- cross-posted to:
- fuck_ai@lemmy.world
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Genuinely a bit shocked to see the number of robolovers in these comments. Very weird, very disheartening. No wonder so much shit online doesn’t work properly lol
What do you expect? Half of these decision makers are complete idiots that are just good at making money and think that that means they are smarter than anyone who makes less than them. They then see some new hyped up tech, they chat with ChatGPT and they are dump enough to be floored by it’s “intelligence” and now they think it can replace workers but since it’s still early, they assume that it will quickly surpass the workers. So in their mind, firing ten programmers and saving like two million a year, while only spending maybe a few tens of thousands a year on AI will be a crazy success that will show how smart they are. And as time goes on and the AI gets better, they will save even more money. So why spend more money to help the programmers improve, when you can just fire them and spend a fraction of it on AI?
AI-assisted coding […] means more ambitious, higher-quality products
I’m skeptical. From my own (limited) experience, my use-cases and projects, and the risks of using code that may include hallucinations.
there are roughly 29 million software developers worldwide serving over 5.4 billion internet users. That’s one developer for every 186 users,
That’s an interesting way to look at it, and that would be a far better relation than I would have expected. Not every software developer serves internet users though.
I don’t honestly believe that AI can save me time as a developer. I’ve tried several AI agents and every single one cost me time. I had to hold its hand while it fumbled around the code base, then fix whatever it eventually broke.
I’d imagine companies using AI will need to hire more developers to undo all the damage the AI does to their code base.
I was in the same boat about…3mos ago. But recent tooling is kind of making me rethink things. And to be honest I’m kind of surprised. I’m fairly anti-AI.
Is it perfect? Fuck no. But with the right prompts and gates, I’m genuinely surprised. Yes, I still have to tweak, but we’re talking entire features being 80% stubbed in sub 1 minute. More if I want it to test and iterate.
My major concern is the people doing this and not reviewing the code and shipping it. Because it definitely needs massaging…ESPECIALLY for security reasons.
The funny thing is that if AI coding were that good, we would already see widespread adoption in open source projects. But we haven’t, because it sucks. Of course commercial software development companies are free to lie about how much they use AI, or get creative with their metrics so they can get their KPI bonuses. So we can’t really believe anything they say. But we can believe in transparency.
As always, there are so many people selling snake oil by saying the word AI without actually telling you what they mean. Quite obviously there are a great many tools that one could call AI that can be and are and have been used to help do a ton of things, with many of those technologies going back decades. That’s different from using ChatGPT to write your project. Whenever you hear someone write about AI and not give clear definitions, there’s a good chance they’re full of s***.
How do you know is not being used to develop open source code?
I have used AI assistance in many things, most of them are open sourced as I by default open source everything I make in my free time. The output code is indistinguishable, same as you wouldn’t know if I asked my questions on how to do something on reddit, stackoverflow (rip) or other forum. You see the source, not the process I followed to make that source code. For all we know linux kernel devs might as well be asking chatgpt question, we wouldn’t know.
As per explicit open source AI related tools there are hundreds. So I don’t really know what you mean here that “open source projects” have not adopted AI. Do you mean like “vibe coding”?
My theory is that C-suites are actually using “AI efficiency gain” as an excuse for laying off workers without scaring the shareholders.
“I didn’t lay off 10% of the workforce because the company is failing. It’s because… uhmmmm… AI! I have replaced them with AI! Please give us more money.”
It’s the next RTO.
I’m 90% sure it’s something to do with the stock market, buy backs and companies having to do cryptic shit to keep up with a fake value to their shares
Ironically, processing large amounts of data and making soft decisions and planning based on such data makes AI ideal for replacing C-suite members.
Pointing this out in company wide meetings is a fun past time.
Let’s make a community powered, open source project to do this and watch them squirm when investors demand that million dollar CEOs get replaced with AI for higher investor returns.
it means more ambitious, higher-quality products
No … the opposite actually.
Read the article before commenting.
The literal entire thesis is that AI should maintain developer headcounts and just let them be more productive, not reduce headcount in favour of AI.
The irony is that you’re putting in less effort and critical thought into your comment than an AI would.
For the sake of benefit of the doubt, it’s possible to simultaneously understand the thesis of the article, and to hold the opinion that AI doesn’t lead to higher-quality products. That would likely involve agreeing with the premise that laying off workers is a bad idea, but disagreeing (at least partially) with the reasoning why it’s a bad idea.
I get what you’re saying, but the problem is that AI seems to need way more hand holding and double checking before it can be considered ready for deployment.
I’ve used copilot for Ansible/Terraform code and 40-50% of the time it’s just… wrong. It looks right, but it won’t actually function.
For easy, entry programs it’s fine, but I wouldn’t (and don’t) let it near complex projects.
I’ve seen similar issues with ansible and terraform. It’s much better with more traditional languages though. Works great with core go-lang, Python, Java, Kotlin, etc. Ymmv when it comes to some libraries as well. I think it’s mostly to do with the amount of training data.
Its not about writing easy entry programs, it’s about writing code robustly.
Writing out test code where tests are isolated from each other, cover every edge case, and test every line of code, is tedious but pays dividends. AI makes it far less tedious to write out that test code and practice proper test driven development.
A well run dev team with enough senior people that manages the change properly should increase in velocity if they’re already writing robust code, and increase in code quality if they’re not.
That middle graph is absolute fucking bullshit. AI is not fucking ever going to replace 75% of developers or I’ve been working way too fucking hard for way to little pay these past 30 years. It might let you cut staff 5-10% because it enables folks to accomplish certain things a bit faster.
Christ on a fucking crutch. Ask developers who are currently using AI (not the ones working for AI companies) how much time and effort it actually saves them. They will tell you.
It doesn’t have to make sense or make the outcome be better, the only thing it has to do is make the company look better on paper to its shareholders. If something can make the company look better on paper it will be done, the quality of the work is not relevant
Not only the shareholders. If some of the higher level administration can get richer in the short run, even if that might actually hurt the shareholders in the medium run, you can bet that many of them will do so.
I use it here and there. it just seems to shift effort from writing code to reading and fixing code. the “amount” of work is about the same.
I use it so much. All my Google searches for syntax or snippets? Web searches are unuseable at this point, AI can spit it out faster. But the real savings? Repetitive code. I suck at it, I always make typos and it’s draining. I just toss in a table or an api response and tell it what I want and boom
It probably does write 75% of my code by lines, but maybe 5% of the business logic is AI (sometimes I just let it take a crack at a problem, but usually if I have to type it out I might as well code it)
What it’s good at drains my concentration, so doing the grunt work for me is a real force multiplier. I don’t even use it every day, but it might be a 3x multiplier for me and could improve
But here’s the thing - programmers are not replaceable. Not by other humans, not by AI - you learn hyper specific things about what you work on
But the real savings? Repetitive code. I suck at it, I always make typos and it’s draining.
It’s hard to say without being immersed in the codebase you work on, but wouldn’t making your code DRY (when possible) take care of a lot of the repetition without needing to write a bunch of incredibly similar code (be it by hand or with an LLM)?
But the real savings? Repetitive code. I suck at it, I always make typos and it’s draining. I just toss in a table or an api response and tell it what I want and boom
Get better at it, manually, or you’ll suck at it forever. It’s a skill like anything else.
AI writing code for me made me the software architect I always dreamed of becoming.
I fucking LOVE to think about a hard problem for days, planning, researching, comming up with elegant solutions, doing quick POC, thinking what needs to be refactored for it to scale to a real life scenario, then documenting it all in a way that is properly communicating the important aspects in an easy to understand way. It’s so exciting!
And I fucking HATE having to sit down and actually type out the solved code for hours and hours. It’s so boring.
Best 20$ per month subscribtion I’ve ever had.
Yep. It’s gonna be $20 forever, too. Have fun!
Lol. Lmao even
It does save a lot of time and effort, and does lead to better code in the hands of a skilled developer. Writing out thorough test code and actually doing proper test driven development suddenly becomes a lot less onerous.
Their graph also has no numbers and is just there to help visualize the difference they’re referring to.
No it doesn’t.
Oh I’m glad you’re the be all know all arbiter of all software developers, and not just some grump on the internet.
To the first part, I agree. A skilled developer who can quickly separate the wheat from the chaff can get a boost out of AI. I’d put it at around 5-10%, but I’ve had some tiny projects where it was 400% boost. I think it’s a small net gain.
As for your second point I just have to disagree. There are no numbers but it is clearly selling the idea of the majority of code being AI generated, and that’s bullshit whether it’s an outright lie with numbers, or merely vaguely misleading. It’s like when someone cuts off the bottom of a graph to make relative change look huge. It wants people to glance at it, get the wrong idea, and move off without curiosity.
To the first part, I agree. A skilled developer who can quickly separate the wheat from the chaff can get a boost out of AI.
It takes less time to just write code than to babysit an artificial dumbass.
Also is substack the new meduim? I cant keep up with these freemium wordpress/blog clones.
Why do people always have to use some freemium offering when there’s an opensource, self-hosted or already hosted variant out there? I don’t get it. Just riding the wave I guess.
My guess? The freemium stuff gives the promise of $$ after a certain level of popularity. And they make it VERY easy to use.
Personally, ive been thinking of using writefreely for its seamless integration of fediverse…but I really dont have a lot to say in the traditional space. IE screaming at the wailing wall (or at least it feels like screaming at the wailing wall).
Does a writefreely instance appear on lemmy as a community with posts written by the author? That would be so cool, and would go in the right direction of integrating different kinds of social media in one client.
I may test it out. I believe it will at least work with RSS and Piefed.
The money supply growth is far below the average, its tight monetary policy, so we are going to see a slowing job market.
Its not that dumb as you think, its way dumber.
Right now? They’ve been doing this for two years!
deleted by creator
Implying that LLMs increase efficiency
Maybe the capital ‘E’ in “Efficiency” was for a proper noun.
And it’s the name of some money-printing machine or some ponzi scheme.
Well, something around here, is surely a ponzi scheme.
