Comment by jesuscript | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jesuscript | Hacker News Reader

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AI/ML will solve some great problems, many that are critical. Similar to how Wix solves your basic webpage for the average person. Does Wix solve anything for your typical enterprise or SAAS app? Even if it did, would these institutions not manage to add a new layer to the layer cake?

It's kind of been one of my main critiques of companies like Palantir. You really can't just dump a company's data into the big ML tumbler and expect useful/sellable products to just pop out. Take a random use case like, I don't know, Pepsi. Maybe Pepsi can get some insights about their supply chain and customer preferences. Alright? Okay. Did the world end because that happened? Not really.

Shifting gears back to programmers - AI will be a super smart programmer that will write a bunch of your code. I worked with some super smart programmers, and they can manage to write a lot of super smart code that eventually becomes a clusterfuck too.

We'll just go from unwrapping human shit code, to unwrapping AI shit code (or even better, unwrapping a mix of human shit and AI shit). The job prospects here are even greater than you imagine.

Long as you maintain the belief in the fundamental truth, that anything in existence is capable of writing shit code, then the world will never end for programmers.

Sometimes though we shouldn't have the AI write the code first.

So many times, I look over things people copy and pasted piece by piece from blogs and stackoverflow, when if they thought about it for 5 minutes, they'd realize a simpler implementation would have worked and been easier to write in the end. AI, if chatgpt is any indication, is moving toward overly flowerly and long prose while telling lies, that is stuff that looks "impressive" at a glance like the large ornate class hiearchies of java and c++ in the 90s looked but are things that could be done in a shell script.

I am worried then that like stackoverflow, AI will make a generation of developers who are extremely lazy and not critically thinking, just like stackoverflow did, and leave more of a mess for us to pick up after. Of course, in the midst of this, management won't know the difference. Just like chatgpt sounding impressive as it tells falsehoods, AI-code will look impressive to fools.

Yeah I think LLMs are really amazing and I'm open minded about how they can contribute to the craft of creating software. I've played around with these for generating code and it's very cool how much can be done.

BUT. Honestly I just see a lot of code review and refactoring of shitty AI-generated code in my future. And I think people who lean on this heavily are going to struggle to progress... Just like when I get the whiff of code copied verbatim from SO, it's going to put a sour taste in my mouth when I get a series of reviews with a bunch of poorly factored AI generated code.

But maybe it's more likely that old fogeys like me with our backwards beliefs are not long for this world. But I dunno, I haven't yet been replaced by the hordes of actual humans crowdsourcing this on SO, so color me a bit skeptical!

> I am worried then that like stackoverflow, AI will make a generation of developers who are extremely lazy and not critically thinking

If you take someone already hard working and able to think critically, with enough time and practice they can grow into being a decent developer. The learning resources they have available don't determine their long term work ethic or bar for quality.

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