You’re going to lose the ability to do it yourself if you keep doing that. I used to use AI occasionally for code until one day I tried doing it on my own and realized that I had forgotten how to do it without AI. I feel rather embarrassed to admit that, and imo LLMs are like the smoking of our generations and lots of people, including me, jumped on the hype train not knowing of all the harms it causes.
It’s honestly going to do it it’s way. You’ll likely have to go through it all in the end and change a lot. If somehow it pulls it off as you would, there’s the issue of debugging or modifying it later. You’ll look at it and have to figure it out first before you can start. That takes a lot of extra time.
I find it really unproductive and dangerous to do bigger tasks. Basically anything “from scratch” that isn’t the basics, you’ll regret it like a rake to the face at some point.
I think modern software being chock full of dependencies is a problem. There are security and other issues introduced by devs who literally are just avoiding writing a pretty simple function or two and that’s bad. If you properly check those functions I would even say that using AI in that context is the better option.
Yes, you could. As always I think the context dictates what makes sense. I am not generally in favor of ai for software or much else but there could be some examples where writing a small amount of code with it is better than jumping through hoops to use someone else’s project.
With all things we can either practice moderation or not. A couple of functions that avoid adding dependencies and sub dependencies is a good option. I know this because I am a JavaScript developer. Try dealing with a project with dozens of dependencies and tell me you won’t spend a small amount of effort trying to avoid that. Had to do a fire drill deploy just the other day because of a zero day. That one was a complicated thing I couldn’t just write a function for but the principle remains. always adding more dependencies is not a good move.
Question: if I have an AI write a few hundred lines of code I was already going to write myself, but it just does it faster, is it slop?
You’re going to lose the ability to do it yourself if you keep doing that. I used to use AI occasionally for code until one day I tried doing it on my own and realized that I had forgotten how to do it without AI. I feel rather embarrassed to admit that, and imo LLMs are like the smoking of our generations and lots of people, including me, jumped on the hype train not knowing of all the harms it causes.
Question: If I define a problem differently than everyone else, have I won the argument?
Maybe
A couple hundred lines?
It’s honestly going to do it it’s way. You’ll likely have to go through it all in the end and change a lot. If somehow it pulls it off as you would, there’s the issue of debugging or modifying it later. You’ll look at it and have to figure it out first before you can start. That takes a lot of extra time.
I find it really unproductive and dangerous to do bigger tasks. Basically anything “from scratch” that isn’t the basics, you’ll regret it like a rake to the face at some point.
It means somewhere else it already exists. If you don’t want to write that, just look for dependencies. Or write your own codegen tools.
That’s not how LLMs or coding agents work. They aren’t a database of existing code snippets for it to choose from.
I think modern software being chock full of dependencies is a problem. There are security and other issues introduced by devs who literally are just avoiding writing a pretty simple function or two and that’s bad. If you properly check those functions I would even say that using AI in that context is the better option.
You can just fork the dependencies into your own project, or use snapshots (dub allows that via versioning).
Yes, you could. As always I think the context dictates what makes sense. I am not generally in favor of ai for software or much else but there could be some examples where writing a small amount of code with it is better than jumping through hoops to use someone else’s project.
Using AI is exactly jumping through hoops to use someone else’s project.
With all things we can either practice moderation or not. A couple of functions that avoid adding dependencies and sub dependencies is a good option. I know this because I am a JavaScript developer. Try dealing with a project with dozens of dependencies and tell me you won’t spend a small amount of effort trying to avoid that. Had to do a fire drill deploy just the other day because of a zero day. That one was a complicated thing I couldn’t just write a function for but the principle remains. always adding more dependencies is not a good move.
Yesn’t. It’s more than ai can introduce a subtle bug that you may overlook. But if you do it, you’d actually think about it
Y-yeah, I’d certainly never overlook subtle bugs in my own handwritten code, haha!.. ha…
Yes it is because you didn’t put in the work you lazy pig!