My employer is trying to get people to use AI more, too.
I’m skeptical of AI, but I’m finding it useful for menial tasks - things that you’d otherwise automate using an AST-based codemod tool (like jscodeshift, libcst codemod, etc), a hacky find/replace, or do by hand (boring, tedious work that I’d rather not do). Giving the AI system an example patch for something like migrating away from a legacy API, and saying “do this same thing across these 200 other files”, can have pretty good results.
In general, it seems like a good tool for things where the entire process is well-defined - the prompt and context provide all the info it needs - and I include example code in the context.
I don’t trust it for brand new code in a large existing codebase… Even the best AI models still get a lot of things wrong.
For sure. I copy JSON from swagger and get a Typescript interface all the time. It’s boring stuff to do manually, and yeah there are definitely tools I could use for this, but it’s not as easy. It’s basic stuff, and the AIs can do it reliably.
I have a bunch of chat contexts for things like this. SQL -> DTO object, JSON -> Typescript, etc. So it’s kinda a swiss army knife kind of tool where it can do a bunch of basic stuff. Sure there are specific tools for each of these things, but it’s easier to have all of those basic functions in one place.
But this week I was doing some very complicated logic that required in depth knowledge of the data structures and consideration for a whole bunch of edge cases… so I didn’t even touch an LLM this week. Though next week I might add some new tables to the DB, I’ll think about the data relationships and get that right, and then I’ll have the AIs deal with all of the boring shit involved in getting it to the FE.
Yep. There’s lots it can do, but more I wouldn’t trust it with. Useful for certain tasks.
The code you hand produced is made an AI.
It just stands for “Actual Intelligence” in this case. 😌
“Why should I? He’s the one who sucks.” — M. Bolton
It’s a tool and has its place. For me it’s currentl place is replacing Google searches about programming stuff. This is not to say the AI answers are perfect, they are just generally a better use of my time than Google results because Google has gotten so bad.
But you get ai answers with Google now so… It’s basically the same.
Corollary:
The job market will be flooded with a shitload of junior devs who never actually earned their degree in the coming years, and anyone older than a mid-gen zoomer is gonna be able to pretty much write their own check.
Honestly this is one of the things that was slightly tempting me to become a programmer, but like actually learn how to do it not overly they on ai
Instead though I’m becoming a machinist cuz I’m better with my hands
Ngl I kinda want to get into metalworking. It looks super fun, tbh.
Just think though what you will be doing for that check you write yourself, going through mountains of incomprehensible AI code. Just make sure you add 20g to whatever salary you were thinking.
I spent a big chunk of my career going through mountains of incomprehensible human-generated code. I eventually learned that it was generally easier to just start over from scratch. At the same time I learned that nothing makes corporate bosses’ heads explode faster than telling them that their codebase sucks and needs to be rewritten from scratch. My solution to this fundamental dilemma was to become a school bus driver.
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Maybe I should be glad I never got the dev jobs I wanted and was relegated to help desk.
For me, developing applications was a joy … but only when I was left completely alone to do everything by myself. Such opportunities were just becoming rarer and rarer.
20g? like gold coins?
No like 20 extra grams of that guud
Gotta get my nut
With the ever rising prices of gold that might not be a bad idea
You left off a zero
If I’m gonna have to un-fuck your AI slop codebase, you better fucking believe I’m going to charge you through the nose for it.
Maybe the 20 was meant as monthly lol
Applicants should be asking employers: how extensive has your firm’s use of AI generated coding tools been over the last few years?
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The hard part of software development is not the coding. The hard part is coming up with something actionable, reasonably well defined, internally consistent and technically possible from limited bits and pieces of information, more often than not all of them vague and contradictory; and they change if you ask the same stakeholder again a day later.
I don’t see that part getting replaced by AI any time soon.
Most of my career was spent working for small shops that provided custom software for small-ish clients. The absolute number one skillset required was the ability to talk to clients, understand their business and figure out what they needed the software to actually do. Not only are these skills not taught in Computer Science programs, it’s never even suggested that you might possibly need them at some point in your career. In my opinion, this is why CS types cling so tenaciously to a rigid division of labor in software development: they want somebody else to do this and then hand them a well-written requirements document.
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Important distinction is “Computer Science”. My degree is “Software Engineer” and project management was a significant part of the program. We had a junior group project that started with our class doing a client interview of the teacher to extract what the project requirements where. I think a lot of people don’t know that software engineer programs are even an option.
It’s nice to see academia adapting (somewhat) to the work environment, even if it took a few decades.
Neither does my boss, he’s not completely delusional. He’s a dev himself. He’s just the normal amount of technooptimist delusional, luckily
Your code could be what was ai generated.
Hey all, vibe coder here. Let me preface with a fuck microsoft.
Anyway, I’m not in a programming job, just a tedious one with decent pay. Since I am tech savvy and they have no trainers to bring up my proficiencies, I spend down time vibe coding my job.
It was a real piece of shit at first, but then co-pilot transformed me into some sort of code architect wizard. I am certainly not a programmer, but I know how to map out where functions and classses should live, and how the folder hierarchy should look. Yelling OOP, “best practices”, DRY and what the “tree /f” should look like helps a lot. Also being really snarky when it’s wrong or it’ll just plow along.
I want to discuss because I think we all agree to some extent that AI is the next surveillance tool and we’re probably the biggest targets for big corpro. Like, is using it maybe awful? Or maybe my success with AI is more correlated witb my effort than the tool? Is anyone else seeing incredible return from their ventures with AI? Do you see your bosses peddle AI but don’t understand any meaningful ways to apply it?
Let me preface with a fuck microsoft.
Yet you’re praising copilot, and likely using an editor built and maintained by Microsoft (VS Code). I’m confused.
I can hate MS teams shitty app, or how they are using AI to blow up kids in Gaza. I still get value out of a platform like Windows, GitHub, or co-pilot. I would rather be coding on a framework laptop with an offline AI on fedora linux with a vpn and locked down firefox and codium, but that’s just not what I’m running with at my job.
I’m a software engineer and I’ll discuss it with you, rather than just down voting and walking away.
Your use case for AI allows it to excel. Writing self contained scripts and small pieces of functionality for automation is a great use case for AI, but it isn’t what software engineers do. There is a saying that you won’t have a design problem in a code base under 10,000 lines, then all you have is design problems, and this is what AI is bad at. It can’t maintain or update or extend much larger code bases, and it can’t interpret user vagueries into concrete requirements and features.
For me it is useful for prototyping, and for boilerplate code where I know exactly what I want but its faster to prompt it than to type it all out. I wouldn’t use it for anything critical without carefully reviewing every line it generates, which would take longer than just writing the damn code.
I also have a big problem with the reliance a lot of people are building on AI. Remember how every other service you’ve used goes through ‘enshitification’? This will happen to AI. Once they need to be profitable and the shareholders need to get paid, the features will get worse and the prices will go up, and you will have to pay those prices if you can’t work without it. Just something to bear in mind.
Use it if it’s useful. Don’t become reliant on it. You seem interested in coding, why not try coding something simple yourself? Try looking up the documention to see if you can use your wet brain first, and only go to the AI after. You might find you actually enjoy it, or solve problems faster because you remember how you solved them before.
You seem interested in coding, why not try coding something simple yourself?
Actually, the first script for the app I did myself. It was a calculation taken out of excel. I made it with better decision-making and compliance to standards. It was simple, but I used AI to review and realized the gap between my speed and skill and the AI, which is where the dependence began. The codebase is well beyond 10,000 at this point, but it’s pretty close to done.
This was done in python, but I mostly dabble in engineering hobbies using C, my favorite being my QMK split keyboard. Again, lot of dependence, but in both cases, I’m learning way more than I ever did spending $40k at college. I should look up software engineering because it seems interesting.
code architect wizard
Okay, this is some pretty decent trolling. In the forest of low hanging fruit the current global political atmosphere has brought us, I’m glad there’s still people out there putting in the effort to hand craft some decent bait.
You give me hope, Gaja0. Keep up the good work.
Hi. Welcome to Lemmy. Where most people passionately hate AI. Some for good reason. Some out of pure hate only ever seen in a conservative when faced with any sort of change.
As I’m typing this, your comment has a “socre” (is the the right term for vote count?) Of 1. You will son find you and I are both way more under voted than we should be.
I once say someone at like -25 for saying “the main value Spotify has for me is that their AI helps me discover new music”.
Edit: when ever I say something stupid or make a mistake and send up getting downvoted, I take pride in keeping my comment up. It’s only human to make mistakes, and I hate people who pretend to be perfect. But since in this case I’m jumping into the shark waters with you, I’ll delete this when I get bored
Edit 2: changed trying for typing
He’s late for the fad and should know better by now.
You should see my former bosses, when everyone else was slowly realising AI isn’t a magic tool to solve everything they tripled down and implemented AI into every possible single process in the company.
The AI bullshit is like 40% the reason I left, the other 60% being micromanagement.
