9 ms·

I am skeptical. Well before AI co-pilots something happened to the good old admins--they started to disappear only to be replaced by "AWS devops" (their job ti

I am skeptical. Well before AI co-pilots something happened to the good old admins--they started to disappear only to be replaced by "AWS devops" (their job titles) who have never wired a network using routers, switches, and cables. I noticed that they started lacking basic networking knowledge and couldn't set up networking inside AWS. They just didn't know what a gateway, NAT, or subnet is. Similar things are happening with AI co-pilots. We have an increasing number of people who "write code", but the number of people who can understand and review code is not increasing. There is also a problem of injecting ethics and politics into those tools, which can produce silly results. I asked Bard to write me a Python function to turn the US Constitution into a palindrome. Bard refused and gave ma a lecture on how the US Constitution is too important to be played with in such trivial fashion. I then asked it to produce code that turns the US national anthem into a palindrome, it refused again. So I asked it do the same but with the Russian national anthem and it spat out code without telling me off. I then asked it to generate code for simple tasks and it did an OK job, except the formatting and the fonts used were different every time, because it just lifted code from different webpages and recombined it like a massively hungover student waking up to realise he's supposed to hand in the assignment in one hour.

ben_w 2y ago
Sounds about right. I'm very impressed with the best models — but, because I remember how awful NLP used to be, "very impressed" still means I rate the best as being around the level of an intern/work placement student most of the time, and even at their best still only a junior. It's great, if you're OK with that. I've used GPT-3.5 to make my own personal pay-as-you-go web interface for any LLM that's API-compatible with OpenAI despite not being a professional Web Developer. It's fairly fragile because it's doing stupid things to get the "good enough" result. Bu that's OK, because it's for me, I'm not selling it. (As for the lesser models… I asked one for a single page web app version of Tetris; it started off lazy, then suddenly switched from writing a game in JavaScript into writing a machine learning script in python!)
jiggawatts 2y ago
> They just didn't know what a gateway, NAT, or subnet is. If you ask me, they shouldn't have to, in the same way that you probably don't know how to diagnose a coax cable problem. The major public clouds all have completely software-defined networks (SDNs), and concepts like subnets are basically emulated for the sake of legacy systems. Why would we want subnets, like... at all? Why can't all systems just have an IP address and use point-to-point communications? That's literally what the underlying SDN does with the packets anyway! The subnets and routes you see don't map 1:1 to the underlying network. The packets are stuffed inside a VXLAN packet and routed between random hypervisors scattered randomly across multiple buildings. Just give up the pretence, give everything an system-assigned public-routable IPv6 address and be done with it. Better yet, auto-register everything in a private DNS zone and auto-generate internal use SSL certs too. The amount of wiring we do manually is just insane, just so that Azure and Amazon can help greybeards pretend that they're operating a Cisco router and need to stand in line to file the paperwork required to get an SSL certificate.
- bandrami 2y ago
  > you probably don't know how to diagnose a coax cable problem No, that was definitely part of the sysadmin job description ~25 years ago, both line discipline and physical medium problems (I had a TDR and a fiberglass fish at my desk for my first sysadmin job and was kind of bummed to find out that isn't remotely normal anymore)
- groestl 2y ago
  > and concepts like subnets are basically emulated for the sake of legacy systems. Until you scale up a Kubernetes Cluster so far that the abstractions begin to leak.
- api 2y ago
  Problem is that all those systems are proprietary to individual clouds. Congratulations folks! We undid several decades of progress and went back to the 1960s and 1970s when software can only run on the specific mainframe for which it was written.
  - 2y ago
throwaway918274 2y ago
Your mentioning of AWS devops reminded me of a story my dad, a mechanical engineer, told me. He travels a lot and works with engineers all over the world. He was talking to me about how the new "wave" of engineers (mainly in Canada and America) that he works with there is a a complete lack of people that know how to do things like manually calibrating various parts by hand. He's had to completely rethink how they approach their industrial designs and build machines and transition to much more electronic based things with fewer moving parts, and build things they can just adjust with computers and point-and-click GUIs, because people just don't know how these old things work from a physical reality perspective. My dad was very distraught by the caliber of engineers he's seeing in the "next generation". But that's not the only thing. In Canada, our aging population of tradespeople are retiring in droves and we have a dearth of younger people to replace them. It's so bad, that in my province they've completely redesigned the Grade 11-12 highschool curriculum to have "fast track" paths into trades where 80% of their time is spent in coop/apprenticeship (good thing!). We have a housing crisis and we have nobody that actually knows how to build houses in our country while the federal government imports 1 million people per year with nowhere for them to live. Most kids these days just want to be "influencers". Spelling and grammar in young people is absolutely atrocious because they are totally dependent on autocorrect; and they can't type using physical keyboards because they only ever used a touchscreen keyboard on phones and tablets. It's not just programming being destroyed by copilots. It's an overall dumbing down of our entire civilization.
- JTyQZSnP3cQGa8B 2y ago
  I have the same issue with young software engineers. We used to install every Linux distro because it was fun. Junior are now scared of the command-line. Another example that I see all the time: I recently had to review a pull request from a junior. 200 lines of very simple C++ doing almost nothing, you can't fail that. I had to write more than 50 suggestions and comments on very basic stuff that the guy should have learned when he started coding. Yes, they must learn the ropes, but it seems like the passion is not there. We used to be passionate about coding, and all I see is people who went to private college to make money but don't enjoy what they do.
bradleyjg 2y ago
This is definitely appealing to my curmudgeon heart. But I translate it into my corner of the world and the equivalent is everyone should know c. We don’t need everyone to know c. Everything else being exactly equal would I like someone I work with to know c over not? Sure. But would I take a world with many fewer programmers that all knew c over the one we have today—definitely not. It would be a significantly poorer world.
joshstrange 2y ago
> Well before AI co-pilots something happened to the good old admins--they started to disappear only to be replaced by "AWS devops" (their job titles) who have never wired a network using routers, switches, and cables. I noticed that they started lacking basic networking knowledge and couldn't set up networking inside AWS. They just didn't know what a gateway, NAT, or subnet is. I see the same arguments about higher level languages. All of the tech industry is about standing on the shoulders of giants. I do believe that lower level knowledge can help a great deal but using this argument I can say something like: Kids these days don’t know basic assembly, they have no idea what an or/and/nor/xor gate is, they’ve never built a computer from components (no, not cpu/mb/ram/etc, I’m talking transistors and soldering). Maybe LLMs are different but I don’t think they are, they are yet another tool that some people will abuse and some will use wisely. No different from an IDE or a higher-level language in my book. I have next to zero idea how many things I use daily work (like my car for example), it doesn’t stop me from being able to drive where I need to go. I have configured lower level networking equipment in the past and I couldn’t be happier that I don’t have to do that drudgery anymore. All I’m saying is this is a dangerous argument to make because someone can always one-up (one-down?) you. “Oh you had NAT? Luxury! In my day we didn’t even have a network, we had to….” (See also: Four Yorkshiremen [0]) [0] https://youtu.be/ue7wM0QC5LE?si=Mm-FY1oooq2XkCQz https://youtu.be/ue7wM0QC5LE?si=Mm-FY1oooq2XkCQz
- pclmulqdq 2y ago
  I think there may be a difference in kind here than with a lot of previous labor-saving abstractions. To use an LLM, you still need to know the language you are using it to write. You don't need to know C or assembly as a Python/JS programmer today, but you do need to know JS to be an LLM-heavy JS programmer.
  - ungreased0675 2y ago
    Not really? I don’t know JavaScript, just HTML and CSS. I still can make decent web app MVPs using copilot to fill in the blanks.
    - 2y ago
kolinko 2y ago
As constitution - changing one but not another could be a matter of cultural sensitivity as well (although I bet Bard isn’t that smart). As a Polish person, I don’t mind you changing the constitution, but for example with our national anthemn we are way more attached to changing how it sounds than Americans are to theirs. Ditto where our flag and our symbol can be used. As for Bard - did you try arguing with it that constitution guarantees you the freedom to play with it? I managed to convince gpt to do some weird stuff by arguing for cultural sensitivity.
- surfingdino 2y ago
  What Bard couldn't understand was that what I actually expected it to do was to write (well, steal, these things are simply giving answers that look like plausible answers by recombining other people's work) a function that takes a long piece of text and turns it into a palindrome. It cannot deal with ambiguity and imprecision, but will refuse how to acknowledge that fact and will keep generating random answers like a public schoolboy who insists on winning an argument despite not knowing a thing about what it is he's arguing for or against. When I asked Bard a more precise question and asked for a function that takes a long piece of text and turns it into a palindrome it gave me a different implementation of it every time I asked the same question behaving like a kid who has no clue, but will give a random answer and watch the teacher to see if the teacher accepts it. I will not argue with Bard or any other tool of that sort. I have better things to do. They are supposed to be good at translation, so I thought ok, let's try giving it a piece of my own writing in English and ask it to translate it into French (a gendered language). It could not infer from the text that the internal monologue that the protagonist was a female, so it translated it all using male voice. I asked it to switch gender to female voice but it stopped doing so after translating about two pages of the text and even on those two pages it kept switching to male voice. Then, after translating three pages it replied "I don't know how to do it" when I asked it translate another page, even though I used the same prompt I was using to ask it to translate previous pages. These are toys not tools. They are shit at their job and a waste of time and electricity. Since you are Polish, I was told by my Polish colleagues that onet.pl, a large Polish news site uses AI to auto-translate articles from foreign media sources and that all of those translations are done in the male voice, even when the original text clearly describes what a woman did or said. My colleagues say it's been going on for a while and nobody bothers to fix these translations. If true, the future is here, it is shit, and AI is good at one thing that VCs love to fund, i.e. extraction of value through destruction of value.
holoduke 2y ago
Yes I agree. But good companies are aware of this fenomenon and these so called chatgpt programmers are considered juniors. There is always place for you as an experienced developer who understands memory management, io performance, stack executions, step debuggers, compile optimizers and much more.
sph 2y ago
> I asked Bard to write me a Python function to turn the US Constitution into a palindrome. Bard refused and gave ma a lecture on how the US Constitution is too important to be played with in such trivial fashion. Jesus, they have coded pearl-clutching and finger-wagging lectures in my computers. You know, those machines that used to be brutally efficient at doing what you asked of them.
- staunton 2y ago
  > those machines that used to be brutally efficient at doing what you asked of them. In a way, that's a natural thing to happen. Computer systems are weird in that we have an extremely good model of how they work at a certain level: "processor will (almost) always process assembly exactly as it should, etc." When computers first came around, this "computer does exactly as you say" thing was weird to people because there weren't really any such things before computers. People would make small mistakes in their code and wonder why the computer can't "just do the obvious correct thing like any sensible person". However, as multiple complex software systems interact and build on top of each other, this ability to "understand everything" at one of these "perfect model" levels (e.g assembly, logic gates, state machines...) becomes useless. To work with them, fuzzy models (like those we use for other humans or animals) are more appropriate. Complex software systems will routinely not do the same thing when given the same command. They will change over time, break in incomprehensible und unpredictable ways, and, as the newest addition, argue with you instead of doing what you say. That development makes total sense. At least those systems can now "take a hint".
Salgat 2y ago
I've noticed that ChatGPT will speed up the monotonous part of writing code, but will often inject a few bugs into the code that I need to fix. In a way, ChatGPT has become my personal junior developer (which I only use for basic stuff) while I'm still dependent on my own expertise to review and fix the code, but at least it's still faster than using google and writing most of it myself. Juniors will always have bugs in their code, but when you bypass the step of writing the code and figuring it out for yourself, how do you effectively learn and become a better developer? In a way, ChatGPT both replaces the need for junior developers and creates a situation where you'll end up with a developer shortage because not everyone can start right away as a mid-senior level.
havkom 2y ago
I agree. The state of level of “basic” knowledge in developers are dropping. The consequences are that developers can tackle basic tasks which are supported by the frameworks they use, but once something is not supported or straightforward they don’t know what to do and get completely stuck. From society’s point of view, the usefulness and value of the task force decreases and important problems are not solved or aren’t efficiently solved.
- surfingdino 2y ago
  They don't know what they don't know. (Devs not knowing where to start writing a piece of code that works on actual bytes and not strings or numbers is a classic example of this problem.) Sometimes they are good devs in their space and mean well, but they spend their working lives on a different level of abstraction and in a different problem domain. The danger with co-pilots is that devs using them will even not know what to ask for, because they will not know what it is they need to write. There is value in going through docs, writing your own code, making mistakes, seeing your code fail, fixing it. That's how you learn to spot mistakes made by AI, but I don't think that having a coding puppy and spending time fixing its mistakes is conducive to writing better code or improving developer productivity.
blackeyeblitzar 2y ago
> We have an increasing number of people who "write code", but the number of people who can understand and review code is not increasing. Something like this was happening with coding bootcamps as well. Lots of people who can code what they were directly taught but don’t have the basics to go outside of that.
mattnewton 2y ago
> and it did an OK job, except the formatting and the fonts used were different every time, because it just lifted code from different webpages and recombined it like a massively hungover student Tangent, but it used different fonts? I can’t imagine how this is possible given how LLMs work under the hood (sampling likely tokens which represent Unicode character sequences - it doesn’t operate on rich text so afaik has no way of seeing or changing font information). Is there something weird happing with the frontend breaking the code/not-code formatting they do (as a cosmetic thing rendering the output)?
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- surfingdino 2y ago
  I was surprised by it too, but lost interest tbh.
emodendroket 2y ago
> There is also a problem of injecting ethics and politics into those tools, which can produce silly results. Well, they can, but the "no filter" option does not necessarily generate satisfactory results either. I find it hard to blame Google for not wanting to put their brand on an AI providing a ranking list of races by intelligence or whatever kind of offensive thing people are going to try to make it produce.
- surfingdino 2y ago
  We are talking about a code generator. Dev tools ought to be neutral when it comes to politics and ethics otherwise you get a smart hammer that will refuse to nail Jesus to a cross. That's not how tools work.
  - emodendroket 2y ago
    Safety devices put into tools to prevent misuse or accidents are also not that unusual. Feel free to change my example to something like "a code snippet that will use the 23andMe API to prevent users with insufficient European ancestry from registering an account" if you want a more code-specific example of reputational risk from an unfiltered AI.
ohyes 2y ago
> because it just lifted code from different webpages and recombined it like a massively hungover student waking up to realise he's supposed to hand in the assignment in one hour. That’s CTO level coding right there, gotta tell bard about my great app idea.

ben_w 2y ago

Sounds about right. I'm very impressed with the best models — but, because I remember how awful NLP used to be, "very impressed" still means I rate the best as being around the level of an intern/work placement student most of the time, and even at their best still only a junior. It's great, if you're OK with that. I've used GPT-3.5 to make my own personal pay-as-you-go web interface for any LLM that's API-compatible with OpenAI despite not being a professional Web Developer. It's fairly fragile because it's doing stupid things to get the "good enough" result. Bu that's OK, because it's for me, I'm not selling it. (As for the lesser models… I asked one for a single page web app version of Tetris; it started off lazy, then suddenly switched from writing a game in JavaScript into writing a machine learning script in python!)

jiggawatts 2y ago

> They just didn't know what a gateway, NAT, or subnet is. If you ask me, they shouldn't have to, in the same way that you probably don't know how to diagnose a coax cable problem. The major public clouds all have completely software-defined networks (SDNs), and concepts like subnets are basically emulated for the sake of legacy systems. Why would we want subnets, like... at all? Why can't all systems just have an IP address and use point-to-point communications? That's literally what the underlying SDN does with the packets anyway! The subnets and routes you see don't map 1:1 to the underlying network. The packets are stuffed inside a VXLAN packet and routed between random hypervisors scattered randomly across multiple buildings. Just give up the pretence, give everything an system-assigned public-routable IPv6 address and be done with it. Better yet, auto-register everything in a private DNS zone and auto-generate internal use SSL certs too. The amount of wiring we do manually is just insane, just so that Azure and Amazon can help greybeards pretend that they're operating a Cisco router and need to stand in line to file the paperwork required to get an SSL certificate.

bandrami 2y ago
> you probably don't know how to diagnose a coax cable problem No, that was definitely part of the sysadmin job description ~25 years ago, both line discipline and physical medium problems (I had a TDR and a fiberglass fish at my desk for my first sysadmin job and was kind of bummed to find out that isn't remotely normal anymore)
groestl 2y ago
> and concepts like subnets are basically emulated for the sake of legacy systems. Until you scale up a Kubernetes Cluster so far that the abstractions begin to leak.
api 2y ago
Problem is that all those systems are proprietary to individual clouds. Congratulations folks! We undid several decades of progress and went back to the 1960s and 1970s when software can only run on the specific mainframe for which it was written.
- 2y ago

throwaway918274 2y ago

Your mentioning of AWS devops reminded me of a story my dad, a mechanical engineer, told me. He travels a lot and works with engineers all over the world. He was talking to me about how the new "wave" of engineers (mainly in Canada and America) that he works with there is a a complete lack of people that know how to do things like manually calibrating various parts by hand. He's had to completely rethink how they approach their industrial designs and build machines and transition to much more electronic based things with fewer moving parts, and build things they can just adjust with computers and point-and-click GUIs, because people just don't know how these old things work from a physical reality perspective. My dad was very distraught by the caliber of engineers he's seeing in the "next generation". But that's not the only thing. In Canada, our aging population of tradespeople are retiring in droves and we have a dearth of younger people to replace them. It's so bad, that in my province they've completely redesigned the Grade 11-12 highschool curriculum to have "fast track" paths into trades where 80% of their time is spent in coop/apprenticeship (good thing!). We have a housing crisis and we have nobody that actually knows how to build houses in our country while the federal government imports 1 million people per year with nowhere for them to live. Most kids these days just want to be "influencers". Spelling and grammar in young people is absolutely atrocious because they are totally dependent on autocorrect; and they can't type using physical keyboards because they only ever used a touchscreen keyboard on phones and tablets. It's not just programming being destroyed by copilots. It's an overall dumbing down of our entire civilization.

JTyQZSnP3cQGa8B 2y ago
I have the same issue with young software engineers. We used to install every Linux distro because it was fun. Junior are now scared of the command-line. Another example that I see all the time: I recently had to review a pull request from a junior. 200 lines of very simple C++ doing almost nothing, you can't fail that. I had to write more than 50 suggestions and comments on very basic stuff that the guy should have learned when he started coding. Yes, they must learn the ropes, but it seems like the passion is not there. We used to be passionate about coding, and all I see is people who went to private college to make money but don't enjoy what they do.

bradleyjg 2y ago

This is definitely appealing to my curmudgeon heart. But I translate it into my corner of the world and the equivalent is everyone should know c. We don’t need everyone to know c. Everything else being exactly equal would I like someone I work with to know c over not? Sure. But would I take a world with many fewer programmers that all knew c over the one we have today—definitely not. It would be a significantly poorer world.

joshstrange 2y ago

> Well before AI co-pilots something happened to the good old admins--they started to disappear only to be replaced by "AWS devops" (their job titles) who have never wired a network using routers, switches, and cables. I noticed that they started lacking basic networking knowledge and couldn't set up networking inside AWS. They just didn't know what a gateway, NAT, or subnet is. I see the same arguments about higher level languages. All of the tech industry is about standing on the shoulders of giants. I do believe that lower level knowledge can help a great deal but using this argument I can say something like: Kids these days don’t know basic assembly, they have no idea what an or/and/nor/xor gate is, they’ve never built a computer from components (no, not cpu/mb/ram/etc, I’m talking transistors and soldering). Maybe LLMs are different but I don’t think they are, they are yet another tool that some people will abuse and some will use wisely. No different from an IDE or a higher-level language in my book. I have next to zero idea how many things I use daily work (like my car for example), it doesn’t stop me from being able to drive where I need to go. I have configured lower level networking equipment in the past and I couldn’t be happier that I don’t have to do that drudgery anymore. All I’m saying is this is a dangerous argument to make because someone can always one-up (one-down?) you. “Oh you had NAT? Luxury! In my day we didn’t even have a network, we had to….” (See also: Four Yorkshiremen [0]) [0] https://youtu.be/ue7wM0QC5LE?si=Mm-FY1oooq2XkCQz https://youtu.be/ue7wM0QC5LE?si=Mm-FY1oooq2XkCQz

pclmulqdq 2y ago
I think there may be a difference in kind here than with a lot of previous labor-saving abstractions. To use an LLM, you still need to know the language you are using it to write. You don't need to know C or assembly as a Python/JS programmer today, but you do need to know JS to be an LLM-heavy JS programmer.
- ungreased0675 2y ago
  Not really? I don’t know JavaScript, just HTML and CSS. I still can make decent web app MVPs using copilot to fill in the blanks.
  - 2y ago

kolinko 2y ago

As constitution - changing one but not another could be a matter of cultural sensitivity as well (although I bet Bard isn’t that smart). As a Polish person, I don’t mind you changing the constitution, but for example with our national anthemn we are way more attached to changing how it sounds than Americans are to theirs. Ditto where our flag and our symbol can be used. As for Bard - did you try arguing with it that constitution guarantees you the freedom to play with it? I managed to convince gpt to do some weird stuff by arguing for cultural sensitivity.

surfingdino 2y ago
What Bard couldn't understand was that what I actually expected it to do was to write (well, steal, these things are simply giving answers that look like plausible answers by recombining other people's work) a function that takes a long piece of text and turns it into a palindrome. It cannot deal with ambiguity and imprecision, but will refuse how to acknowledge that fact and will keep generating random answers like a public schoolboy who insists on winning an argument despite not knowing a thing about what it is he's arguing for or against. When I asked Bard a more precise question and asked for a function that takes a long piece of text and turns it into a palindrome it gave me a different implementation of it every time I asked the same question behaving like a kid who has no clue, but will give a random answer and watch the teacher to see if the teacher accepts it. I will not argue with Bard or any other tool of that sort. I have better things to do. They are supposed to be good at translation, so I thought ok, let's try giving it a piece of my own writing in English and ask it to translate it into French (a gendered language). It could not infer from the text that the internal monologue that the protagonist was a female, so it translated it all using male voice. I asked it to switch gender to female voice but it stopped doing so after translating about two pages of the text and even on those two pages it kept switching to male voice. Then, after translating three pages it replied "I don't know how to do it" when I asked it translate another page, even though I used the same prompt I was using to ask it to translate previous pages. These are toys not tools. They are shit at their job and a waste of time and electricity. Since you are Polish, I was told by my Polish colleagues that onet.pl, a large Polish news site uses AI to auto-translate articles from foreign media sources and that all of those translations are done in the male voice, even when the original text clearly describes what a woman did or said. My colleagues say it's been going on for a while and nobody bothers to fix these translations. If true, the future is here, it is shit, and AI is good at one thing that VCs love to fund, i.e. extraction of value through destruction of value.

holoduke 2y ago

Yes I agree. But good companies are aware of this fenomenon and these so called chatgpt programmers are considered juniors. There is always place for you as an experienced developer who understands memory management, io performance, stack executions, step debuggers, compile optimizers and much more.

sph 2y ago

> I asked Bard to write me a Python function to turn the US Constitution into a palindrome. Bard refused and gave ma a lecture on how the US Constitution is too important to be played with in such trivial fashion. Jesus, they have coded pearl-clutching and finger-wagging lectures in my computers. You know, those machines that used to be brutally efficient at doing what you asked of them.

staunton 2y ago
> those machines that used to be brutally efficient at doing what you asked of them. In a way, that's a natural thing to happen. Computer systems are weird in that we have an extremely good model of how they work at a certain level: "processor will (almost) always process assembly exactly as it should, etc." When computers first came around, this "computer does exactly as you say" thing was weird to people because there weren't really any such things before computers. People would make small mistakes in their code and wonder why the computer can't "just do the obvious correct thing like any sensible person". However, as multiple complex software systems interact and build on top of each other, this ability to "understand everything" at one of these "perfect model" levels (e.g assembly, logic gates, state machines...) becomes useless. To work with them, fuzzy models (like those we use for other humans or animals) are more appropriate. Complex software systems will routinely not do the same thing when given the same command. They will change over time, break in incomprehensible und unpredictable ways, and, as the newest addition, argue with you instead of doing what you say. That development makes total sense. At least those systems can now "take a hint".

Salgat 2y ago

I've noticed that ChatGPT will speed up the monotonous part of writing code, but will often inject a few bugs into the code that I need to fix. In a way, ChatGPT has become my personal junior developer (which I only use for basic stuff) while I'm still dependent on my own expertise to review and fix the code, but at least it's still faster than using google and writing most of it myself. Juniors will always have bugs in their code, but when you bypass the step of writing the code and figuring it out for yourself, how do you effectively learn and become a better developer? In a way, ChatGPT both replaces the need for junior developers and creates a situation where you'll end up with a developer shortage because not everyone can start right away as a mid-senior level.

havkom 2y ago

I agree. The state of level of “basic” knowledge in developers are dropping. The consequences are that developers can tackle basic tasks which are supported by the frameworks they use, but once something is not supported or straightforward they don’t know what to do and get completely stuck. From society’s point of view, the usefulness and value of the task force decreases and important problems are not solved or aren’t efficiently solved.

surfingdino 2y ago
They don't know what they don't know. (Devs not knowing where to start writing a piece of code that works on actual bytes and not strings or numbers is a classic example of this problem.) Sometimes they are good devs in their space and mean well, but they spend their working lives on a different level of abstraction and in a different problem domain. The danger with co-pilots is that devs using them will even not know what to ask for, because they will not know what it is they need to write. There is value in going through docs, writing your own code, making mistakes, seeing your code fail, fixing it. That's how you learn to spot mistakes made by AI, but I don't think that having a coding puppy and spending time fixing its mistakes is conducive to writing better code or improving developer productivity.

blackeyeblitzar 2y ago

> We have an increasing number of people who "write code", but the number of people who can understand and review code is not increasing. Something like this was happening with coding bootcamps as well. Lots of people who can code what they were directly taught but don’t have the basics to go outside of that.

mattnewton 2y ago

> and it did an OK job, except the formatting and the fonts used were different every time, because it just lifted code from different webpages and recombined it like a massively hungover student Tangent, but it used different fonts? I can’t imagine how this is possible given how LLMs work under the hood (sampling likely tokens which represent Unicode character sequences - it doesn’t operate on rich text so afaik has no way of seeing or changing font information). Is there something weird happing with the frontend breaking the code/not-code formatting they do (as a cosmetic thing rendering the output)?

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
surfingdino 2y ago
I was surprised by it too, but lost interest tbh.

emodendroket 2y ago

> There is also a problem of injecting ethics and politics into those tools, which can produce silly results. Well, they can, but the "no filter" option does not necessarily generate satisfactory results either. I find it hard to blame Google for not wanting to put their brand on an AI providing a ranking list of races by intelligence or whatever kind of offensive thing people are going to try to make it produce.

surfingdino 2y ago
We are talking about a code generator. Dev tools ought to be neutral when it comes to politics and ethics otherwise you get a smart hammer that will refuse to nail Jesus to a cross. That's not how tools work.
- emodendroket 2y ago
  Safety devices put into tools to prevent misuse or accidents are also not that unusual. Feel free to change my example to something like "a code snippet that will use the 23andMe API to prevent users with insufficient European ancestry from registering an account" if you want a more code-specific example of reputational risk from an unfiltered AI.

ohyes 2y ago

> because it just lifted code from different webpages and recombined it like a massively hungover student waking up to realise he's supposed to hand in the assignment in one hour. That’s CTO level coding right there, gotta tell bard about my great app idea.