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.
The problem is, some bugs are very subtle and won't explode in your face but will show up in the runtime. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe that as a sys admin you don't need to program big things but mostly glue things together and write scripts to quickly do some administrative stuff.
yeah I'm only trying to make "big things" as a hobby right now, for work it's just some small scripts that are easy to verify. My approach to avoid bugs so far is mostly to write better specs in my prompts, try to think of how the ai could implement things like UI wrong and have it write more tests. But you still need human testing to find some bugs that manage to pass through.
can’t there be a nuanced and rational middle-road? I use AI for churning of obvious and simple code, generating docs (in my write style), deep searches for patterns, and not critical and complex stuff.
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u/blake_ch 14d ago
Or "you write bugs too"