I tried out the new copilot agent in VSCode and I spent more time undoing shit and hand holding than it would have taken to do it myself

Things like asking it to make a directory matching a filename, then move the file in and append _v1 would result in files named simply “_v1” (this was a user case where we need legacy logic and new logic simultaneously for a lift and shift).

When it was done I realized instead of moving the file it rewrote all the code in the file as well, adding several bugs.

Granted I didn’t check the diffs thoroughly, so I don’t know when that happened and I just reset my repo back a few cookies and redid the work in a couple minutes.

I will give it this. It’s been actually pretty helpful in me learning a new language because what I’ll do is that I’ll grab an example of something in working code that’s kind of what I want, I’ll say “This, but do X” then when the output doesn’t work, I study the differences between the chatGPT output & the example code to learn why it doesn’t work.

It’s a weird learning tool but it works for me.

I do enjoy the new assistant in JetBrains tools, the one that runs locally. It truly helps with the trite shit 90% of the time. Every time I tried code gen AI for larger parts, it’s been unusable.

I will be downvoted to oblivion, but hear me out: local llm’s isn’t that bad for simple scripts development. NDA? No problem, that a local instance. No coding experience? No problems either, QWQ can create and debug whole thing. Yeah, it’s “better” to do it yourself, learn code and everything. But I’m simple tech support. I have no clue how code works (that kinda a lie, but you got the idea), nor do I paid to for that. But I do need to sort 500 users pulled from database via corp endpoint, that what I paid for. And I have to decide if I want to do that manually, or via script that llm created in less than ~5 minutes. Cause at the end of the day, I will be paid same amount of money.

It even can create simple gui with Qt on top of that script, isn’t that just awesome?

six figures for a junior programmer, no less

1. Programmers invent AI
2. Executives use AI to replace programmers
3. Executives rehire programmers for thousands of dollars an hour to fix AI mistakes.

Meanwhile, idiot leadership jobs are the best suited to be taken over by AI.

So this. Just because it can’t do the job doesn’t mean they won’t actually replace you with it.

At the end of the day, they still want their shit to work. It does, however, make things very uncomfortable in the mean time.

And then you get hired back 6 months later for more pay after they realize how badly they fucked up.

This is exactly what rips at me, being a low-level artist right now. I know Ai will only be able to imitate, and it lacks a “human quality.” I don’t think it can “replace artists.”

…But bean-counters and executives, who have no grasp of art, marketing to people who also don’t understand art, can say it’s “good enough” and they can replace artists. And society seems to sway with “The Market”, which serves the desires of the wealthy.

I point to how graphic design departments have been replaced by interns with a Canva subscription.

I’m not going to give up art or coding, of course. I’m stubborn and driven by passion and now sheer spite. But it’s a constant, daily struggle, getting bombarded with propaganda and shit-takes that the disciplines you’ve been training your whole life to do “won’t be viable jobs.”

And yet the work that “isn’t going anywhere” is either back-breaking in adverse conditions (hey, power to people that dig that lol) and/or can’t afford you a one-bedroom.

Yep. Well said. They don’t need to create a better product. They need to create a new product that marketing can sell.

Bugs are for the users to test.

Only if you confine “ai” to mean an LLM.

Automation has replaced so many jobs already. More to come. Head in the sand won’t help anyone.

Fake review writers are hopefully retraining for in-person scams.

I’m a senior developer and I sometimes even look back thinking “how the fuck did I make that mistake yesterday”. I know I’m blind to my own mistakes, so I know testers may have some really valid feedback when I think I did everything right :)

even devs who’ve worked for 10+ years make dumb mistakes every so, so often.

there, I fixed it for you

AI is really good at creating images of Jesus that boomers say “amen” to.

False. Porn is sexy, and I can’t possibly be aroused by an image of a woman spreading her cheeks when her fingers are attached to her arse with a continuous piece of flesh, giving her skin the same topography as a teapot.

I’d suggest that if you think AI porn is anywhere near the real thing, that’s probably because you think porn is already slop in the same way that these AI bros think of code or creative writing or whatever other information-based thing you already know AI can’t do well.

Porn isn’t slop, people aren’t just interestingly-shaped slabs of meat. Sex is fundamentally about interpersonal connection. It might be one of the things that LLMs and robots are the worst at.

Everyone’s convinced their thing is special, but everyone else’s is a done deal.

I’m sad it makes me sound like such a pie-in-the-sky hippie when I say I think everyone’s contributions are not just special, but essential, and that’s why this whole mentality pisses me off so much, especially in the indie space.

• Artists are like “Finally, I can have Ai do my code! But good art takes a special touch.”
• Coders are like “Finally, I can have Ai do my art! But good code takes a special touch.”
• “Idea Guys”, who never learned anything but want to make a game because they like playing them, are leading the charge. They’re so excited to put everyone who makes those games out of a job because they think they’ll finally get to “achieve their dreams” with freaking prompts.

But for the people who do the work, why the heck are skilled artisans so ready to sell out their comrades? This “highly competitive” nonsense, and one-great-glorious-man myth has simply turned us on each other, when the people with pointless bullshit jobs are somehow still employed, simply serving to harass and bother the people getting things done.

Meanwhile the only task where current AI seems truly competitive is porn.

Well it sure has a heckuva data set from every possible angle and lighting setup, doesn’t it? 😬 Lol

They’re about 2% better at being a telephone IVR than the older ones, probably at 6x the power cost.

As someone trying to get a job in IT, I’m just going to ignore this comment :)

Not sure how you manage to draw conclusions by comparing two different fields.

Basically, the industry is not investing in new blood.

Yeah I think it makes sense out of an economic motivation. Often the code-quality of a junior is worse than that of an AI, and a senior has to review either, so they could just directly prompt the junior task into the AI.

The experience and skill to quickly grasp code and intention (and having a good initial idea where it should be going architecturally) is what is asked, which is obviously something that seniors are good at.

It’s kinda sad that our profession/art is slowly dying out because juniors are slowly replaced by AI.

As long as they keep the rainbow 🌈 socks on, I’ll eat them raw.

AI is great for learning a language, partly because it’s the right combination of useful and stupid.

It’s familiar with the language in a way that would take some serious time to attain, but it also hallucinates things that don’t exist and its solution to debugging something often ends up being literally just changing variable names or doing the same wrong things in different ways. But seeing what works and what doesn’t and catching it when it’s spiraling is a pretty good learning experience. You can get a project rolling while you’re learning how to implement what you want to do without spending weeks or months wondering how. It’s great for filling gaps and giving enough context to start understanding how a language works by sheer immersion, especially if the application of that language comes robust debugging built in.

I’ve been using it to help me learn and implement GDscript while I’m working on my game and it’s been incredibly helpful. Stuff that would have taken weeks of wading through YouTube tutorials and banging my head against complex concepts and math that I just don’t have I can instead work my way through in days or even hours.

Gradually I’m getting more and more familiar with how the language works by doing the thing, and when it screws up and doesn’t know what it’s talking about I can see that in Godot’s debugging and in the actual execution of the code in-game. For a solo indie dev who’s doing all the art, writing, and music myself, having a tool to help me move my codebase forward while I learn has been pretty great. It also means that I can put systems in place that are relevant to the project so my modding partner who doesn’t know GDScript yet has something relevant to look at and learn from by looking through the project’s git.

But if I knew nothing about programming? If I wasn’t learning enough to fix its mistakes and sometimes abandon it entirely to find solutions to things it can’t figure out? I’d be making no progress or completely changing the scope of the game to make it a cookie cutter copy of the tutorials the AI is trained on.

Vibe coding is complete nonsense. You still need a competent designer who’s at least in the process of learning the context of the language they’re working with or your output is going to be complete garbage. And if you’re working in a medium that doesn’t have robust built-in debugging? Good luck even identifying what it’s doing wrong if you’re not familiar with the language yourself. Hell, good luck getting it to make anything complex if you have multiple systems to consider and can’t bridge the gaps yourself.

Corpo idiots going all in on “vibe coding” are literally just going to do indies a favor by churning out unworkable garbage that anyone who puts the effort in will be able to easily shine in comparison to.

It’s a good teacher, though, and a decent assistant.

Relevant xkcd: https://xkcd.com/2597/

Probably just what their hiring algorithm spat out, or a market average, or something.

I have Visual Studio and decided to see what copilot could do. It added 7 new functions to my game with no calls or feedback to the player. When I tested what it did …it used 24 lines of code on a 150 line .CS to increase the difficulty of the game every time I take an action.

The context here is missing but just imagine someone going to Viridian forest and being met with level 70s in pokemon.

I find it useful for learning once you get the fundamentals down. I do it by trying to find all the bugs in the generated code, then see what could be cut out or restructured. It really gives more insight into how things actually work than just regular coding alone.

This isn’t as useful for coding actual programs though, since it would just take more time than necessary.

I asked ChatGPT to do a simple addition problem a while back and it gave me the wrong answer.

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It is not, not useful. Don’t throw a perfectly good hammer to the bin because some idiots say it can build a house on its own. Just like with hammers you need to make sure you don’t hit yourself in the thumb and use it for purpose

My favourite AI code test is code to point a heliostat mirror at (lattitude, longitude) at a target at (latitude, longitude, elevation)

After a few iterations to get the basics in place, “also create the function to select the mirror angle”

A basic fact that isn’t often described is that to reflect a ray you aim the mirror halfway between the source and the target. AI Congress up with the strangest non-working ways of aiming the mirror

Working with AI feels a lot like working with a newbie

Art doesn’t have to fulfill a practical purpose nor does it usually have security vulnerabilities. Not taking a position on the substance, but these are two major differences between the two.

Computer programs need lots of separate pieces to operate together in subtle ways or your program crashes. With art on the other hand I haven’t heard of anyone’s brain crashing when they looked at AI art with too many fingers.

It’s not so much that AI can’t do it, but the LLMs we have now certainly can’t.

I get the idea that it’s only temporary, but I’d much rather have a current gen AI paint a picture than attempt to program a guidance system or a heart monitor

AAA gamedev here. Had a guy scream at me on here on a different account for several days straight last week that “AI will eventually take your job, too, just wait and see” after I told the guy “all you have to do as an artist is make better quality work than AI slop can produce, which is easy for most professionals; AI is still useful in production pipelines to speed up efficiency, but it will never replace human intuition because it can’t actually reason and doesn’t have feelings, which is all art is and is what programming requires”.

Got told that I was a naive and bad person with survivorship bias and hubris who doesn’t understand the plight of artists and will eventually also be replaced, as if I’m not a technical artist myself and don’t work with plenty of other artistic and technical disciplines every single day. Like, okay, dude. I guess nearly a decade of senior-level experience means nothing. I swear, my team had tried and tossed away anywhere from 5 to 10 potential “cutting-edge AI production tools” before the general public had even heard about ChatGPT because most of them have such strict limited use-cases that they aren’t practically applicable to most things, but the guy was convinced that we had to boycott and destroy all AI tools because every artist was gonna be out of a job soon. Lol. Lmao, even.