this post was submitted on 20 Nov 2023
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[–] [email protected] 192 points 11 months ago (9 children)

ChatGPT is hilariously incompetent... but on a serious note, I still firmly reject tools like copilot outside demos and the like because they drastically reduce code quality for short term acceleration. That's a terrible trade-off in terms of cost.

[–] [email protected] 126 points 11 months ago (6 children)

I enjoy using copilot, but it is not made to think for you. It's a better autocomplete, but don't ever let it do more than a line at once.

[–] [email protected] 64 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Yup, AI is a tool, not a complete solution.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 11 months ago (1 children)

As a software engineer, the number of people I encounter in a given week who either refuse to or are incapable of understanding that distinction baffles and concerns me.

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[–] [email protected] 45 points 11 months ago (1 children)

The problem I have with it is that all the time it saves me I have to use on reading the code. I probably spend more time on that as once in a while the code it produces is broken in a subtle way.

I see some people swearing by it, which is the opposite of my experience. I suspect that if your coding was copying code from stack overflow then it indeed improved your experience as now this process is streamlined.

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[–] [email protected] 56 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Biggest problem with it is that it lies with the exact same confidence it tells the truth. Or, put another way, it's confidently incorrect as often as it is confidently correct - and there's no way to tell the difference unless you already know the answer.

[–] [email protected] 19 points 11 months ago (1 children)

it's kinda hilarious to me because one of the FIRST things ai researchers did was get models to identify things and output answers together with the confidence of each potential ID, and now we've somehow regressed back from that point

[–] [email protected] 23 points 11 months ago (3 children)

did we really regress back from that?

i mean giving a confidence for recognizing a certain object in a picture is relatively straightforward.

But LLMs put together words by their likeliness of belonging together under your input (terribly oversimplified).the confidence behind that has no direct relation to how likely the statements made are true. I remember an example where someone made chatgpt say that 2+2 equals 5 because his wife said so. So chatgpt was confident that something is right when the wife says it, simply because it thinks these words to belong together.

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[–] [email protected] 39 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

they drastically reduce code quality for short term acceleration.

Oh boy do I have news for you, that's basically the only thing middle managers care about, short tem acceleration

[–] [email protected] 37 points 11 months ago (2 children)

But LinkedIn bros and corporate people are gonna gobble it up anyways because it has the right buzzwords (including “AI”) and they can squeeze more (low quality) work from devs to brag about how many things they (the corporate owners) are doing.

[–] [email protected] 37 points 11 months ago (16 children)

It's just a fad. There's just a small bit that will stay after the hype is gone. You know, like blockchain, AR, metaverse, NFT and whatever it was before that. In a few years there will be another breakthrough with it and we'll hear from it again for a short while, but for now it's just a one trick pony.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (5 children)

I always forget Metaverse is a thing.

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[–] [email protected] 16 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Yeah, they think it can turn a beginner dev into an advanced dev, but really it's more like having a team of beginner devs.

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[–] [email protected] 34 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (1 children)

I'm still convinced that GitHub copilot is actively violating copyleft licenses. If not in word, then in the spirit.

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[–] [email protected] 28 points 11 months ago (7 children)

they drastically reduce ... quality for short term acceleration

Western society is built on this principle

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[–] [email protected] 167 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (3 children)

I predict that, within the year, AI will be doing 100% of the development work that isn't total and utter bullshit pain-in-the-ass complexity, layered on obfuscations, composed of needlessly complex bullshit.

That's right, within a year, AI will be doing .001% of programming tasks.

[–] [email protected] 20 points 11 months ago (3 children)

Can we just get it to attend meetings for us?

[–] [email protected] 13 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Legitimately could be a use case

"Attend this meeting for me. If anyone asks, claim that your camera and microphone aren't working. After the meeting, condense the important information into one paragraph and email it to me."

[–] [email protected] 16 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Here is a summary of the most important information from that meeting. Since there were two major topics, I've separated them into two paragraphs.

  1. It is a good morning today.
  2. Everyone is thanked for their time. Richard is looking forward to next week's meeting.

The rest of the information was deemed irrelevant to you and your position.

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[–] [email protected] 13 points 11 months ago

Big companies will take 5 years just to get there.

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[–] [email protected] 148 points 11 months ago (2 children)

"look i registered my own domain name all by myself!"

the domain: "localhost"

[–] [email protected] 68 points 11 months ago (5 children)

I'm an elite hacker and I grabbed your IP address from this post. It's 192.168.0.1 just so you know I'm not bluffing.

[–] [email protected] 68 points 11 months ago (2 children)

Heheh I'm ddossing them right now. Unfortunately the computer I'm doing it on is having a few connection issues

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[–] [email protected] 50 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Haha punk it's actually 192.168.1.1. you dun goofed

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[–] [email protected] 95 points 11 months ago (11 children)

Engineering is about trust. In all other and generally more formalized engineering disciplines, the actual job of an engineer is to provide confidence that something works. Software engineering may employ fewer people because the tools are better and make people much more productive, but until everyone else trusts the computer more, the job will exist.

If the world trusts AI over engineers then the fact that you don't have a job will be moot.

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[–] [email protected] 65 points 11 months ago (3 children)

I just used copilot for the first time. It made me a ton of call to action text and website page text for various service pages inwas creating for a home builder. It was surprisingly useful, of course I modified the output a bit but overall saved me a ton of time.

[–] [email protected] 28 points 11 months ago (2 children)

Copilot has cut my workload by about 40% freeing me up for personal projects

[–] [email protected] 33 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Copilot is only dangerous in the hands of people who couldn't program otherwise. I love it, it's helped a ton on tedious tasks and really is like a pair programmer

[–] [email protected] 13 points 11 months ago

Yeah it's perfect for if you can distinguish between good and bad generations. Sometimes it tries to run on an empty text file in vscode and it just outputs an ingredients list lol

[–] [email protected] 22 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Copilot has cut my personal projects by about 40% freeing me up for work

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[–] [email protected] 10 points 11 months ago

i get copilot through github education and let me tell you the first time i put out a bunch of code related to one of my entities, i was floored. it's definitely not there to write your entire app but it saves so much time

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[–] [email protected] 61 points 11 months ago (1 children)

I think the correct response is "Wow. Has your mom seen it? Send her the link."

[–] [email protected] 11 points 11 months ago (5 children)
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[–] [email protected] 47 points 11 months ago (2 children)

AI is only as good as the person using it, like literally any other tool in human existence.

It's meant to amplify the workload of the professional, not replace them with a layman armed with an LLM.

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[–] [email protected] 20 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (4 children)

This AI thing will certainly replace my MD to HTML converter and definitely not misplace my CSS and JS headers

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[–] [email protected] 19 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Tbf I don't really wanna do ops work. I barely even wanna do DevOps. Let me just dev

[–] [email protected] 14 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Me too 😭
I don't want to "kubectl", I want to " make" 😭

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[–] [email protected] 18 points 11 months ago (1 children)

You don't need to convince the devs, you need to convince the managers.

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[–] [email protected] 16 points 11 months ago

Wow, there is a lot of pearl-clutching and gatekeeping ITT. It's delicious!

[–] [email protected] 15 points 11 months ago (15 children)

On a more serious note, ChatGPT, ironically, does suck at webdev frontend. The one task that pretty much everyone agrees could be done by a monkey (given enough time) is the one it doesn't understand at all.

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[–] [email protected] 13 points 11 months ago

Don't forget that GPT4 was getting dumber the more it learned from people.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 11 months ago

These morons are probably going to train AI wrong so job security for the next 100 years.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 11 months ago (3 children)

The only thing ChatGPT etc. is useful for, in every language, is to get ideas on how to solve a problem, in an area you don't know anything about.

ChatGPT, how can I do xy in C++?
You can use the library ab, like ...

That's where I usually search for the library and check the docs if it's actually possible to do it this way. And often, it's not.

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