Fuck AI code generation. I gave it a fair shot and it's a waste of time that actively makes my job harder.
this post was submitted on 17 Dec 2024
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Programming
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I use AI as a rubber duck or to get general ideas all the time. For example, I wanted to make a "hand" of cards splayed out using css, so I asked AI and it gave me a nice starting point I could tweak without having to fuss with figuring the formula to tilt which element at which angle. It's also quite good at guessing what boring boilerplate code I need to type next.
Another example: I was trying to figure out an architecture that adhered to OOP/SOLID principles for a specific task, and asked for an example implementation. I was able to test and think through a ton of permutations before landing on what I was taking to prod.
I think it's a nice tool for the toolbelt, but it isn't replacing a programmer anytime soon. You have to know what to ask and be able to intelligently analyze what it spits out to you
My employer hired a consultancy company to implement some terraform and ansible code for some cloud infra and we got in return hundreds of machine generated code lines that do not work and now are suing the consultant.
Worst part, is that the guy who reviewed this ended up writing everything himself
They excused it as "I'm overworked" which... fair enough, but that doesn't excuse this. I blame Microsoft, not this fella.
AI is good for the messy inbox problem, but it ain't perfect.
He's right that it's probably harder for AI to understand. But wrong in every other way possible. Human understanding should trump AI, at least while they're as unreliable as they currently are.
Maybe one day AI will know how to not bullshit, and everyone will use it, and then we'll start writing documentation specifically for AI. But that's a long way off.
Having AI not bullshiting will require an entirely different set of algorithms than LLM, or ML in general. ML by design aproximates answers, and you don't use it for anything that's deterministic and has a correct answer. So, in that rwgard, we're basically at square 0.
You can keep on slapping a bunch of checks on top of random text prediction it gives you, but if you have a way of checking if something is really true for every case imaginable, then you can probably just use that to instead generate the reply, and it can't be something that's also ML/random.
If it can't understand human text then is it really worth using? Like isn't that the minimum standard here, to get context and understand from text?
I don't have any game in this but this seems backwards and stupid... Especially since all AI currently is fancy pattern matching basically
He admitted himself that it might not be harder for AI to understand.
The more apt headline is that Microsoft doesn't pay enough people to review their documentation PRs. The org has 572 members but nearly every PR to this repo is processed by this one guy.
Progressing languages aren't about computers. They're about humans.
Even the dudes responses in those comments seem written by an AI.