As I’m writing this, we’re in the middle of an AI-induced mass psychosis. People are literally token-maxxing themselves into hospital beds, scrambling to capture some of that market value before everything is automated away. I can’t blame them. Models keep getting better, programmers are being laid off left and right. We’ve been repeatedly told that AI will write 100% of the code by the end of the year. Whether that’s true or not, this may not be the best time to sit back.
I absolutely agree that the technology in itself isn’t useless. It’s the humans and their abuse of LLMs/GenAI for everything conceivable that makes me angry. Most of the advertised use cases are just not holding up. The idea that “AI” can do everything better than humans is just wrong. It mimicks human output at best, and this also means that when trained on human garbage code it won’t generate better code than humans, statistically. It’s a probability machine, not an intelligent entity. If you keep that in mind, and if you are able to ignore all the ethical, environmental and intellectual property theft issues, then it can be a useful tool.
I’m not being sarcastic here: I’m also using LLMs for small, narrowly defined delevopment tasks, albeit with models running on local hardware mostly. But I’m constantly torn between being impressed when it actually works and being downright disgusted by the non-deterministic nature of the thing when it doesn’t.