Sam Altman argued it was "already feels difficult to remember how much effort it really took" for coders to write software.

Altman’s remarks in his tweet drew an overwhelmingly negative reaction.

“You’re welcome,” one user responded. “Nice to know that our reward is our jobs being taken away.”

Others called him a “f***ing psychopath” and “scum.”

“Nothing says ‘you’re being replaced’ quite like a heartfelt thank you from the guy doing the replacing,” one user wrote.

  • MangoCats@feddit.itEnglish
    1·
    2 hours ago

    “how does someone who isn’t proficient in bash tell whether the bash script that AI has generated is a good one or a bad one?”

    What I find most bash scripts to be lacking is consideration of error cases, edge cases, faulty inputs, etc. It’s pretty trivial to make a script to copy some files from here to there, but what if the source files are missing, what if the destination has write permission errors, what if the destination already has files with the same names?

    My latest Gemini script writing conversation started with “do this in a bash script” and it gave me a nice short script that did that. Then it asked about the edge cases, one by one, and if/how I wanted to handle them. 4/5 of its observations were relevant to the task and I told it to proceed with code to handle those (error out / show help / prompt for additional input / …), which it added with informative comments about what it was intending to do, and the other cases didn’t make sense for the larger picture (which I hadn’t explained to it, so no real fault there…)

    Yeah, it’s still bash glop, and that “shopt -s nullglob” is one of those things that I have to look up when I see it to be sure it does what I think it does, but if you have any reasonable understanding of bash scripts, this is one of the more readable bash scripts I have encountered. As a professional charged with creating the script - it’s your job to be sure it’s right, not the AI’s job, not any more than it was your text editor’s responsibility to get it right in the past - even with code completion tools. The AI is a tool that helps put something together for you efficiently, code-completion gone wild, but it’s no more responsible for that code than a chainsaw is responsible for where a tree falls.

    And when it all goes to shit, who will fix it if we have allowed human proficiency to wither away and die?

    8 billion of us are so far down that rabbit hole in so many areas, we’d better make sure it doesn’t all go to shit because if/when it does we’ll be lucky to have 800,000 humans surviving even 50 years after the SHTF.