• MystikIncarnate@lemmy.ca
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    1 day ago

    A person who hasn’t debugged any code thinks programmers are done for because of “AI”.

    Oh no. Anyways.

  • samus12345@lemm.ee
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    1 day ago

    As an end user with little knowledge about programming, I’ve seen how hard it is for programmers to get things working well many times over the years. AI as a time saver for certain simple tasks, sure, but no way in hell they’ll be replacing humans in my lifetime.

  • Rose@slrpnk.net
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    1 day ago

    It’s even funnier because the guy is mocking DHH. You know, the creator of Ruby on Rails. Which 37signals obviously uses.

    I know from experience that a) Rails is a very junior developer friendly framework, yet incredibly powerful, and b) all Rails apps are colossal machines with a lot of moving parts. So when the scared juniors look at the apps for the first time, the senior Rails devs are like “Eh, don’t worry about it, most of the complex stuff is happening on the background, the only way to break it if you genuinely have no idea what you’re doing and screw things up on purpose.” Which leads to point c) using AI coding with Rails codebases is usually like pulling open the side door of this gargantuan machine and dropping in a sack of wrenches in the gears.

  • Phoenixz@lemmy.ca
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    1 day ago

    The day that AI can program perfectly is the day it can improve the itself perfectly and it’s the day that we’ll all be fucked.

    I personally vote for some sort of direct brain interface (no Elmo, you’re not allowed to play) that DOES allow direct recall of queries but does NOT allow ads ffs) that allows us to grow with AI in intelligence. If you can’t beat em (we can’t), join em.

    • borth@sh.itjust.works
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      1 day ago

      I highly doubt some of these rich fucks would pass up an opportunity to put ads straight into people’s brains.

  • maplebar@lemmy.world
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    2 days ago

    AI isn’t ready to replace just about anybody’s job, and probably never will be technically, economically or legally viable.

    That said, the c-suit class are certainly going to try. Not only do they dream of optimizing all human workers out of every workforce, they also desperately need to recoup as much of the sunk cost that they’ve collectively dumped into the technology.

    Take OpenAI for example, they lost something like $5,000,000,000 last year and are probably going to lose even more this year. Their entire business plan relies on at least selling people on the idea that AI will be able to replace human workers. The minute people realize that OpenAI isn’t going to conquer the world, and instead end up as just one of many players in the slop space, the entire bottom will fall out of the company and the AI bubble will burst.

  • arc@lemm.ee
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    2 days ago

    AI is certainly a very handy tool and has helped me out a lot but anybody who thinks “vibe programming” (i.e. programming from ignorance) is a good idea or will save money is woefully misinformed. Hire good programmers, let them use AI if they like, but trust the programmer’s judgement over some AI.

    That’s because you NEED that experience to notice the AI is outputting garbage. Otherwise it looks superficially okay but the code is terrible, or fragile, or not even doing what you asked it properly. e.g. if I asked Gemini to generate a web server with Jetty it might output something correct or an unholy mess of Jetty 8, 9, 10, 11, 12 with annotations and/or programmatic styles, or the correct / incorrect pom dependencies.

    • millie@slrpnk.net
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      1 day ago

      AI is great for learning a language, partly because it’s the right combination of useful and stupid.

      It’s familiar with the language in a way that would take some serious time to attain, but it also hallucinates things that don’t exist and its solution to debugging something often ends up being literally just changing variable names or doing the same wrong things in different ways. But seeing what works and what doesn’t and catching it when it’s spiraling is a pretty good learning experience. You can get a project rolling while you’re learning how to implement what you want to do without spending weeks or months wondering how. It’s great for filling gaps and giving enough context to start understanding how a language works by sheer immersion, especially if the application of that language comes robust debugging built in.

      I’ve been using it to help me learn and implement GDscript while I’m working on my game and it’s been incredibly helpful. Stuff that would have taken weeks of wading through YouTube tutorials and banging my head against complex concepts and math that I just don’t have I can instead work my way through in days or even hours.

      Gradually I’m getting more and more familiar with how the language works by doing the thing, and when it screws up and doesn’t know what it’s talking about I can see that in Godot’s debugging and in the actual execution of the code in-game. For a solo indie dev who’s doing all the art, writing, and music myself, having a tool to help me move my codebase forward while I learn has been pretty great. It also means that I can put systems in place that are relevant to the project so my modding partner who doesn’t know GDScript yet has something relevant to look at and learn from by looking through the project’s git.

      But if I knew nothing about programming? If I wasn’t learning enough to fix its mistakes and sometimes abandon it entirely to find solutions to things it can’t figure out? I’d be making no progress or completely changing the scope of the game to make it a cookie cutter copy of the tutorials the AI is trained on.

      Vibe coding is complete nonsense. You still need a competent designer who’s at least in the process of learning the context of the language they’re working with or your output is going to be complete garbage. And if you’re working in a medium that doesn’t have robust built-in debugging? Good luck even identifying what it’s doing wrong if you’re not familiar with the language yourself. Hell, good luck getting it to make anything complex if you have multiple systems to consider and can’t bridge the gaps yourself.

      Corpo idiots going all in on “vibe coding” are literally just going to do indies a favor by churning out unworkable garbage that anyone who puts the effort in will be able to easily shine in comparison to.

      It’s a good teacher, though, and a decent assistant.

  • digitalnuisance@infosec.pub
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    2 days ago

    I had a dude screaming pretty much the same thing at me yesterday on here (on a different account), despite the fact that I’m senior-level, near the top of my field and that all the objective data as well as anecdotal reports from tons of other people says otherwise. Like, okay buddy, sure. People seem to just like fighting things online to feel better about themselves, even if the thing they’re fighting doesn’t really exist.

    • Event_Horizon@lemmy.world
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      2 days ago

      I’m a senior BA working on a project to replace some outdated software with a new booking management and payment system. One of our minor stakeholders is an overly eager tech bro who insists on bringing up AI in every meeting, he’s gone as far as writing up and sending proposals to myself and project leads.

      We all just roll our eyes when a new email arrives. Especially when there’s almost no significant detail in these proposals, it’s all conjecture based of what he’s read online…on tech bro websites.

      Oh and the best part, this guy has no experience in system development or design or anything AI related. He doesn’t even work in IT. But he researchs AI in his spare time and uses it as a side hustle…

  • jmaris@europe.pub
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    2 days ago

    People who think AI will replace X job either don’t understand X job or don’t understand AI.

    • boonhet@lemm.ee
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      2 days ago

      Yeah, particularly with CEOs. People don’t understand that in an established company (not a young startup), the primary role of the CEO is to take blame for unpopular decisions and resign or be fired so it would seem like the company is changing course.

      • trolololol@lemmy.world
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        2 days ago

        Ha I never thought of CEOs this way but now so many things make sense. Especially things being exactly as they were when CEOs change, but with a mountain of meaningless changes that never do any good.

        Not that I ever thought they know what they were doing, but now I get what they’re used for.

        • boonhet@lemm.ee
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          2 days ago

          Yup. It’s kinda my conspiracy theory, but also, it’s really not, it’s like a public secret at this point.

          They don’t get these huuuuge golden parachutes for nothing. They get it precisely because they need to take the fall at some point, and if the fall is big enough, they might not even get a new job at a similar level.

          It’s a disgusting system, but I’m not trying to absolve CEOs of anything here. They very much know what they’re getting into when they sign contracts for tens of millions per year in total comp, with generous exit packages. I’m just saying that’s why companies won’t replace them with AI, or even just cheaper proven leaders, any time soon, despite the fact that no CEO is worth the amount of money they make, in actual productivity.

    • dream_weasel@sh.itjust.works
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      2 days ago

      For basically everyone at least 9 in 10 people you know are… bless their hearts…not winning a nobel prize any time soon.

      My wife works a people-facing job, and I could never do it. Most people don’t understand most things. That’s not to say most people don’t know anything, but there are not a lot of polymaths out and about.

  • needanke@feddit.org
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    2 days ago

    Tinfoil hat time:

    That Ace account is just an alt of the original guy and rage baiting to give his posting more reach.

  • gravitas_deficiency@sh.itjust.works
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    2 days ago

    Lmfao I love these threads. “I haven’t built anything myself with the thing I’m claiming makes you obsolete but trust me it makes you obsolete”

      • starman2112@sh.itjust.works
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        3 days ago

        I almost added that, but I’ll be real, I have no clue what a junior programmer is lmao

        For all I know it’s the equivalent to a journeyman or something

        • artiface@lemm.ee
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          3 days ago

          Junior programmer is who trains the interns and manages the actual work the seniors take credit for.

          • hperrin@lemmy.ca
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            3 days ago

            This is not true. A junior programmer takes the systems that are designed by the senior and staff level engineers and writes the code for them. If you think the code is the work, then you’re mistaken. Writing code is the easy part. Designing systems is the part that takes decades to master.

            That’s why when Elon Musk was spewing nonsense about Twitter’s tech stack, I knew he was a moron. He was speaking like a junior programmer who had just been put in charge of the company.

          • slappypantsgo@lemm.ee
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            3 days ago

            I was gonna say, if this person is making $145k, they are not a “junior” in any realistic sense of the term. It would be nice if computer programming and software development became a legitimate profession.

  • Aggravationstation@feddit.uk
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    2 days ago

    AI isn’t ready to replace programmers, engineers or IT admins yet. But let’s be honest if some project manager or CTO somewhere hasn’t already done it they’re at least planning it.

    Then eventually to save themselves or out of sheer ignorance they’ll blame the chaos that results on the few remaining people who know what they’re doing because they won’t be able to admit or understand the fact that the bold decision they took to “embrace” AI and increase the company’s bottom line which everyone else in their management bubble believes in has completely mangled whatever system their company builds or uses. More useful people will get fired and more actual work will get shifted to AI. But because that’ll still make the number go up the management types will look even better and the spread of AI will carry on. Eventually all systems will become an unwieldy mess nobody can even hope to repair.

    This is just IT, I’m pretty sure most other industries will eventually suffer the same fate. Global supply chains will collapse and we’ll all get sent back to the dark ages.

    TL,DR: The real problem with AI isn’t that it’ll become too powerful and choose to kill us, but that corporate morons will overestimate how powerful it already is and that will cause our eventual downfall.

    • Terrasque@infosec.pub
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      2 days ago

      AI isn’t ready to replace programmers, engineers or IT admins yet.

      On the other hand… it’s been about 2.5 years since chatgpt came out, and it’s gone from you being lucky it could write a few python lines without errors to being able to one shot a mobile phone level complexity game, even with self hosted models.

      Who knows where it’ll be in a few years

  • Lucidlethargy@sh.itjust.works
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    3 days ago

    AI is fucking so useless when it comes to programming right now.

    They can’t even fucking do math. Go make an AI do math right now, go see how it goes lol. Make it a, real world problem and give it lots of variables.

    • SynopsisTantilize@lemm.ee
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      2 days ago

      I have Visual Studio and decided to see what copilot could do. It added 7 new functions to my game with no calls or feedback to the player. When I tested what it did …it used 24 lines of code on a 150 line .CS to increase the difficulty of the game every time I take an action.

      The context here is missing but just imagine someone going to Viridian forest and being met with level 70s in pokemon.

    • iAvicenna@lemmy.world
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      2 days ago

      It is not, not useful. Don’t throw a perfectly good hammer to the bin because some idiots say it can build a house on its own. Just like with hammers you need to make sure you don’t hit yourself in the thumb and use it for purpose

    • psud@aussie.zone
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      3 days ago

      My favourite AI code test is code to point a heliostat mirror at (lattitude, longitude) at a target at (latitude, longitude, elevation)

      After a few iterations to get the basics in place, “also create the function to select the mirror angle”

      A basic fact that isn’t often described is that to reflect a ray you aim the mirror halfway between the source and the target. AI Congress up with the strangest non-working ways of aiming the mirror

      Working with AI feels a lot like working with a newbie

    • cyberfae@lemmy.world
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      2 days ago

      I find it useful for learning once you get the fundamentals down. I do it by trying to find all the bugs in the generated code, then see what could be cut out or restructured. It really gives more insight into how things actually work than just regular coding alone.

      This isn’t as useful for coding actual programs though, since it would just take more time than necessary.

      • zenpocalypse@lemm.ee
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        2 days ago

        So true, it’s an amazing tool for learning. I’ve never been able to learn new frameworks so fast.

        AI works very well as a consultant, but if you let it write the code, you’ll spend more time debugging because the errors it makes are often subtle and not the types of errors humans make.

      • Asetru@feddit.org
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        2 days ago

        Me, a person with no coding skills, had the ai write code and I can’t see if there’s anything wrong with the results. So the results must be good.

        • andxz@lemmy.world
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          It’s not like I don’t have a basic calculator to test the output, is it?

          I might’ve also understated my python a little bit, as in I understand what the code does. Obviously you could break it, that wasn’t the point. I was more thinking that throwing math problems at what is essentially a language interpreter isn’t the right way to go about things. I don’t know shit though. I guess we’ll see.

          • Asetru@feddit.org
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            2 days ago

            I have no idea what you’re trying to say here.

            If you want to learn how to code, writing a calculator with a ui isn’t a bad idea. But then you should code it yourself because otherwise you won’t learn much.

            If you want to try and see if llms can write code that executes, then fine, you succeeded. I absolutely fail to see what you gain from that experiment though.

            • andxz@lemmy.world
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              1 day ago

              I’ve done a few courses and learned the basics, but it wasn’t until I started using some assistance that I got a deeper understanding of Python in general.

              I came in very late, obviously, but I’ve still tried to learn coding on and off by myself since the late 90’s, although I ended up on another career path altogether. I’m in my 40’s and I’ve finally at least made some decent executable code.

              Made myself a scalable clock since my eyes are failing, for example. It was a success and I use it daily. Would never have figured that out without some AI help. Still had to do some registry tweaking and shit since I’m stuck on windows on my workstation but it works wonderfully. Just a little widget but it improved my life greatly.

              I’ve also cobbled together a workable alternative to notepad that I use as a diary of sorts. Never would’ve figured that out alone either.

              As I see it at least whatever AI assistant you use at least doesn’t give one the gatekeeping or abuse one gets if they ask a relatively simple question somewhere else. Kinda like this, I guess.

              TL;DR: In some situations our current 'AI’s can be helpful.

        • frezik@midwest.social
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          2 days ago

          That might be the underlying problem. Software project management around small projects is easy. Anything that has a basic text editor and a Python interpreter will do. We have all these fancy tools because shit gets complicated. Hell, I don’t even like writing 100 lines without git.

          A bunch of non-programmers make a few basic apps with ChatGPT and think we’re all cooked.

        • andxz@lemmy.world
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          2 days ago

          No doubt, I was merely suggesting that throwing math problems might not have been the intended use for what is essentially a language interpreter, obviously depending on the in question.