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I knew a guy that made a good living as a freelance web developer decades ago. He would pretty much just copy and paste code from tutorials or stack overflow a

I knew a guy that made a good living as a freelance web developer decades ago. He would pretty much just copy and paste code from tutorials or stack overflow and had no real idea how anything worked. Using code without understanding it is never a good idea, it doesn’t need to be from AI for that to be true.

Laakeri 2y ago
But he made a good living out of it, so in the end it was a good idea?
- emseetech 2y ago
  It certainly puts a ceiling on a career. And I'd argue it probably gave him a pretty rough shelf life. At some point he has to understand what he's doing. Unless he's so good at selling his services he can consistently find new clients. And if that's the case, he'd probably kill it in sales.
  - fragmede 2y ago
    sales engineer is quite a lucrative career. don't have to be really good at it, just enough to be useful.
    - snoxy 2y ago
      Sales engineers have to be good enough to bluff their way through the layers of hyperbole/minor exaggeration/utter bullshit (delete as applicable) the sales team have spun. Whether their conscience gets involved before the deal closes, different question.
      - gizmo686 2y ago
        Not at my work. Around here sales engineers just say "this is a proof of concept, X will be different in the final version". Then, after they close the deal, they give us their half implemented feature they developed that none of us heard about before, and tell ys that we need to finish it and include it in the next release.
  - efilife 2y ago
    Cope. People often make money on things they know nothing about
  - dazzawazza 2y ago
    I'll bet the ceiling is CTO.
  - HeyLaughingBoy 2y ago
    Most people never reach the theoretical ceiling of their careers, so he probably did quite well.
- thephyber 2y ago
  He may have made a good living, but his customer / employer bought low quality code with lots of tech debt. That business model only works until customers are sophisticated enough to understand tech debt. In the future, more customers will be less willing to pay the same good wages for low quality code.
  - throwaway2037 2y ago
    > but his customer / employer bought low quality code with lots of tech debt. Sarcastic reply: Isn't that most tech? Even good (above average) developer produce lots of tech debt and sometimes low quality code.
    - datavirtue 2y ago
      Yeah, and the business people could not care less. I am on a team taking in millions of dollars from a Delphi Windows app from 1997. Zero tests, horribly mangled business logic embedded in UI handlers. Maintaining that app is not feasible. I'm rebuilding a modern version of it only because it is embarrassing to demo and is such a UX nightmare that our distributor made us commit to a new app.
    - b112 2y ago
      "Webdev" makes me think of wordpress, which is like planting 20 onions in your backyard, and comparing yourself to a farmer with acres of crops. I can completely believe someone had no idea what they were doing when copy/pasting, and working on wordpress.
f6v 2y ago
Or maybe you’re just exaggerating. I’ve done my fair share of copy pasting and it never worked to just do it without understanding what’s going on. I think the problem with “AI” code is that many people have almost a religions belief. There’re weirdos on internet who say that AGI is couple years away. And by extension current AI models are seen as something incapable of making a mistake when writing code.
- n4r9 2y ago
  The other downside to AI code vs stackoverflow is that a stackoverflow post can be updated, or a helpful reply might point out the error. With the advent of LLMs we may be losing this communal element of learning and knowledge-sharing.
  - Piskvorrr 2y ago
    We aren't. LLMs may have been useful for a moment in time, before the trick "it's now MY OWN creation, no IP strings attached - when it comes through the plagiarism machine" became apparent, and before the models started eating their own tail. Now they're just spiralling down, and it will IMNSHO take something else than an iterative "a future version will surely fix this, One Day, have faith."
    - n4r9 2y ago
      There are signs of a decline in people asking and answering questions on sites like stack exchange: https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/387278/has-stack-exchanges-traffic-decreased-since-chatgpt https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/387278/has-stack-ex... So I hope you're right, but the evidence is currently that you're wrong. Let's see how it plays out, I suppose.
      - Piskvorrr 2y ago
        - Which might be a different matter: of specifically SE declining. (A very different, and long-running, tragedy, but one that began long before the current AI boom and prompted by very different, non-technical issues.) - That said, surely traffic will decline for Q&A sites. "How do I connect tab A into slot B" is something that people are likely to query LLMs for; the response will surely sound authoritative, and could be even correct. That's definitely a task where LLMs could help: common questions that have been asked many times (and as such, are likely to be well-answered in the human-made training data). A 20001st question of "how do I right-align a paragraph in HTML" has not been posted? Good. Rote tasks are well-suited to automation. (Which, again, brings us back to the issue "how to distinguish the response quality?")
Cthulhu_ 2y ago
This is a known issue from like the 2000s where there were so many bad PHP tutorials, a lot of SQL injection and XSS etc came from those.
jazz9k 2y ago
I knew someone similar. They would just get free templates and sell them as a website to customers, with almost no changes, aside from logos and text. Most had no Javascript or css and looked terrible, even by 2005 standards. His clients were usually older small business owners that just wanted a web presence. His rate was $5000/site. Within a few years, business dried up and he had to do something completely different. He also hosted his own smtp server for clients.It was an old server on his cable modem in a dusty garage. I helped him prevent spoofing/relaying a few times, but he kept tinkering with the settings and it would happen all over again.
falcor84 2y ago
>a guy that made a good living ... never a good idea Arguably the term for a bad idea that works is "good idea"
- frumper 2y ago
  That's fair. From a personal perspective it was a good idea. He regularly had sites get compromised though, so for his customers it wasn't always a good product. He generally kept his customers happy though.
- digging 2y ago
  Or maybe "good" and "bad" aren't useful descriptors in this context.
- macksd 2y ago
  There are plumbers who make a living but whose work results in leaks in people's homes. They're making a living, but I don't consider the way they work "a good idea".
JKCalhoun 2y ago
At least AI comments their code.

Laakeri 2y ago

But he made a good living out of it, so in the end it was a good idea?

emseetech 2y ago
It certainly puts a ceiling on a career. And I'd argue it probably gave him a pretty rough shelf life. At some point he has to understand what he's doing. Unless he's so good at selling his services he can consistently find new clients. And if that's the case, he'd probably kill it in sales.
- fragmede 2y ago
  sales engineer is quite a lucrative career. don't have to be really good at it, just enough to be useful.
  - snoxy 2y ago
    Sales engineers have to be good enough to bluff their way through the layers of hyperbole/minor exaggeration/utter bullshit (delete as applicable) the sales team have spun. Whether their conscience gets involved before the deal closes, different question.
    - gizmo686 2y ago
      Not at my work. Around here sales engineers just say "this is a proof of concept, X will be different in the final version". Then, after they close the deal, they give us their half implemented feature they developed that none of us heard about before, and tell ys that we need to finish it and include it in the next release.
- efilife 2y ago
  Cope. People often make money on things they know nothing about
- dazzawazza 2y ago
  I'll bet the ceiling is CTO.
- HeyLaughingBoy 2y ago
  Most people never reach the theoretical ceiling of their careers, so he probably did quite well.
thephyber 2y ago
He may have made a good living, but his customer / employer bought low quality code with lots of tech debt. That business model only works until customers are sophisticated enough to understand tech debt. In the future, more customers will be less willing to pay the same good wages for low quality code.
- throwaway2037 2y ago
  > but his customer / employer bought low quality code with lots of tech debt. Sarcastic reply: Isn't that most tech? Even good (above average) developer produce lots of tech debt and sometimes low quality code.
  - datavirtue 2y ago
    Yeah, and the business people could not care less. I am on a team taking in millions of dollars from a Delphi Windows app from 1997. Zero tests, horribly mangled business logic embedded in UI handlers. Maintaining that app is not feasible. I'm rebuilding a modern version of it only because it is embarrassing to demo and is such a UX nightmare that our distributor made us commit to a new app.
  - b112 2y ago
    "Webdev" makes me think of wordpress, which is like planting 20 onions in your backyard, and comparing yourself to a farmer with acres of crops. I can completely believe someone had no idea what they were doing when copy/pasting, and working on wordpress.

f6v 2y ago

Or maybe you’re just exaggerating. I’ve done my fair share of copy pasting and it never worked to just do it without understanding what’s going on. I think the problem with “AI” code is that many people have almost a religions belief. There’re weirdos on internet who say that AGI is couple years away. And by extension current AI models are seen as something incapable of making a mistake when writing code.

n4r9 2y ago
The other downside to AI code vs stackoverflow is that a stackoverflow post can be updated, or a helpful reply might point out the error. With the advent of LLMs we may be losing this communal element of learning and knowledge-sharing.
- Piskvorrr 2y ago
  We aren't. LLMs may have been useful for a moment in time, before the trick "it's now MY OWN creation, no IP strings attached - when it comes through the plagiarism machine" became apparent, and before the models started eating their own tail. Now they're just spiralling down, and it will IMNSHO take something else than an iterative "a future version will surely fix this, One Day, have faith."
  - n4r9 2y ago
    There are signs of a decline in people asking and answering questions on sites like stack exchange: https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/387278/has-stack-exchanges-traffic-decreased-since-chatgpt https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/387278/has-stack-ex... So I hope you're right, but the evidence is currently that you're wrong. Let's see how it plays out, I suppose.
    - Piskvorrr 2y ago
      - Which might be a different matter: of specifically SE declining. (A very different, and long-running, tragedy, but one that began long before the current AI boom and prompted by very different, non-technical issues.) - That said, surely traffic will decline for Q&A sites. "How do I connect tab A into slot B" is something that people are likely to query LLMs for; the response will surely sound authoritative, and could be even correct. That's definitely a task where LLMs could help: common questions that have been asked many times (and as such, are likely to be well-answered in the human-made training data). A 20001st question of "how do I right-align a paragraph in HTML" has not been posted? Good. Rote tasks are well-suited to automation. (Which, again, brings us back to the issue "how to distinguish the response quality?")

Cthulhu_ 2y ago

This is a known issue from like the 2000s where there were so many bad PHP tutorials, a lot of SQL injection and XSS etc came from those.

jazz9k 2y ago

I knew someone similar. They would just get free templates and sell them as a website to customers, with almost no changes, aside from logos and text. Most had no Javascript or css and looked terrible, even by 2005 standards. His clients were usually older small business owners that just wanted a web presence. His rate was $5000/site. Within a few years, business dried up and he had to do something completely different. He also hosted his own smtp server for clients.It was an old server on his cable modem in a dusty garage. I helped him prevent spoofing/relaying a few times, but he kept tinkering with the settings and it would happen all over again.

falcor84 2y ago

>a guy that made a good living ... never a good idea Arguably the term for a bad idea that works is "good idea"

frumper 2y ago
That's fair. From a personal perspective it was a good idea. He regularly had sites get compromised though, so for his customers it wasn't always a good product. He generally kept his customers happy though.
digging 2y ago
Or maybe "good" and "bad" aren't useful descriptors in this context.
macksd 2y ago
There are plumbers who make a living but whose work results in leaks in people's homes. They're making a living, but I don't consider the way they work "a good idea".

JKCalhoun 2y ago

At least AI comments their code.