Big brain tech dude got yet another clueless take over at HackerNews etc? Here's the place to vent. Orange site, VC foolishness, all welcome.
This is not debate club. Unless it’s amusing debate.
For actually-good tech, you want our NotAwfulTech community
Where is the good AI written code? Where is the good AI written writing? Where is the good AI art?
None of it exists because Generative Transformers are not AI, and they are not suited to these tasks. It has been almost a fucking decade of this wave of nonsense. The credulity people have for this garbage makes my eyes bleed.
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".
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 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".
When they say “art” they mean “metaphorical lead paint” and when they say “accessible” they mean “insidiously inserted into your neural pathways”
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.
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.
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
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