A new Coddy Developer Survey found that four in five developers, 80%, say their use of AI has felt more like a dependence than an advantage.
I don’t really derive a sense of accomplishment from it, so I don’t get the dopamine hit. It’s more write a simple bash script to do X because I hate working in that syntax, or this library has terrible documentation, tell me how I’m supposed to use it.
You still need to read and understand everything it writes, but it’s easier to validate something is correct sometimes rather than figure out the correct way to do something.
Also the freaking essays it writes as comments burying the useful information in the equivalent of a recipe blog post when you really just need assumptions about input, and side effects.
I definitely don’t get the high of coding anymore, but I do get a high of solving complex issues in architectural designs. I realized the high I chased when coding previously have shifted from coding design, to systems design.
I never got a high from coding, now compiling and seeing your tests have a green [PASS] next to them is a different story.
I had this experience once. We have a ChatGPT license where I work, and I asked it to configure a switch that I wasn’t familiar with. I simply described in words what network architecture I wanted and it did it! It even made some nice-looking documentation.
But, then I tried the new configs, and they didn’t work. It turns out there were some key syntax things it got wrong. And the documentation was wrong on top of that, with incorrect diagrams, and when I asked it to fix it it made different errors I the diagrams in different places. On balance, I still saved some time over reading all the manuals and figuring out the syntaxes myself, but only because I made my own documentation with the results that worked. If I had trusted the AI I would be sunk.
I’ve concluded that AI gives the illusion of competence, like a overly confident new manager. This can be very attractive to a less experienced person. But it’s really guessing, just like we all are. It can just guess after actually “reading” all the manuals. I haven’t used AI to write anything more than simple configurations and helper scripts. If I did want to use AI for more it would be in more of a pair-programming context. I might have a window open where I describe some things and ask for analysis, but I wouldn’t just run anything it does blindly.
Pair programming/writing/creating is exactly how AI is meant to be used. It is an augmentor not a replacement for human competence. The person using it still has to do the thinking, qc, and directing, not take the first output as final.
And always with skepticism!
A couple other cool things I’ve seen experts do:
The first: finding bugs which, considering the scarcity of humans capable of bugfinding doesn’t seem so bad in our weeks with finite hours.
Next, really tedious work that experts do know how to do, but simply wouldn’t prioritize because they have lives. A big one seems to be reverse engineering, like to give new life to ancient hardware. “I connected <ewastey thing> over USB at <IP>, give me control.”
My coworkers use Claude like an actual brain subscription, and I have started to write off everything they say as if it came straight from the AI. They have gained so much unearned confidence about shit they have no idea about, and have even argued with the development team about it.
I got into an argument about how in band and out of band DTMF work with one of them for a solid half hour before they finally admitted they didn’t actually know but were going off what claude said.
I wanted to punch them for wasting everyone’s time. If you don’t understand stop answering definitively like you’re the expert.
Some customers have switched to using AI emails too. Customers that used to ask extremely low level questions will now submit a 2 page long email with action items and explinations about why our product does X, Y, Z, and I have to read it twice to figure out their problem isn’t even in the action items because the AI hyper focused on the wrong thing.
Like ok thanks you dumped the entire app log into Claude and asked it “why no work” and Claude read an error message that’s benign and now the customer is demanding fixes for something that is not and never has been a problem and won’t actually solve the root issue.
But just think of those billable hours
Considering the vast amounts of knowledge it has at its disposal, I can only conclude that it’s not very smart at applying it. A person with a fraction of that knowledge will produce better results.
So it has more access to information, but the results are poor compared to a person.
The important thing to remember is that it actually has zero access to information, because that’s not how LLMs work.
At their core, they’re vector databases, and they’re trying to probabilistically come up with the next most likely token in a stream of tokens found in the DB. You can manipulate the stream by injecting text such as the content of existing files (which becomes more tokens) into the stream, but it never actually understands any of it.
That’s why hallucinations are inherently unavoidable. It’s really all just hallucinations. It’s just that you can sometimes get useful text from their hallucinations if they happen to comport with reality.
Well, vector fields are information. But they have no understanding. The number 1 might be followed by 2 in 99.999% of cases, but it has no function to explain why, or to contextualize a scenario where that might be wrong.
Well, yeah…
Most of the time it doesn’t work, rarely it does.
Intermittent rewards are what we’re wired for. That’s why random rewards/acknowledgment tickle our brains more than standard rewards we know are coming.
That’s the reason there’s such a big push “to just try it”.
It’s the same strategy the first crack dealers used
It feels so weird to read lemmy, as if I’m living in a different reality. To me, most of the time an agent can oneshot a ticket (if it has a good, non-vague description) or at least do 80-90% that can be fixed with several changes or prompts, and only odd tasks need more manual investigations than that.
Surely you still need a dev oversight and someone needs to do tech plans & lead the projects, but that’s not like anything people experience here.
For the little stuff sure. Most of us are the ones that handle the odd tasks.
Ai coding is like the loom for society but you have to know how to use it.
People claiming its garbage slop are 2 years out of date on current models.
To all those people I suggest you familiarize yourself with it as whats coming is going to ruin the world but not because its slop because its going to be capable.
AI can handle boilerplate and any coding project that has been done ad nauseam. AI can’t handle legacy system quirks, creative problem solving, or massive projects with changing requirements. I don’t think the AI bubble will be around long enough for them to solve these shortcomings or the issues of expanding scope and scale leading to hallucinations.
To me AI is just impressive enough to convince managers and inexperienced developers it is the future. I’ll believe that when a Fortune 500 company rebuilds their whole entire tech stack via AI, and I think AI could solve climate change before it could do that haha.
I disagree with much of your ai cant deal with complexity.
I dunno i am just saying be prepared because its going to blind side everyone thinking its a fad
AI can’t handle legacy system quirks, creative problem solving, or massive projects with changing requirements.
I think that disliking ai - for whatever good reason - makes people shun the reality, cherry-pick articles/studies etc, but we have to be honest: We all do that - even when we try to balance it, so that is normal behaviour within a spectrum. However, current anti-ai leaning do end up blinded to how fast things are moving with this technology because it is moving so fast. There are massive burnouts just from those following AI development every day, and they constantly have to expand/narrow their scope. If anyone takes a few days of in their field of interest, it feels like they have to sprint to catch up. It is accelerating and is no longer confined to model inventions from big corps with mega models - developers are building ‘cognitive architectures’ around the current llm’ limitations.
So to me, these ‘AI can’t …’ type of sentences are always changing as they become yesterdays ‘AI cant …’ sentences within days or weeks. It is a great ‘moving goalpost’ tho, as there are a lot of human level evolutionary abilities lacking from current models. But every second, one+ of millions of people are working towards adding that next ‘AI cant …’ sentence to yesterdays claims, and things are moving fast.
I think it is vital for everyone - in all corners of human ‘belief-space’ - to keep in active touch with this technology, as much as they can muster, agree they are angry but try to shake some hard assumptions/‘loosen up’, see where it is headed and adjust their expectations/plans for the future accordingly. Anger is an easy but dangerous thing as it can make us refuse to acknowledge something that we need to prepare for. We’ve all been there - many many times, and we all know how we think and act in anger. Now, is a bad time for that. Please familiarise your self with ai tech.
Not starting an argument/debate (i’m burned out atmo), just a long-winded observation really…
Haha I feel the long winded observation, I get it. I’m open to being wrong about AI, but you missed the main point of my argument
I don’t think the AI bubble will be around long enough for them to solve these shortcomings or the issues of expanding scope and scale leading to hallucinations.
Right now AI simply can’t (or at least last time I checked because you’re correct the technology moves very fast) do the things I mentioned.
These things, in my mind, are the gatekeepers for profitability if AI can figure these and any other issues and turn a profit before the bubble bursts, then yes we’d have an AI future. If we really get down to brass tacks (and now that I’m really thinking about it) that is the objective issue with AI, it isn’t profitable yet, it doesn’t matter if it can code a simulation of every life form on this planet if it isn’t making money. If it can solve this problem however, then yes I’d agree, everyone saying “AI can’t…” with eat their words seasoned with a little salt.
To address your accusation of cherry picking articles and advice for keeping in touch, I was kind of forced to cherry pick while attempting to keep in touch? When I was researching modern developments in AI all I was fed was an excessive amount of marketing material (this is a red flag for obvious reasons), I had to intentionally break good faith and search for things like “The issues with claude code” to get something written by a person who did not have a conflict of interest when it came to reviewing AI
I’d love to see examples of AI proving the naysayers wrong, but I was either seeing nothing but hype or enough evidence to remain skeptical of the technology.
What I’m trying to say is that I’ve tried to follow AI, I’ve tried to be impartial, but combined with what I am seeing, what I experienced as a software developer, and the economic side of AI, I don’t see any sort of AI revolution akin to the printing press or the internet. Just another race to wealth fueled by hype and some very impressive math.
I do think that outside of coding AI has some really great promises, like being able to design an Excel spreadsheet in plain English is amazing for anyone afraid of Excel, so microsoft copilot has my respect within the M365 suite, granted I don’t know what the Excel wizards have to say about the matter, but I think your average 9 to 5 desk worker whose experience with Excel revolved around accidentally opening it once would love copilot.
I think claude fable could organize, plan, execute, basically any coding task and human level complexity…
it’s like gambling. you hope it churns out good stuff – and some of the time, it does! lucky!
then you try your luck again. and again with small “fixes”. and again.
That’s only if you have no idea what you’re doing with it. Depending on your skill level in development, that is not the case at all.
i don’t think that applies at all.
if you have no idea what you’re doing, you’re surely going to think all the churned out stuff is good.
You can think whatever you want, go ahead.
