this post was submitted on 15 Sep 2024
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[–] [email protected] 273 points 2 months ago (44 children)

Wow, the text generator that doesn't actually understand what it's "writing" is making mistakes? Who could have seen that coming?

I once asked one to write a basic 50-line Python program (just to flesh things out), and it made so many basic errors that any first-year CS student could catch. Nobody should trust LLMs with anything related to security, FFS.

[–] [email protected] 59 points 2 months ago (7 children)

My experience with ChatGPT goes like this:

  • Write me a block of code that makes x thing
  • Certainly, here's your code
  • Me: This is wrong.
  • You're right, this is the correct version
  • Me: This is wrong again.
  • You're right, this is the correct version
  • Me: Wrong again, you piece of junk.
  • I'm sorry, this is the correct version.
  • (even more useless code) ... and so on.
[–] [email protected] 31 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (3 children)

I interviewed someone who used AI (CoPilot, I think), and while it somewhat worked, it gave the wrong implementation of a basic algorithm. We pointed out the mistake, the developer fixed it (we had to provide the basic algorithm, which was fine), and then they refactored and AI spat out the same mistake, which the developer again didn't notice.

AI is fine if you know what you're doing and can correct the mistakes it makes (i.e. use it as fancy code completion), but you really do need to know what you're doing. I recommend new developers avoid AI like the plague until they can use it to cut out the mundane stuff instead of filling in their knowledge gaps. It'll do a decent job at certain prompts (i.e. generate me a function/class that...), but you're going to need to go through line-by-line and make sure it's actually doing the right thing. I find writing code to be much faster than reading and correcting code so I don't bother w/ AI, but YMMV.

An area where it's probably ideal is finding stuff in documentation. Some projects are huge and their search sucks, so being able to say, "find the docs for a function in library X that does..." I know what I want, I just may not remember the name or the module, and I certainly don't remember the argument order.

[–] [email protected] 19 points 2 months ago (1 children)

AI is fine if you know what you're doing and can correct the mistakes it makes (i.e. use it as fancy code completion)

I'm not a developer and i havent touched code for over 10 yrs, but when i heard about my company pushing AI tools on the devs, i thought exactly what you said. It should be a tool for experienced devs who already know what they're doing....

Lo and behold they did the opposite... They fired all the senior people and pushed AI on the interns and new grads.... and then expected AI to suddenly make the jr devs work like the expensive Sr devs they just fired...

Wtf

[–] [email protected] 7 points 2 months ago

Yeah, it makes no sense. AI is at best a replacement for junior devs and interns.

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