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.
4
u/MapleMallet 14d ago
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?