I would say yes and no. I don’t think it’s entirely horrible as a programming assistant. I used it just a week ago to perform a series of UI upgrades. I probably wouldn’t have learned anything doing it myself, just mindlessly following the upgrade guide until it’s all done. It would’ve taken me a day at least, between meetings and other distractions, but an agent did it for me, unattended, in about 5 min. I still verified functionality afterwards and fixed a couple tests.
In some respects it kind of feels like the argument I had with a coworker over the use of Lombok (a tool for injecting common but often tedious coding patterns in Java). I was on the side of not using it because some of the patterns are important to understand and not understanding the implementation can lead to misuse of them. Eventually I decided it was a “necessary evil” and that using stuff like that could free me up for tackling the stuff that is completely unique and wouldn’t be found in any library. The fun stuff.
I still hate data centers and AI revenge porn and AI scams and people that replace perfectly functioning tools and experienced workers with AI bots that aren’t nearly as reliable. But I don’t think it’s an inherently bad technology.
I recently got assigned to a project where portions of the UI has been LLM vomited. It does not conform to web standards, and it doesn’t give a fuck about accessibility.
There’s a custom checkbox component whose label isn’t clickable. I’ve had to fix so many little things because someone couldn’t be bothered to do it right and chose to outsource their thinking to something that can’t think.
My view on LLM usage is essentially, if you don’t give a fuck about what you’re doing, why should anyone else? If you don’t care enough about your project to actually develop it yourself, why should Flathub platform it?
So this is some what problematic. Technology has benefits does not mean it has to be allowed. Question is what do we gain and at what cost. If the answer is we gain speed, then the followup is “does it really matter?”.
Speed of coding is the common answer. Another one is non programmers are able to make programmes. Both of it does not add much of a real value is the point. Because when the machine churn out code at a very high rate, then the humans who should review it gets under pressure. We are not addressing the real bottleneck, instead we just pump out more material which just intensify the congestion at the bottleneck. Quality goes down, we get things like AWS going down, Microsoft wiping people’s machines, etc. In other words it creates problem without much meaningful gain.
Regarding the non-programmers making programmes, it mostly just create a lot of noise. There is a lot of weekend projects, one shot attempts, or some half cooked outcomes. Only a handful of projects with meaningful impact in the world will be born out of it. We all know, even before AI, out of hundreds of thousands of GitHub repos only a small section is actually well maintained, and deliver something to the world.
I don’t have to explain at what cost. It is just literally affecting the climate and accelarting the collapse of current ecosystem. Are we doing this so that a code can be written in 1 hour, instead of one day? If you get more free time because of this, well, at least we can say the load is reduced. But we all know we just get more work to do from our employer. So I don’t really think this is a net positive.
Based. This is great news.
I would say yes and no. I don’t think it’s entirely horrible as a programming assistant. I used it just a week ago to perform a series of UI upgrades. I probably wouldn’t have learned anything doing it myself, just mindlessly following the upgrade guide until it’s all done. It would’ve taken me a day at least, between meetings and other distractions, but an agent did it for me, unattended, in about 5 min. I still verified functionality afterwards and fixed a couple tests.
In some respects it kind of feels like the argument I had with a coworker over the use of Lombok (a tool for injecting common but often tedious coding patterns in Java). I was on the side of not using it because some of the patterns are important to understand and not understanding the implementation can lead to misuse of them. Eventually I decided it was a “necessary evil” and that using stuff like that could free me up for tackling the stuff that is completely unique and wouldn’t be found in any library. The fun stuff.
I still hate data centers and AI revenge porn and AI scams and people that replace perfectly functioning tools and experienced workers with AI bots that aren’t nearly as reliable. But I don’t think it’s an inherently bad technology.
I recently got assigned to a project where portions of the UI has been LLM vomited. It does not conform to web standards, and it doesn’t give a fuck about accessibility.
There’s a custom checkbox component whose label isn’t clickable. I’ve had to fix so many little things because someone couldn’t be bothered to do it right and chose to outsource their thinking to something that can’t think.
My view on LLM usage is essentially, if you don’t give a fuck about what you’re doing, why should anyone else? If you don’t care enough about your project to actually develop it yourself, why should Flathub platform it?
So this is some what problematic. Technology has benefits does not mean it has to be allowed. Question is what do we gain and at what cost. If the answer is we gain speed, then the followup is “does it really matter?”.
Speed of coding is the common answer. Another one is non programmers are able to make programmes. Both of it does not add much of a real value is the point. Because when the machine churn out code at a very high rate, then the humans who should review it gets under pressure. We are not addressing the real bottleneck, instead we just pump out more material which just intensify the congestion at the bottleneck. Quality goes down, we get things like AWS going down, Microsoft wiping people’s machines, etc. In other words it creates problem without much meaningful gain.
Regarding the non-programmers making programmes, it mostly just create a lot of noise. There is a lot of weekend projects, one shot attempts, or some half cooked outcomes. Only a handful of projects with meaningful impact in the world will be born out of it. We all know, even before AI, out of hundreds of thousands of GitHub repos only a small section is actually well maintained, and deliver something to the world.
I don’t have to explain at what cost. It is just literally affecting the climate and accelarting the collapse of current ecosystem. Are we doing this so that a code can be written in 1 hour, instead of one day? If you get more free time because of this, well, at least we can say the load is reduced. But we all know we just get more work to do from our employer. So I don’t really think this is a net positive.
…That was literally no different before AI.
Oh. I meant before AI only. I should have clarified that.