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To be honest ChatGPT pretty much killed the fun of programming.
What?
Programming was like a challenge, you have a problem and you need to solve it. You look into the internet, stack overflow, test different chunks of codes, reading documentation, etc. nowadays is simply splitting one problem into pieces, and then copy pasting.
I like to use suggestions to feel superior when trash talking the generated code
I honestly stopped using it after a week
Places GPT-based “AI” next to flying cars
Flying cars exist, they’re just not cost effective. AFAICT there’s no GPT that is proficient at coding yet.
As far as I know, right now the main problem with flying cars is that they are nowhere near as idiot-proof as a normal car, and don’t really solve any transportation problem since most countries’ air regulations agencies would require them to exclusively take off and land in airports… Where you can usually find tons of planes that can go much further (and are much more cost effective, as you pointed out)
It’s a lot easier to access ChatGPT than it is to access a flying car
The more people using chatgpt to generate low quality code they don’t understand, the more job safety and greater salary I get.
Judging this article by it’s title (refuse to click). Calling BS. ChatGPT has been a game changer for me personally
Who are those guys they keep asking this question over and over ? And how are they not able to use such a simple tool to increase their productivity ?
It’s just fancier spell check and boilerplate generator
It introduced me to the basics of C# in a way that traditional googling at my previous level of knowledge would’ve made difficult.
I knew what I wanted to do and I didn’t know what was possible or how to ask without my question being closed as a duplicate with a link to an unhelpful post.
In that regard, it’s very helpful. If I had already known the language well enough, I can see it being less helpful.
What about just reading the documentation?
Even with amazing documentation, it can be hard to find the thing you’re looking for if you don’t know the right phrasing or terminology yet. It’s easily the most usable thing I’ve seen come out of “AI”, which makes sense. Using a Language Model to parse language is a very literal application.
The person I replied to was talking about learning the basics of a language… This isn’t about searching for something specific, this is about reading the very basic introduction to a language before trying to Google your way through it. Avoiding the basic documentation is always a bad idea. Replacing it with the LLMed version of the original documentation probably even more so.
This is what I’ve used it for and it’s helped me learn, especially because it makes mistakes and I have to get them to work. In my case it was with Terraform and Ansible.
Haha, yeah. It really loves to refactor my code to “fix” bracket list initialization (e.g.
List<string> stringList = [];) because it keeps not remembering that the syntax has been valid for a while.It’s newest favorite hangup is to incessantly suggest null checks without asking if it’s a nullable property that it’s checking first. I think I’m almost at the point where it’s becoming less useful to me.
Great for Coding 101 in a language I’m rusty with or otherwise unfamiliar.
Absolutely useless when it comes time to optimize a complex series of functions or upgrade to a new version of the .NET library. All the “AI” you need is typically baked into Intellisense or some equivalent anyway. We’ve had code-assist/advice features for over a decade and its always been mid. All that’s changed is the branding.
I learned bash thanks to AI!
For years, all I did was copy and paste bash commands. And I didn’t understand arguments, how to chain things, or how it connects.
You do realize that a very thorough manual is but a
man bashaway? Perhaps it’s not the most accessible source available, but it makes up for that in completeness.I believe accessibility is the part that makes LLMs helpful, when they are given an easy enough task to verify. Being able to ask a thing that resembles a human what you need instead of reading through possibly a textbook worth of documentation to figure out what is available and making it fit what you need is fairly powerful.
If it were actually capable of reasoning, I’d compare it to asking a linguist the origin of a word vs looking it up in a dictionary. I don’t think anyone disagrees that the dictionary would be more likely to be fully accurate, and also I personally would just prefer to ask the person who seemingly knows and, if I have reason to doubt, then go back and double-check.
Here’s the manpage for bash’s statistics from wordcounter.net:
Perhaps LLMs can be used to gain some working vocabulary in a subject you aren’t familiar with. I’d say anything more than that is a gamble, since there’s no guarantee that hallucinations have not taken place. Remember, that to spot incorrect info, you need to already be well acquainted with the matter at hand, which is at the polar opposite of just starting to learn the basics.
I do try to keep the “unknown unknowns” problem in mind when I use it, and I’ve been using it far less as I latched on to how OOP actually works and built up the lexicon and my own preferences. I try to only ask it for high-level stuff that I can then use to search the wider (hopefully more human) internet more traditionally with. I fully appreciate that it’s nothing more than a very incredibly fancy auto-completion engine and the basic task of auto-complete just so happens to appear intelligent as it gets better and more complex but continues to lack any form of real logical thoughts.
I’m fine with searching stack exchange. It’s much more useful. More info, more options, more understanding.
I partly disagree, complex algorithms are indeed a no, but for learning a new language it is awesome.
Currently learning Rust and although it cannot solve everything, it does guide you with suggestions and usable code fragments.
Highly recommended.
Is there anything it provided you so far that was better than the guidance from the Rust compiler errors themselves? Every error ends with “run this command for a tutorial on why this error happened and how to fix it” type of info. A lot of times the error will directly tell you how to fix it too.
Currently learning Rust and although it cannot solve everything, it does guide you with suggestions and usable code fragments.
as does the compiler and the rust book
I truly don’t understand the tendency of people to hate these kinds of tools. Honestly seems like an ego thing to me.
Typical lack of nuance on the Internet, sadly. Everything has to be Bad or Good. Black or White. AI is either The best thing ever™ or The worst thing ever™. No room for anything in between. Considering negative news generates more clicks, you can see why the media tend to take the latter approach.
I also think much of the hate is just people jumping on the AI = bad band-wagon. Does it have issues? Absolutely. Is it perfect? Far from it. But the constant negativity has gotten tired. There’s a lot of fascinating discussion to be had around AI, especially in the art world, but God forbid you suggest it’s anything but responsible for the total collapse of civilisation as we know it…
If it didn’t significantly contribute to the cooking of all lifeforms on planet Earth, most of us would not mind. We would still deride it because of its untrustworthiness. However, it’s not just useless: it’s also harmful. That’s the core of the beef I (and a lot of other folks) have against the tech.
Oh for sure. How we regulate AI (including how we power it) is really important, definitely.
cooking of all lifeforms on planet Earth
the core of the beef
yum lifeform beef stew
I think you nailed it with everything you just said.
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Like I told another person ITT, hiring terrible devs isn’t something you can blame on software.
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I would argue that it’s obvious if someone doesn’t know how to use a tool to do their job, they aren’t great at their job to begin with.
Your argument is to blame the tool and excuse the person who is awful with the tool.
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Using a tool to speed up your work is not lazy. Using a tool stupidly is stupid. Anyone who thinks these tools are meant to replace humans using logic is misunderstanding them entirely.
You remind me of some of my coworkers who would rather do the same mind numbing task for hours every day rather than write a script that handles it. I judge them for thinking working smarter is “lazy” and I think it’s a fair judgement. I see them as the lazy ones. They’d rather not think more deeply about the scripting aspect because it’s hard. They rather zone out and mindlessly click, copy/paste, etc. I’d rather analyze and break down the problem so I can solve it once and then move onto something more interesting to solve.
They rather zone out and mindlessly click, copy/paste, etc. I’d rather analyze and break down the problem so I can solve it once and then move onto something more interesting to solve.
From what I’ve seen of AI code in my time using it, it often is an advanced form of copying and pasting. It frequently takes problems that could be better solved more efficiently with fewer lines of code or by generalizing the problem and does the (IMO evil) work of making the solution that used to require the most drudgery easy.
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Some tools deserve blame. In the case of this, you’re supposed to use it to automate away certain things but that automation isn’t really reliable. If it has to be babysat to the extent that I certainly would argue that it does, then it deserves some blame for being a crappy tool.
If, for instance, getter and setter generating or refactor tools in IDEs routinely screwed up in the same ways, people would say that the tools were broken and that people shouldn’t use them. I don’t get how this is different just because of “AI”.
Okay, so if the tool seems counterproductive for you, it’s very assuming to generalize that and assume it’s the same for everyone else too. I definitely do not have that experience.
Having to deal with pull requests defecated by “developers” who blindly copy code from chatgpt is a particularly annoying and depressing waste of time.
At least back when they blindly copied code from stack overflow they had to read through the answers and comments and try to figure out which one fit their use case better and why, and maybe learn something… now they just assume the LLM is right (despite the fact that they asked the wrong question and even if they had asked the right one it’d’ve given the wrong answer) and call it a day; no brain activity or learning whatsoever.
That is not a problem with the ai software, that’s a problem with hiring morons who have zero experience.
No. LLMs are very good at scamming people into believing they’re giving correct answers. It’s practically the only thing they’re any good at.
Don’t blame the victims, blame the scammers selling LLMs as anything other than fancy but useless toys.
Did you get scammed by the LLM? If not, what’s the difference between you and the dev you mentioned?
I was lucky enough to not have access to LLMs when I was learning to code.
Plus, over the years I’ve developed a good thick protective shell (or callus) of cynicism, spite, distrust, and absolute seething hatred towards anything involving computers, which younger developers yet lack.
Sorry, you misunderstood my comment, which was very badly worded.
I meant to imply that you, an experienced developer, didn’t get “scammed” by the LLM, and that the difference between you and the dev you mentioned is that you know how to program.
I was trying to make the point that the issue is not the LLM but the developer using it.
And I’m saying that I could have been that developer if I were twenty years younger.
They’re not bad developers, they just haven’t yet been hurt enough to develop protective mechanisms against scams like these.
They are not the problem. The scammers selling the LLM’s as something they’re not are.
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Its really weird.
I want to believe people arent this dumb but i also dont want to be crazy for suggesting such nonsensical sentiment is manufactured. Such is life in the disinformation age.
Like what are we going to do, tell all Countries and fraudsters to stop using ai because it turns out its too much of a hassle?
We can’t do that, nobody’s saying we can. But this is an important reminder that the tech savior bros aren’t very different from the oil execs.
And constant activism might hopefully achieve the goal of pushing the tech out of the mainstream, with its friend crypto, along other things not to be taken seriously anymore like flying cars and the Hyperloop.
You are speaking for everyone so right away i dont see this as an actual conversion, but a decree of fact by someone i know nothing about.
What are you saying is an important reminder? This article?
By constant activism, do you mean anything that occurs outside of lemmy comments?
Why would we not take LLMs seriously?
I’m talking about people criticizing LLMs. I’m not a politician. But I’ve seen a few debates about LLMs on this platform, enough to know about the common complaints against ShitGPT. I’ve never seen anyone on this platform seriously arguing for a ban. We all know it’s stupid and that it will be ineffective, just like crackdowns on VPNs in authoritarian countries.
The reminder is the tech itself. It’s yet another tech pushed by techbros to save the world that fails to deliver and is costing the rest of the planet dearly in the form of ludicrous energy consumption.
And by activism, I mean stuff happening on Lemmy as well as outside (coworkers, friends, technical people at conferences/meetups). Like it or not, the consensus among techies in my big canadian city is that, while the tech sure is interesting, it’s regarded with a lot of mistrust.
You can take LLMs seriously if you’d like. But the proofs that the tech is unsound for software engineering keep piling up. I’m fine with your skepticism. But I think the future will look bleaker and bleaker as times goes by. Not a week goes by without its lot of AI fuckups being reported in the press. This article is one of many examples.
Theres no particular fuck up mentioned by this article.
The company that conducted the study which this article speculates on said these tools are getting rapidly better and that they arent suggesting to ban ai development assistants.
Also as quoted in the article, the use of these coding assistance is a process in and of itself. If you arent using ai carefully and iteratively then you wont get good results with current models. How we interact with models is as important as the model’s capability. The article quotes that if models are used well, a coder can be faster by 2x or 3x. Not sure about that personally… seems optimistic depending on whats being developed.
It seems like a good discussion with no obvious conclusion given the infancy of the tech. Yet the article headline and accompanying image suggest its wreaking havoc.
Reduction of complexity in this topic serves nobody. We should have the patience and impartiality to watch it develop and form opinions independently from commeter and headline sentiment. Groupthink has been paricularly dumb on this topic from what ive seen.
Nobody talked about banning them, once again. I don’t want to do that. I want it to leave the mainstream, for environmental reasons first and foremost.
The fuckup is, IDK, the false impression of productivity, and the 41% more bugs? That seems like a huge deal to me, even though I’d like to see this study being reproduced to draw real conclusions.
This, with strawberrries, Air Canada’s chatbots, the 3 Miles Island stuff, the delaying of Google’s carbon neutrality efforts, the cursed Google results telling you to add glue to your pizza, the distrust of the general public about anything with an AI label on it, to mention just a few examples… It’s starting to become a lot.
Even if you omit the ethical aspects of cooking the planet for a toy, the technology is wildly unsound. You seem to think it can get better, and I can respect that. But I’m very skeptical, and there’s a lot of people with the same opinion, even in tech.
Also, when a tool increases your productivity but your salary and paid time off don’t increase, it’s a tool that only benefits the overlords and as such deserves to be hated.
Oh, so do you use a 13 year old PC because a newer one increases your productivity without increasing your salary and paid time off?
Personally… I do
I could request a new one, but why? This one works, it’s just slow as all hell.
I mean, you’re clearly using them because they still work, not because of a hatred for increasing productivity for the overlords. Your choice was based on reasonable logic, unlike the other guy.
I could request a new one, but why?
Gives excellent argument for requesting a new one:
slow as all hell.
I’m paid by the hour, I don’t care
I use a 13 year old PC because a newer one will be infected with Windows 11. (The company refuses to migrate to Linux because some of the software they use isn’t compatible.)
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Carbon footprint. Techbro arrogance. Not sure what’s hard to understand about it.
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Of course you know me better than myself.
I guess you wanted an answer but decided upfront you weren’t gonna like it no matter what? Not much I can do about that.
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Wow, this was somehow considered offensive enough for a mod to remove, but we’re also allowing obvious paid trolls on the platform. Lemmy is not what we want it to be.
Whether or not I’ve used Copilot is entirely irrelevant to the points I was making. Please remain on topic.
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No shit. Senior devs have been saying this the whole time. AI, in its current form, for developers, is like handing a spatula to a gourmet chef. Yes it is useful to an extremely small degree, but that’s it…for now.
A convoluted spatula that sometimes accidentally cuts what your cooking im half instead of flipping it and consumes as much power as the entirety of Japan.
It’s when you only have a pot and your fingers that a spatula is awesome. I could never bother finish learning C and its awkward syntax. Even though I know how to code in some other language, I just couldn’t write much C at all and it was painful and slow. And too much time passed between attempts that I forgot most of it in between. Now I can easily make simple C apps, I just explain the underlying logic, with example of how I would do it in my preferred language and piece by piece it quickly comes together and I don’t have to remember if the for loop needs brackets of parenthesis or brackets nor if the line terminator is colon or semi colon.
The problem is that you’re still not learning, then. Maybe that’s your goal, and if so, no worries, but AI is currently a hammer that everyone seems to be falling over themselves finding nails for.
All I can do is sigh and shake my head. This bubble will burst, and AI will still take decades to get to the point people think it is already at.
I’m a penetration tester and it increases my productivity a lot
Penetration tester, huh? Sounds like a fun and reproductive job.
But it can be very HARD sometimes
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so it’s a vector of attack?
I mainly use AI for learning new things. It’s amazing at trivial tasks.
Generative AI is great for loads of programming tasks like helping create regular expressions or syntax conversions between languages. The main issue I’ve seen in codebases that rely heavily on generative AI is that the “solutions” often fix today’s bug while making future debugging more difficult. Generative AI makes it easy to go fast in the wrong direction. Used right it’s a useful tool.
I use it as second last resort, and in those times, it did worked out. I had to test, verify, and make changes. Even so, I avoid using them.
