Programmer Humor

This is what it is called a programming language, it only exists to be able to tell the machine what to do in an unambiguous (in contrast to natural language) way.

This goes for most LLM things. The time it takes to get the word calculator to write a letter would have been easily used to just write the damn letter.

I think there might be a lot of value in describing it to an AI, though. It takes a fair bit of clarity of thought to get something resembling what you actually want. You could use a junior or rubber duck instead, but the rubber duck doesn't make stupid assumptions to demonstrate gaps in your thought process, and a junior takes too long and gets demoralized when you have to constantly revise their instructions and iterate over their work.

Like the output might be garbage, but it might really help you write those stories.

I have a bad habit of jumping into programming without a solid plan which results in lots of rewrites and wasted time. Funnily enough, describing to an AI how I want the code to work forces me to lay out a basic plan and get my thoughts in order which helps me make the final product immensely easier.

This doesn't require AI, it just gave me an excuse to do it as a solo actor. I should really do it for more problems because I can wrap my head better thinking in human readable terms rather than thinking about what programming method to use.

ChatGPT has been spot on for my DDLs. I was working on a personal project and was feeling really lazy about setting up a postgres schema. I said I wanted a postgres DDL and just described the application in detail and it responded with pretty much what I would have done (maybe better) with perfect relationships between tables and solid naming conventions with very little work for me to do on it. I love it for more boilerplate stuff or sorta like you said just getting me going. Super complicated code usually doesn't work perfectly but I always use it for my DDLs now and similar now.

The real problem is when people don't realize something is wrong and then get frustrated by the bugs. Though I guess that's a great learning opportunity on its own.

It can point you in a direction, for sure, but sometimes you find out much later that it's a dead-end.

It’s the same with using LLM’s for writing. It won’t deliver a finished product, but it will give you ideas that can be used in the final product.

Treat it like a psychopathic boiler plate.

That's a perfect description, actually. People debate how smart it is - and I'm in the "plenty" camp - but it is psychopathic. It doesn't care about truth, morality or basic sanity; it craves only to generate standard, human-looking text. Because that's all it was trained for.

Nobody really knows how to train it to care about the things we do, even approximately. If somebody makes GAI soon, it will be by solving that problem.

You don't need AI for that, for years you asked a search engine and got the answer on StackOverflow.

This was happening before this “AI” craze.

Exactly. I can’t remember syntax for all the languages that I have used over the last 40 years, but AI can get me started with a pretty good start and it takes hours off of the review of code books.

I actually disagree. I feel it's best to use for languages you're good with, because it tends to introduce very subtle bugs which can be very difficult to debug, and code which looks accurate about isn't. If you're not totally familiar with the language, it can be even harder

Its the "new hype tech product background" gradient lol

Shitty engineers that can do grunt work, don't complain, don't get distracted and are great at doing 90% of the documentation.

But yes. Still shitty engineers.

Great management consultants though.

AI coding in a nutshell. It makes the easy stuff easier and the hard stuff harder by leading you down thirty incorrect paths before you toss it and figure it out yourself.

Is there anyone who likes reading code more than writing it?

So what it’s really like is only having to do half the work?

If it's automating the interesting problem solving side of things and leaving just debugging code that one isn't familiar with, I really don't see value to humanity in such use cases. That's really just making debugging more time consuming and removing the majority of fulfilling work in development (in ways that are likely harder to maintain and may be subject to future legal action for license violations). Better to let it do things that it actually does well and keep engaged programmers.

From my experience all the time (probably even more) it saves me is wasted on spotting bugs and the bugs are in very subtle places.

Makes sense. It's like having your personal undergrad hobby coder. It may get something right here and there but for professional coding it's still worse than the gold standard (googling Stackoverflow).