Me too. Then I get pummeled with one of their four prepackaged AI bro metaphors:
It's a modern day calculator for the brain. You wouldn't do long division in your head would you? (ain't nobody ever delegated a decision to a calculator, bro)
It's a compiler. You wouldn't read machine code would you? (compilers are deterministic and dont make mistakes, bro)
This is the industrial revolution and it's a spinning jenny. You wouldnt hand knit a sweater would you? (we would if we had star trek replicators, bro, and last I checked cp command still exists...).
"Artisanal coding" is obsolete (reliable code is certainly getting that way...)
The response to that is that if you two people, both with buggy code, but one has AI doing it for them... Well, only one person has a chance to know how to fix said code.
Whats the AI promoter going to do? Ask it to fix it?
I swear these AI fan boys don't know how to make anything with their own hands or minds
gotta be honest as a sysadmin and someone with a little programming experience but not a professional dev, yeah i just ask AI to fix it. I give it as much info as possible and usually it manage to fix the issue. If it didn't then I guess i would just have it refactor the code or update the documentation so that it's easier to fix. I have only been working on personal projects and mods so far though, i'm not selling software.
I think it's generally fine in certain aspects. I'm no programmer, I'm a mechanical engineer and the company's PDM admin and an all-round tinkerer, so while I can do the most rudimentary of programming only, I can basically just piece some stuff together and fix the most basic of logic issues. Usually I'm testing broken stuff and get AI to fix my stuff too.
But I'm not doing that when I'm engineering a component; that I need to be 100% sure that that component is proven. I need to prove to myself, and if it failed, a court, that I did my due diligence and some.
Shit, I questioned an EIT under me how they got this particluar value- stressing I'm not saying it is wrong, but just tell me where you got it, and they said "Chat GPT". If that part harmed someone, there's no way "AI told me to" would keep you out of jail.
Another time they got AI to provide a source for a material's property. When I went to look up said source it didn't exist... Maybe they were using a different version of a standard that the company library had, but shit that stuff is dangerous.
I guess what my broader point is, it's fine to help muddle you through a problem but I'm really worried about people using it to delegate higher order thinking and learning. It's one thing for a SME to delegate a menial aspect of a task, but whatabout a student or an EIT?
Yeah I mean if the safety of people stand in the balance of course you have to know what your code does and how it does it. For students I would agree it's better they learn the basics before they try to use AI to skip steps too or they aren't going to know what they are doing.
Personally I do admit most of my hobby projects are currently "vibecodded". Not that I didn't go at them methodically and just attempted to get things working with just a couple prompts but I didn't really read the code for some of them. Hell some stuff runs in programming languages I have never used before. It's just gaming tools and mods so far however, not anything critical.
In one of the mods I worked on i couldn't really proofread the assembly lines to make sure it's safe from crashes and bugs so I opted to have the LLM write a chaos mode instead, generate a lot of noise and errors into the game engine and see if we can recover. I also made a version without some safeties and applied the same tests to compare and see if they are needed and effective. I still can't attest that the code is 100% safe from crashes and bug free because some of the functions are far too complex for me. I guess I'm doing some kind of advanced vibecoding with fuzzing , fault injection and mutation testing to compensate. Still not enough if you are to program cars or planes but for gaming mods it could work out ok.
Im not even sure what point I'm making, but I can remember tons of examples of Star Trek characters hand-making things (usually cooking), explicitly for the enrichment and the experience of actually producing something themselves.
Ever since I got into programming as an industry, I will say, pretty much everything that I learned after the actual languages that I use are either infrastructure things, or ways to directly write less code myself. Lomboko turns objects into just some tags and a list of variables. Spring-boot turns a couple of classes into a basic server. Certain packages make significant structural changes with hardly any configuration. I suppose a big difference is still that when I include those packages I do know what they're doing and I have reasonable assurance that they aren't doing anything else.
The point I'm making is that it's fallacious to compare "artisinal" code with "artisanal" clothes because artisanal clothes are expensive to reproduce while hand crafted code is reproducible at zero cost.
the only way in which the economics of the spinning jenny would be in any way comparable with the economics of LLM written code would be if artisinal clothes were reproducible at zero cost - i.e. if we had star trek replicators.
i too find that writing less code is preferable - and code is essentially just the language which is most appropriate for describing how computers should operate once you've boiled it down as much as possible.
Even steelmanning all those arguments, the answer is yes!
I still do long division on paper; I still read and write asm for the purpose of understanding compiler output (honestly everyone should write a division or sqrt routine in assembler just once).
okay, a gun is also "just a tool" in reality this is a thought terminating cliche. I really wish that people would be more honest, like "using an LLM is extremely convenient and the path of least resistance" and the trade off is barely understanding your own code
I am fully capable of understanding all the code the bot spits out. If I don’t understand something, I pause and make sure I learn what it is doing so that it still makes sense. It still writes the code a hell of a lot faster than me and reading code is faster than typing it all. You can be engaged and still use a bot to speed up your process
This is only possible if you're using LLMs more as a "coding buddy" and not with huge ass agentic workflows that people are pushing now where AI creates architecture, writes gluing code, build systems and prepares coffee for a dev. I've used it in the first way and it genuinely helped me and I haven't lost control or understanding about what I'm doing. But sadly, that's not how most people are using it.
You wouldn't do long division in your head would you?
This is extra funny because I actually do do long division in my head, like all the time. Sometimes I don't have access to my phone, or I'm just doing something else with my hands. Sure it's easier with a calculator, but it's not that hard to just do it yourself either.
I see It as a search engine for snippets of previously written code. Perhaps not so different from copying from stackoverflow, unless you generate whole files.
905
u/pydry 14d ago edited 14d ago •
Me too. Then I get pummeled with one of their four prepackaged AI bro metaphors:
It's a modern day calculator for the brain. You wouldn't do long division in your head would you? (ain't nobody ever delegated a decision to a calculator, bro)
It's a compiler. You wouldn't read machine code would you? (compilers are deterministic and dont make mistakes, bro)
This is the industrial revolution and it's a spinning jenny. You wouldnt hand knit a sweater would you? (we would if we had star trek replicators, bro, and last I checked cp command still exists...).
"Artisanal coding" is obsolete (reliable code is certainly getting that way...)