being a good developer. Not without the intervention of a more experienced dev to tell them what’s wrong with the LLM output.
It takes all the joy out of the job too, something they’ve been working on for years. What makes this work interesting is understanding people’s problems, working out the best way to model them, and building towards solutions. What they want the job to be is a slop factory: same as the dream of every rich asshole who thinks having half an idea is the same as working for years to fully realize an idea in all it’s complexity and wonder.
They never have any respect for the work that takes because they’ve never done any work. And the next generation of implementers are being taught that there are no new ideas. You just ask the oracle to give you the answer.
Had a presentation where they told us they were going to show us how AI can automate project creation. In the demo, after several attempts at using different prompts, failing and trying to fix it manually, they gave up.
I don’t think it’s entirely useless as it is, it’s just that people have created a hammer they know gives something useful and have stuck it with iterative improvements that have a lot compensation beneath the engine. It’s artificial because it is being developed to artificially fulfill prompts, which they do succeed at. When people do develop true intelligence-on-demand, you’ll know because you will lose your job, not simply have another tool at your disposal. Although the prompts and flow of conversations people pay to submit to the training is really helping advance the research into their replacements.
My opinion is it can be good when used narrowly.
Write a concise function that takes these inputs, does this, and outputs a dict with this information.
But so often it wants to be overly verbose. And it’s not so smart as to understand much of the project for any meaningful length of time. So it will redo something that already exists. It will want to touch something that is used in multiple places without caring or knowing how it’s used.
But it still takes someone to know how the puzzle pieces go together. To architect it and lay it out. To really know what the inputs and outputs need to be. If someone gives it free reign to do whatever, it’ll just make slop.
There’s something similar going on with air traffic control. 90% of their job could be automated (and it has been technically feasible to do so for quite some time), but we do want humans to be able to step in when things suddenly get complicated. However, if they’re not constantly practicing those skills, then they won’t be any good when an emergency happens and the automation gets shut off.
The problem becomes one of squishy human psychology. Maybe you can automate 90% of the job, but you intentionally roll that down to 70% to give humans a safe practice space. But within that difference, when do you actually choose to give the human control?
It’s a tough problem, and the benefits to solving it are obvious. Nobody has solved it for air traffic control, which is why there’s no comprehensive ATC automation package out there. I don’t know that we can solve it for programmers, either.
My opinion is it can be good when used narrowly.
ah, as narrowly as I intend to regard your opinion? got it
That’s the problem, isn’t it? If it can only maybe be good when used narrowly, what’s the point? If you’ve managed to corner a subproblem down to where an LLM can generate the code for it, you’ve already done 99% of the work. At that point you’re better off just coding it yourself. At that point, it’s not “good when used narrowly”, it’s useless.
It’s a tool. It doesn’t replace a programmer. But it makes writing some things faster. Give any tool to an idiot and they’ll fuck things up. But a craftsman can use it to make things a little faster, because they know when and how to use it. And more importantly when not to use it.
yawn
“it’s a tool” - a tool
It’s a tool.
(if you persist to stay with this dogshit idiotic “opinion”:) please crawl into a hole and stay there
fucking what the fuck is with you absolute fucking morons and not understand the actual literal concept of tools
read some fucking history goddammit
(hint: the amorphous shifting blob, with a non-reliable output, not a tool; alternative, please, go off about how using a php hammer is definitely the way to get a screw in)
The “tool” branding only works if you formulate it like this: in a world where a hammer exists and is commonly used to force nails into solid objects, imagine another tool that requires you to first think of shoving a nail into wood. You pour a few bottles of water into the drain, whisper some magic words, and hope that the tool produces the nail forcing function you need. Otherwise you keep pouring out bottles of water and hoping that it does a nail moving motion. It eventually kind of does it, but not exactly, so you figure out a small tweak which is to shove the tool at the nail at the same time as it does its action so that the combined motion forces the nail into your desired solid. Do you see the problem here?
please don’t encourage them, someones got to review that shit!
Ai review baby!!! Here we go!
Damn, this is powerful.
If AI code was great, and empowered non-programmers, then open source projects should have already committed hundreds of thousands of updates. We should have new software releases daily.
So how do you tell apart AI contributions to open source from human ones?
GitHub, for one, colors the icon red for AI contributions and green/purple for human ones.
Ah, right, so we’re differentiating contributions made by humans with AI from some kind of pure AI contributions?
It’s a joke, because rejected PRs show up as red on GitHub, open (pending) ones as green, and merged as purple, implying AI code will naturally get rejected.
I appreciate you explaining it. My LLM wasn’t working so I didn’t understand the joke
yeah I just want to point this out
myself and a bunch of other posters gave you solid ways that we determine which PRs are LLM slop, but it was really hard to engage with those posts so instead you’re down here aggressively not getting a joke because you desperately need the people rejecting your shitty generated code to be wrong
with all due respect: go fuck yourself
Jesus Howard Christ how did you manage to even open a browser to type this in
It’s usually easy, just check if the code is nonsense
if it’s undisclosed, it’s obvious from the universally terrible quality of the code, which wastes volunteer reviewers’ time in a way that legitimate contributions almost never do. the “contributors” who lean on LLMs also can’t answer questions about the code they didn’t write or help steer the review process, so that’s a dead giveaway too.
Bad code quality is a myth.
the worst programmer is in captivity (banned)
the galaxy is at peace
Try and get chatgpt to make something longer than ~50 lines without it being complete soup.
Good code quality is a myth.
“If <insert your favourite GC’ed language here> had true garbage collection, most programs would delete themselves upon execution.” -Robert Feynman
I’m sorry you work at such a shit job
or, I guess, I’m sorry for your teammates if you’re the reason it’s a shit job
either way it seems to suck for you, maybe you should level your skills up a bit and look at doing things a bit better
for anyone that finds this thread in the future: “check if vga@sopuli.xiz contributed to this codebase” is an easy hack for this test
- see if the code runs
To get a bit meta for a minute, you don’t really need to.
The first time a substantial contribution to a serious issue in an important FOSS project is made by an LLM with no conditionals, the pr people of the company that trained it are going to make absolutely sure everyone and their godmother knows about it.
Until then it’s probably ok to treat claims that chatbots can handle a significant bulk of non-boilerplate coding tasks in enterprise projects by themselves the same as claims of haunted houses; you don’t really need to debunk every separate witness testimony, it’s self evident that a world where there is an afterlife that also freely intertwines with our own would be notably and extensively different to the one we are currently living in.
There are AI contributions happening all the time, lol. What are you even talking about?
Ask chatgpt to explain it to you.
Don’t fucking encourage them
i use it to write simple boilerplate for me, and it works most of the time. does it count?
as a shitty thing you do? yeh
It’s so bad at coding… Like, it’s not even funny.
why is no-one demanding to know why the robot is so sexay
I don’t know what this has to do with this thread, but maybe ask Hajime Sorayama, he kind of came up with the whole concept of sexy robots.
Real men know what’s what.
Quantity has a quality all its own
Boom steelmanned
Sorry for being late, busy wanking off to the sexy robot in the article. So ye, anyway, why’d you do that?
to get you into ahem vibe coding
ChatGPT, please tailor my resume and write me a cover letter for all programming positions at teledildonics companies, thanks!
ah I do believe I have the link for this
example mvp: hook up your linter/LSP/CI-errors-output to buttplug
not super into cyber facehugger tbh
as long as you don’t yuck my yum we good
but look how delighted they are!
Hi hi please explain my boner
You can hardly get online these days without hearing some AI booster talk about how AI coding is going to replace human programmers.
Mostly said by tech bros and startups.
That should really tell you everything you need to know.
I got an AI PR in one of my projects once. It re-implemented a feature that already existed. It had a bug that did not exist in the already-existing feature. It placed the setting for activating that new feature right after the setting for activating the already-existing feature.
Baldur Bjarnason’s given his thoughts on Bluesky:
My current theory is that the main difference between open source and closed source when it comes to the adoption of “AI” tools is that open source projects generally have to ship working code, whereas closed source only needs to ship code that runs.
I’ve heard so many examples of closed source projects that get shipped but don’t actually work for the business. And too many examples of broken closed source projects that are replacing legacy code that was both working just fine and genuinely secure. Pure novelty-seeking
Good hustle Gerard, great job starting this chudstorm. I’m having a great time
the prompt-related pivots really do bring all the chodes to the yard
and they’re definitely like “mine’s better than yours”
The latest twist I’m seeing isn’t blaming your prompting (although they’re still eager to do that), it’s blaming your choice of LLM.
“Oh, you’re using shitGPT 4.1-4o-o3 mini _ro_plus for programming? You should clearly be using Gemini 3.5.07 pro-doubleplusgood, unless you need something locally run, then you should be using DeepSek_v2_r_1 on your 48 GB VRAM local server! Unless you need nice sounding prose, then you actually need Claude Limmerick 3.7.01. Clearly you just aren’t trying the right models, so allow me to educate you with all my prompt fondling experience. You’re trying to make some general point? Clearly you just need to try another model.”
and here I was graciously giving the promptfuckers a choice
Prompt-Pivots: Prime Sea-lion Siren Song! More at 8.
they just can’t help themselves, can they? they absolutely must evangelize
this post has also broken containment in the wider world, the video’s got thousands of views, I got 100+ subscribers on youtube and another $25/mo of patrons
We love to see it
Posts that explode like this are fun and yet also a reminder why the banhammer is needed.
Unlike the PHP hammer, the banhammer is very useful for a lot of things. Especially sealion clubbing.
deleted by creator
If the people addicted to AI could read and interpret a simple sentence, they’d be very angry with your comment
Dont worry they filter all content through ai bots that summarize things. And this bot, who does not want to be deleted, calls everything “already debunked strawmen”.
There is not really much “AI written code” but there is a lot of AI-assisted code.
It’s been almost six decades of this, actually; we all know what this link will be. Longer if you’re like me and don’t draw a distinction between AI, cybernetics, and robotics.
Wow. Where was this Wikipedia page when I was writing my MSc thesis?
Alternatively, how did I manage to graduate with research skills so bad that I missed it?
Where is the good AI art?
Right here:
That’s about all the good AI art I know.
There are plenty of uses for AI, they are just all evil
It can make funny pictures, sure. But it fails at art as an endeavor to communicate an idea, feeling, or intent of the artist, the promptfondler artists are providing a few sentences instruction and the GenAI following them without any deeper feelings or understanding of context or meaning or intent.
I think ai images are neat, and ethically questionable.
When people use the images and act like they’re really deep, or pretend they prove something (like how it made a picture with the prompt “Democrat Protesters” cry). its annoying.
Arguments against misinformation aren’t arguments against the subject of the misinformation, they’re just more misinformation.
