TechTakes

I got an AI PR in one of my projects once. It re-implemented a feature that already existed. It had a bug that did not exist in the already-existing feature. It placed the setting for activating that new feature right after the setting for activating the already-existing feature.

The only people impressed by AI code are people who have the level to be impressed by AI code. Same for AI playing chess.

Where is the good AI written code? Where is the good AI written writing? Where is the good AI art?

None of it exists because Generative Transformers are not AI, and they are not suited to these tasks. It has been almost a fucking decade of this wave of nonsense. The credulity people have for this garbage makes my eyes bleed.

This broke containment at the Red Site: https://lobste.rs/s/gkpmli/if_ai_is_so_good_at_coding_where_are_open

Reader discretion is advised, lobste.rs is home to its fair share of promptfondlers.

The general comments that Ben received were that experienced developers can use AI for coding with positive results because they know what they’re doing. But AI coding gives awful results when it’s used by an inexperienced developer. Which is what we knew already.

That should be a big warning sign that the next generation of developers are not going to be very good. If they're waist deep in AI slop, they're only going to learn how to deal with AI slop.

As a non-programmer, I have zero understanding of the code and the analysis and fully rely on AI and even reviewed that AI analysis with a different AI to get the best possible solution (which was not good enough in this case).

What I'm feeling after reading that must be what artists feel like when AI slop proponents tell them "we're making art accessible".

Coding is hard, and its also intimidating for non-coders. I always used to look at coders as kind of a different kind of human, a special breed. Just like some people just glaze over when you bring up math concepts but are otherwise very intelligent and artistic, but they can't bridge that gap when you bring up even algebra. Well, if you are one of those people that want to learn coding its a huge gap, and the LLMs can literally explain everything to you step by step like you are 5. Learning to code is so much easier now, talking to an always helpful LLM is so much better than forums or stack overflow. Maybe it will create millions of crappy coders, but some of them will get better, some will get great. But the LLM's will make it possible for more people to learn, which means that my crypto scam now has the chance to flourish.

Good hustle Gerard, great job starting this chudstorm. I’m having a great time

Baldur Bjarnason's given his thoughts on Bluesky:

My current theory is that the main difference between open source and closed source when it comes to the adoption of “AI” tools is that open source projects generally have to ship working code, whereas closed source only needs to ship code that runs.

I’ve heard so many examples of closed source projects that get shipped but don’t actually work for the business. And too many examples of broken closed source projects that are replacing legacy code that was both working just fine and genuinely secure. Pure novelty-seeking

The headlines said that 30% of code at Microsoft was AI now! Huge if true!

Something like MS word has like 20-50 million lines of code. MS altogether probably has like a billion lines of code. 30% of that being AI generated is infeasible given the timeframe. People just ate this shit up. AI grifting is so fucking easy.