is everyone here a complete beginner? how do so many people relate to this? as soon as you need to do anything halfway interesting the thing just confidently spews nonsense.
this post was submitted on 01 Apr 2025
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And halfway interesting means beyond a medium blog written by someone with 3 months experience trying to pad their resume, and not following standards beyond default linting rules at all
There's always been a tendency of folks reading programmer humor to be beginners rather than seasoned devs. I think, there's just more of those in general, as there's lots of fields where entry-level coding skills are good enough...
Including when you have entry level skills and just enough seniority to pretend it's a full time job to tell people who know what they're doing to keep doing it.
At my workplace eng management won't shut up about AI and vibe coding.
It's because the potential customers for your product are asking about AI adoption. It's become a box to tick for all of the non technical goofballs making decisions.
Nobody's really serious on a meme sub. Maybe check your humour meter. It must be broken.
What do you think the point of this post is, then? Comedic hyperbole only works if there is still some truth to it
The joke is that there are some people who truly believe chatgpt is a better programmer than humans. It isn't that programming.dev is chock full of beginners who seriously believe the same.
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When I used to do image and signal processing for embedded systems in C and C++, AI was useless. Now that I do backend web development in Python and Ruby, AI is better than me. It really depends on the problem area and how many sample code and answers are out there for it to steal from.
I do backend development in PHP and Ruby, and AI sometimes has a suggestion that helps me out but is often completely, utterly useless, especially at actually coding the thing from scratch.
Yeah lol, a lot of "I need to do X" and I often get "use functionThatDoesX then" and sometimes it's a wonderful discovery, most often though it just doesn't exist lol
I asked gpt for code to aim a heliostat
It needed a module to get the sun's position, it used sun::alt:: azimuth which doesn't exist rather than Astro::Coord::ECI::Sun
It needed a module to calculate mirror angle between the Sun's altitude and azimuth and the target altitude and azimuth. It left that commented out rather than selecting the altitude halfway between Sun and target and azimuth between Sun and azimuth
It turns out there's precious little on the internet on how to aim a mirror, partly because it's not popular, partly because it's dead simple
Can confirm. AI is worse than useless for embedded systems.
I was working with Yocto on a very specialized xilinx chip. I had chatGPT makeup a chapter that didn't exist (in a manual that did), reference non-existent paragraphs from said chapter, and then argue with me quite confidently that that chapter was real and the information it was giving me was accurate.
ChatGPT can make ridiculous claims about what it can do. It sometimes even says that it does real world things when it’s laughably impossible.
I do a ton of Powershell scripting, and AI is either a half competent programmer, or someone let grandpa respond with the syntax from nineteen dickety two
And as soon as you enter corporate stuff, LLMs are useless again, because most things are integrated into existing ecosystems which LLMs don't know and/or libraries are only used for closed source code.
Like 95% of the people on here do the latter, though. (Way too often I get in arguments where it seems like people don't realise there's other kinds of coding)
Really? I had an app that would autogenarate time sheets for work in Google Sheets. I decided to minimise API calls by doing a single call to Google Drive then parse the HTML and reupload. Not a big Python project but ChatGPT hit a wall pretty fast on that one. Though, tbf the documentation was suprisingly opaque so I suppose that goes back to your point.
That project also produced my finest pile of spaghetti code since I had to account for stretched cells in the HTML parsing. I still have a piece of paper with my innumerate math scribbles. The paper makes sense to me. The code does not.
LLMs are only wrong 25% of the time when it’s your area of expertise. When it’s not, they give flawless answers.
Vibe coding gave me polio
When I needed to pick up on some basics, it actually did help but ultimately not as much as actual guides and tutorials written online. This image of a chimera certainly matches the kind of Frankenstein code I was getting.
That said, when I was having some very interesting ideas about making automated code in R, it did make for a good sounding board. You don't need to Google when everything in R has documentation but you do when you're combining libraries in unique ways to automate 98% of the stupid shit you do at your data researcher job (e.g. can you look up in our database how many students pick their nose during philosophy class on a Friday?)
ChatGPT is a better programmer than you
Unfortunately very true 😭
It's great for getting off the ground in a language you're unfamiliar with. But a recipe for technical debt when used long term. You're inviting spaghetti code with some real hair pulling bugs.
This was my usecase when learning JS. I've always had a very very difficult time with programming and wrapping my head around those types of patterns. But with the help of AI I was able to get a quicker understanding and being able to ask followup questions, explain what different symbols do, nowadays I use it as a basic reference to get a starting point to some solutions while just being well versed enough to approach a lot of things on my own.
I often try to switch around and experiment with different similar and potentially better approaches unless it's giving me one of those responses that have been the most bogstandard straightforward way of doing it... because of a stackoverflow answer from 12 years ago. But those are often the more simpler queries. But each day I practice my programming I turn to search engines more and more to adapt similar problems to my own so the kickoff of using AI got me to the point where I had a stronger understanding of how things work in a practical learning method that worked really really well for me.
I hate how great AI can be in some use cases while I also am part of the reason for excessive power usage of GPUs :( but I really don't think I would've been able to get as far as I've come today without it.
It's a very good teacher when you're a dev learning a new language
Because it's plagiarizing all the good teachers, mulching up their words, and spitting it out.
You could also read a book about it, but they're so looooong
I heavily agree on this for most people. Sadly books, actual lectures and classes and online tutorials haven't been working for me before.
It must really fucking suck being a teacher in programming and having invested time into a book or online tutorial/study thing today. I hope EU will legislate AI training.
Well sure, but it's also good to give you a rundown on various patterns and options. Like any tool it's only as good as the wielder
Most tools aren't actively detrimental to use, though. It's like a hammer where the handle is covered in spikes. Even if you're a genius and know how to hold it without cutting your hand, most people would just use a different hammer. And I'm not going to let that toolsmith off the hook, either.
Unfortunately, the people pushing AI are the same ones selling recreational flamethrowers
This is genius
I mean, what I can say that chatgpt is it's still a tool but cannot start solve advanced programming projects yet. Sure it knows syntax and programming structure but if you know programming concepts and critical thinking then you're still programming, you just don't have the in depth knowledge of the language.
Stackoverflow nerds are faster than ai
Gamedev using D here, my main gripe with programming isn't AI, but that I decided to go with my own engine, and now there's barely any documentation on graphics API use that isn't the OpenGL manual, as I'm encountering very interesting bugs recently (textures disappearing, texture glitches, etc.), while most article nowadays being about how I wasn't supposed to learn any programming, but instead art, so I could create the next Undertale, Touhou, etc. all alone, and it would be truly my game with my true intentions.
Some people are often asking "but what about these other tools", when I criticize AI. IMHO, some of the tools that made game development more accessible also made it more atomized, since you have less need for a programmer nowadays, with some tools not even requiring "classical" coding, but is visual in nature instead.
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