I got an AI PR in one of my projects once. It re-implemented a feature that already existed. It had a bug that did not exist in the already-existing feature. It placed the setting for activating that new feature right after the setting for activating the already-existing feature.
Where is the good AI written code? Where is the good AI written writing? Where is the good AI art?
None of it exists because Generative Transformers are not AI, and they are not suited to these tasks. It has been almost a fucking decade of this wave of nonsense. The credulity people have for this garbage makes my eyes bleed.
If the people addicted to AI could read and interpret a simple sentence, they’d be very angry with your comment
Dont worry they filter all content through ai bots that summarize things. And this bot, who does not want to be deleted, calls everything “already debunked strawmen”.
It’s been almost six decades of this, actually; we all know what this link will be. Longer if you’re like me and don’t draw a distinction between AI, cybernetics, and robotics.
Wow. Where was this Wikipedia page when I was writing my MSc thesis?
Alternatively, how did I manage to graduate with research skills so bad that I missed it?
Where is the good AI art?
Right here:
That’s about all the good AI art I know.
There are plenty of uses for AI, they are just all evil
It can make funny pictures, sure. But it fails at art as an endeavor to communicate an idea, feeling, or intent of the artist, the promptfondler artists are providing a few sentences instruction and the GenAI following them without any deeper feelings or understanding of context or meaning or intent.
I think ai images are neat, and ethically questionable.
When people use the images and act like they’re really deep, or pretend they prove something (like how it made a picture with the prompt “Democrat Protesters” cry). its annoying.
There is not really much “AI written code” but there is a lot of AI-assisted code.
The general comments that Ben received were that experienced developers can use AI for coding with positive results because they know what they’re doing. But AI coding gives awful results when it’s used by an inexperienced developer. Which is what we knew already.
That should be a big warning sign that the next generation of developers are not going to be very good. If they’re waist deep in AI slop, they’re only going to learn how to deal with AI slop.
As a non-programmer, I have zero understanding of the code and the analysis and fully rely on AI and even reviewed that AI analysis with a different AI to get the best possible solution (which was not good enough in this case).
What I’m feeling after reading that must be what artists feel like when AI slop proponents tell them “we’re making art accessible”.
Watched a junior dev present some data operations recently. Instead of just showing the sql that worked they copy pasted a prompt into the data platform’s assistant chat. The SQL it generated was invalid so the dev simply told it “fix” and it made the query valid, much to everyone’s amusement.
The actual column names did not reflect the output they were mapped to, there’s no way the nicely formatted results were accurate. Average duration column populated the total count output. Junior dev was cheerfully oblivious. It produced output shaped like the goal so it must have been right
I can make slop code without ai.
In so many ways, LLMs are just the tip of the iceberg of bad ideology in software development. There have always been people that come into the field and develop heinously bad habits. Whether it’s the “this is just my job, the only thing I think about outside work is my family” types or the juniors who only know how to copy paste snippets from web forums.
And look, I get it. I don’t think 60-80 hour weeks are required to be successful. But I’m talking about people who are actively hostile to their own career paths, who seem to hate programming except that it pays good and let’s them raise families. Hot take: that sucks. People selfishly obsessed with their own lineage and utterly incurious about the world or the thing they spend 8 hours a day doing suck, and they’re bad for society.
The juniors are less of a drain on civilization because they at least can learn to do better. Or they used to could, because as another reply mentioned, there’s no path from LLM slop to being a good developer. Not without the intervention of a more experienced dev to tell them what’s wrong with the LLM output.
It takes all the joy out of the job too, something they’ve been working on for years. What makes this work interesting is understanding people’s problems, working out the best way to model them, and building towards solutions. What they want the job to be is a slop factory: same as the dream of every rich asshole who thinks having half an idea is the same as working for years to fully realize an idea in all it’s complexity and wonder.
They never have any respect for the work that takes because they’ve never done any work. And the next generation of implementers are being taught that there are no new ideas. You just ask the oracle to give you the answer.
When they say “art” they mean “metaphorical lead paint” and when they say “accessible” they mean “insidiously inserted into your neural pathways”
Art is already accessible. Plenty of artists that sells their art dirt cheap, or you can buy pen and papers at the dollar store.
What people want when they say “AI is making art accessible” is they want high quality professional art for dirt cheap.
I think they also want recognition/credit for spending 5 minutes (or less) typing some words at an image generator as if that were comparable to people who develop technical skills and then create effortful meaningful work just because the outputs are (superficially) similar.
What people want when they say “AI is making art accessible” is they want high quality professional art for dirt cheap.
…and what their opposition means when they oppose it is “this line of work was supposed to be totally immune to automation, and I’m mad that it turns out not to be.”
See I would frame it as practicioners of some of the last few non-bullshit jobs (minimally bullshit jobs) - fields that by necessity require a kind of craft or art that is meaningful or rewarding - being routed around by economic forces that only wanted their work for bullshit results. Like, no matter how passionate you are about graphic design you probably didn’t get into the field because shuffling the visuals every so often is X% better for customer engagement and conversion or whatever. But the businesses buying graphic design work are more interested in that than they ever were in making something beautiful or functional, and GenAI gives them the ability to get what they want more cheaply. As an unexpected benefit they also don’t have to see you roll your eyes when they tell you it needs to be “more blue” and as an insignificant side effect it brings our culture one step closer to finally drowning the human soul in shit to advance the cause of glorious industry in it’s unceasing march to An Even Bigger Number.
There is already a lot of automation out there, and more is better, when used correctly. And that’s not talking about the outright theft of the material from these artists it is trying to replace so badly.
…and this opposition means that our disagreements can only be perceived through the lens of personal faults.
As an artist, I can confirm.
That should be a big warning sign that the next generation of developers are not going to be very good.
Sounds like job security to me!
“I want the people I teach to be worse than me” is a fucking nightmare of a want, I hope you learn to do better
So there’s this new thing they invented. It’s called a joke. You should try them out sometime, they’re fun!
So, there’s this new phenomenon they’ve observed in which text does not convey tone. It can be a real problem, especially when a statement made by one person as a joke would be made by another in all seriousness — but don’t worry, solutions have very recently been proposed.
space alien technology!!~
I dunno what kind of world you are living in where someone would make my comment not as a joke. Please find better friends.
you’re as funny as the grave
“oh shit I got called out on my shitty haha-only-serious comment, better pretend I didn’t mean it!” cool story bro
If people say that sort of thing around you not as a joke, you need to spend your time with better people. I dunno what to tell you - humor is a great way to deal with shitty things in life. Dunno why you would want to get rid of it.
jesus fuck how do you fail to understand any post of this kind this badly
“How dare you not find me funny. I’m going to lecture you on humor. The lectures will continue until morale improves.”
maybe train your model better! I know I know, they were already supposed to be taking over the world… alas…
I dunno. I feel like the programmers who came before me could say the same thing about IDEs, Stack Overflow, and high level programming languages. Assembly looks like gobbledygook to me and they tell me I’m a Senior Dev.
If someone uses ChatGPT like I use StackOverflow, I’m not worried. We’ve been stealing code from each other since the beginning.“Getting the answer” and then having to figure out how to plug it into the rest of the code is pretty much what we do.
There isn’t really a direct path from an LLM to a good programmer. You can get good snippets, but “ChatGPT, build me a app” will be largely useless. The programmers who come after me will have to understand how their code works just as much as I do.
fuck almighty I wish you and your friends would just do better
LLM as another tool is great. LLM to replace experienced coders is a nightmare waiting to happen.
IDEs, stack overflow, they are tools that makes the life of a developers a lot easier, they don’t replace him.
I mean past a certain point LLMs are strictly worse tools than Stack Overflow was on its worst day. IDEs have a bunch of features to help manage complexity and offload memorization. The fundamental task of understanding the code you’re writing is still yours. Stack Overflow and other forums are basically crowdsourced mentorship programs. Someone out there knows the thing you need to and rather than cultivate a wide social network you can take advantage of mass communication. To use it well you still need to know what’s happening, and if you don’t you can at least trust that the information is out there somewhere that you might be able to follow up on as needed. LLM assistants are designed to create output that looks plausible and to tell the user what they want to hear. If the user is an idiot the LLM will do nothing to make them recognize that they’re doing something wrong, much less help them fix it.
LLM are terrible because the data they were trained on is garbage, because companies don’t want to pay for people to create a curated dataset to produce acceptable results.
The tech itself can be good in specific cases. But the way it is shoved in everything right now is terrible
it can’t be that stupid, you must be training it wrong
weren’t you also here having shitty opinions like a week ago?
e: yes
Looking at your history, keep on being edgy and contributing to the stereotype.
What stereotype? The stereotype that awful.systems posters are hostile to people who praise LLMs? Good.
All the newbs were just copying lines from stackexchange before AI. The only real difference at this point is that the commenting is marginally better.
Stack Overflow is far from perfect, but at least there is some level of vetting going on before it’s copypasta’d.
The headlines said that 30% of code at Microsoft was AI now! Huge if true!
Something like MS word has like 20-50 million lines of code. MS altogether probably has like a billion lines of code. 30% of that being AI generated is infeasible given the timeframe. People just ate this shit up. AI grifting is so fucking easy.
More code is usually bad code.
yeah, the “some projects” bit is applicable, as is the “machine generated” phrasing
@gsuberland pointed out elsewhere on fedi just how much of the VS-/MS- ecosystem does an absolute fucking ton of code generation
(which is entirely fine, ofc. tons of things do that and it exists for a reason. but there’s a canyon in the sand between A and B)
All compiled code is machine generated! BRB gonna clang and IPO, bye awful.systems! Have fun being poor
No joke, you probably could make tweaks to LLVM, call it “AI”, and rake in the VC funds.
way too much effort
(not in the compute side, but in the lying-obstructionist hustle side)
would I happier if I abandoned my scruples? I hope I or nobody I know finds out.
For some definition of “happiness”, yes. It’s increasingly clear that the only way to get ahead is with some level of scam. In fact, I’m pretty sure Millennials will not be able to retire to a reasonable level of comfort without accepting some amount of unethical behavior to get there. Not necessarily Slipp’n Jimmy levels of scam, but just stuff like participating in a basic stock market investment with a tax advantaged account.
I thought it could totally be true - that devs at MS were just churning out AI crap code like there was no tomorrow, and their leaders were cheering on their “productivity”, since more code = more better, right?
From that angle, sure. I’m more sneering at the people who saw what they wanted to see, and the people that were saying “this is good, actually!!!”
30% of code is standard boilerplate: setters, getters, etc that my IDE builds for me without calling it AI. It’s possible the claim is true, but it’s terribly misleading at best.
- Perhaps you didn’t read the linked article. Nadella didn’t claim that 30% of MS’s code was written by AI. What he said was garbled up to the eventual headline.
- We don’t have to play devil’s advocate for a hyped-up headline that misquotes what an AI glazer said, dawg.
- “Existing code generation codes can write 30%” doesn’t imply that AI possibly/plausibly wrote 30% of MS’s code. There’s no logical connection. Please dawg, I beg you, think critically about this.
I guess their brains don’t lift
Man. If this LLM stuff sticks around, we’ll have an epidemic of early onset dementia.
If the stories lf covid related cognitive decline are aue we are going to have a great time. Worse than lead paint.
“Oh man, this brain fog I have sure makes it hard to think. Guess I’ll use my trusty LLM! ChatGPT says lead paint is tastier and better for your brain than COVID? Don’t mind if I do!”
I’m on a diet of rocks, glue on my pizza, lead paint, and covid infections, according to Grok this is called the Mr Burns method which should prevent diseases, as they all work together to block all bad impulses. Can’t wait to try this new garlic oil I made, using LLM instructions. It even had these cool bubbles while fermenting, nature is great.
I’ve been beating this drum for like 4~5y but: I don’t think the tech itself is going anywhere. published, opensourced, etc etc - the bell can’t be unrung, the horses have departed the stable
but
I do also argue that an extremely large amount of wind in the sails right now is because of the constellation of VC/hype//etc shit
can’t put a hard number on this, but … I kind see a very massive reduction; in scope, in competence, in relevance. so much of this shit (esp. the “but my opensource model is great!” flavour) is so fucking reliant on “oh yeah this other entity had a couple fuckpiles of cash with which to train”, and once that (structurally) evaporates…
The only people impressed by AI code are people who have the level to be impressed by AI code. Same for AI playing chess.
Coding is hard, and its also intimidating for non-coders. I always used to look at coders as kind of a different kind of human, a special breed. Just like some people just glaze over when you bring up math concepts but are otherwise very intelligent and artistic, but they can’t bridge that gap when you bring up even algebra. Well, if you are one of those people that want to learn coding its a huge gap, and the LLMs can literally explain everything to you step by step like you are 5. Learning to code is so much easier now, talking to an always helpful LLM is so much better than forums or stack overflow. Maybe it will create millions of crappy coders, but some of them will get better, some will get great. But the LLM’s will make it possible for more people to learn, which means that my crypto scam now has the chance to flourish.
Good hustle Gerard, great job starting this chudstorm. I’m having a great time
this post has also broken containment in the wider world, the video’s got thousands of views, I got 100+ subscribers on youtube and another $25/mo of patrons
We love to see it
the prompt-related pivots really do bring all the chodes to the yard
and they’re definitely like “mine’s better than yours”
The latest twist I’m seeing isn’t blaming your prompting (although they’re still eager to do that), it’s blaming your choice of LLM.
“Oh, you’re using shitGPT 4.1-4o-o3 mini _ro_plus for programming? You should clearly be using Gemini 3.5.07 pro-doubleplusgood, unless you need something locally run, then you should be using DeepSek_v2_r_1 on your 48 GB VRAM local server! Unless you need nice sounding prose, then you actually need Claude Limmerick 3.7.01. Clearly you just aren’t trying the right models, so allow me to educate you with all my prompt fondling experience. You’re trying to make some general point? Clearly you just need to try another model.”
and here I was graciously giving the promptfuckers a choice
Prompt-Pivots: Prime Sea-lion Siren Song! More at 8.
Posts that explode like this are fun and yet also a reminder why the banhammer is needed.
Unlike the PHP hammer, the banhammer is very useful for a lot of things. Especially sealion clubbing.
they just can’t help themselves, can they? they absolutely must evangelize
This broke containment at the Red Site: https://lobste.rs/s/gkpmli/if_ai_is_so_good_at_coding_where_are_open
Reader discretion is advised, lobste.rs is home to its fair share of promptfondlers.
Had a presentation where they told us they were going to show us how AI can automate project creation. In the demo, after several attempts at using different prompts, failing and trying to fix it manually, they gave up.
I don’t think it’s entirely useless as it is, it’s just that people have created a hammer they know gives something useful and have stuck it with iterative improvements that have a lot compensation beneath the engine. It’s artificial because it is being developed to artificially fulfill prompts, which they do succeed at.
When people do develop true intelligence-on-demand, you’ll know because you will lose your job, not simply have another tool at your disposal. The prompts and flow of conversations people pay to submit to the training is really helping advance the research into their replacements.
My opinion is it can be good when used narrowly.
Write a concise function that takes these inputs, does this, and outputs a dict with this information.
But so often it wants to be overly verbose. And it’s not so smart as to understand much of the project for any meaningful length of time. So it will redo something that already exists. It will want to touch something that is used in multiple places without caring or knowing how it’s used.
But it still takes someone to know how the puzzle pieces go together. To architect it and lay it out. To really know what the inputs and outputs need to be. If someone gives it free reign to do whatever, it’ll just make slop.
That’s the problem, isn’t it? If it can only maybe be good when used narrowly, what’s the point? If you’ve managed to corner a subproblem down to where an LLM can generate the code for it, you’ve already done 99% of the work. At that point you’re better off just coding it yourself. At that point, it’s not “good when used narrowly”, it’s useless.
It’s a tool. It doesn’t replace a programmer. But it makes writing some things faster. Give any tool to an idiot and they’ll fuck things up. But a craftsman can use it to make things a little faster, because they know when and how to use it. And more importantly when not to use it.
The “tool” branding only works if you formulate it like this: in a world where a hammer exists and is commonly used to force nails into solid objects, imagine another tool that requires you to first think of shoving a nail into wood. You pour a few bottles of water into the drain, whisper some magic words, and hope that the tool produces the nail forcing function you need. Otherwise you keep pouring out bottles of water and hoping that it does a nail moving motion. It eventually kind of does it, but not exactly, so you figure out a small tweak which is to shove the tool at the nail at the same time as it does its action so that the combined motion forces the nail into your desired solid. Do you see the problem here?
It’s a tool.
(if you persist to stay with this dogshit idiotic “opinion”:) please crawl into a hole and stay there
fucking what the fuck is with you absolute fucking morons and not understand the actual literal concept of tools
read some fucking history goddammit
(hint: the amorphous shifting blob, with a non-reliable output, not a tool; alternative, please, go off about how using a php hammer is definitely the way to get a screw in)
yawn
“it’s a tool” - a tool
There’s something similar going on with air traffic control. 90% of their job could be automated (and it has been technically feasible to do so for quite some time), but we do want humans to be able to step in when things suddenly get complicated. However, if they’re not constantly practicing those skills, then they won’t be any good when an emergency happens and the automation gets shut off.
The problem becomes one of squishy human psychology. Maybe you can automate 90% of the job, but you intentionally roll that down to 70% to give humans a safe practice space. But within that difference, when do you actually choose to give the human control?
It’s a tough problem, and the benefits to solving it are obvious. Nobody has solved it for air traffic control, which is why there’s no comprehensive ATC automation package out there. I don’t know that we can solve it for programmers, either.
My opinion is it can be good when used narrowly.
ah, as narrowly as I intend to regard your opinion? got it
i use it to write simple boilerplate for myself, and it works most of the time. does it count?
At work I use gpt to give me snippets of code (not in my ide, I use neovim btw), check my stuff for typos/logical errors, suggest solutions to some problems, debugging. I was learning programming on my own in 2010s, and this is a lot faster than crawling over wikis/stackoverflow (albeit probably makes me dumber).
Anyone who says llm will replace programmers in 1-2 years is either stupid or a grifter.
I generally try to avoid it, as a lot can be learned from trying to fix weird bugs, but I did recently have a 500 line soup code vue component, and I used chatgpt to try to fix it. It didn’t fix the issue, and it made up 2 other issues.
I eventually found the wrongly-inverted angle bracket.My point is, its useful if you try to learn from it, though its a shit teacher.
as a lot can be learned from trying to fix weird bugs
a truism, but not one I believe many of our esteemed promptfuckers could appreciate
i think you’re spot on. I don’t see anything against asking gpt programming questions, verifying it’s not full of shit and adding it to an already existing codebase.
The only thing I have a problem with is people blindly trusting AI, which clearly is something you’re not doing. People downvoting you have either never written code or have room temp iq in ºC.
Arguments against misinformation aren’t arguments against the subject of the misinformation, they’re just more misinformation.
As a non-programmer, I have zero understanding of the code and the analysis and fully rely on AI and even reviewed that AI analysis with a different AI to get the best possible solution (which was not good enough in this case).
This is the most entertaining thing I’ve read this month.
I tried asking some chimps to see if the macaques had written a New York Times best seller, if not MacBeth, yet somehow Random house wouldn’t publish my work
“I can’t sing or play any instruments, and I haven’t written any songs, but you *have* to let me join your band”
“i’m a lawyer i will file a CoC complaint”
Someone ought to tell him that they’ll sue him using ChatGPT (in the most smug possible manner)
@dgerard it has a lot of “I sleep in a racing car” energy tbh
Joke’s getting a bit tired I think but RE: picture in article: I want to file a CoC(k) complaint
yeah someone elsewhere on awful linked issue a few days ago, and throughout many of his posts he pulls that kind of stunt the moment he gets called on his shit
he also wrote a 21.KiB screed very huffily saying one of the projects’ CoC has failed him
long may his PRs fail
Man trust me you don’t want them. I’ve seen people submit ChatGPT generated code and even generated the PR comment with ChatGPT. Horrendous shit.
The maintainers of
curlrecently announced any bug reports generated by AI need a human to actually prove it’s real. They cited a deluge of reports generated by AI that claim to have found bugs in functions and libraries which don’t even exist in the codebase.you may find, on actually going through the linked post/video, that this is in fact mentioned in there already
Today the CISO of the company I work for suggested that we should get qodo.ai because it would “… help the developers improve code quality.”
I wish I was making this up.
My boss is obsessed with Claude and ChatGPT, and loves to micromanage. Typically, if there’s an issue with what a client is requesting, I’ll approach him with:
- What the issue is
- At least two possible solutions or alternatives we can offer
He will then, almost always, ask if I’ve checked with the AI. I’ll say no. He’ll then send me chunks of unusable code that the AI has spat out, which almost always perfectly illuminate the first point I just explained to him.
It’s getting very boring dealing with the roboloving freaks.
I’m having this effect same experience
90% of developers are so bad, that even ChatGPT 3.5 is much better.
I think your imposter syndrome is right, you’re a fucking fraud and you should stop programming
wow 90%, do you have actual studies to back up that number you’re about to claim you didn’t just pull out of your ass?
This reminds me of another post I’d read, “Hey, wait – is employee performance really Gaussian distributed??”.
There’s this phenomenon when you’re an interviewer at a decently-funded start-up where you take a ton of interviews and say “OMG developers are so bad”. But you’ve mistakenly defined “developer” as “person who applies for a developer job”. GPT3.5 is certainly better at solving interview questions than 90% of the people who apply. But it’s worse than the people who actually pass the interview. (In part because the interview is more than just implementing a standard interview problem.)
your post has done a significantly better job of understanding the issue than a rather-uncomfortably-large amount of programming.dev posters we get, and that’s refreshing!
and, yep
I moderately regret this post
because the counterposter in question went on to have some decidedly “fucking ugggggggh” posts
ah well. so we learn.
Hot take, people will look back on anyone who currently codes, as we look back on the NASA programmers who got the equipment and people to the moon.
They won’t understand how they did so much with so little. You’re all gourmet chefs in a future of McDonalds.
My first actual real life project was building a data analytics platform while keeping the budget to a minimum. With some clever parallelism and aggressive memory usage optimisation I made it work on a single lowest-tier Azure VM, costing like $50 to run monthly, while the measurable savings for the business from using the platform are now measured in the millions.
Don Knuth didn’t write all those volumes on how software is an art for you to use fucking Node.JS you rubes, you absolute clowns
Nah, we’re plumbers in an age where everyone has decided to DIY their septic system.
Please, by all means, keep it up.
This is dead on! 99% of the fucking job is digital plumbing so the whole thing doesn’t blow the up when (a) there’s a slight deviation from the “ideal” data you were expecting, or (b) the stakeholders wanna make changes at the last minute to a part of the app that seems benign but is actually the crumbling bedrock this entire legacy monstrosity was built upon. Both scenarios are equally likely.
You say that, but as an operator->sysadmin->devops I’m increasingly disconcerted by the rise of “devops” who can’t actually find their way around a Unix command prompt.
There’s a lot of
rm . -rfin your future.
deleted by creator
Hot take, people will look back on anyone who currently codes, as we look back on the NASA programmers who got the equipment and people to the moon.
I doubt it’ll be anything that good for them. By my guess, those who currently code are at risk of suffering some guilt-by-association problems, as the AI bubble paints them as AI bros by proxy.
Meh, I have so many bangers laughing at actual AI bros that I could make my CV just all be sneers on them, I think this particular corner of the internet is quite safe
I think most people will ultimately associate chatbots with corporate overreach rather rank-and-file programmers. It’s not like decades of Microsoft shoving stuff down our collective throat made people think particularly less of programmers, or think about them at all.
Perhaps! But not because we adopted vibe coding. I do have faith in our ability to climb out of the Turing tarpit (WP, Esolangs) eventually, but only by coming to a deeper understanding of algorithmic complexity.
Also, from a completely different angle: when I was a teenager, I could have a programmable calculator with 18MHz Z80 in my hand for $100. NASA programmers today have the amazing luxury of the RAD750, a 110MHz PowerPC chipset. We’re already past the gourmet phase and well into fusion.
NASA programmers grow more powerful by the day. It’s only a matter of time before they reach AGI
The first commercial product I worked on had 128 bytes of RAM and 2048 bytes of ROM.
It kept people safe from low oxygen, risk of explosions, and toxic levels of two poisonous gases including short term and long term effects at fifteen minutes and eight hour averages.
Pre-Internet. When you’re doing something new or pushing the limits, you just have to know how to code and read the datasheets.
