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Telorand ,

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.

skillissuer , (edited )
@skillissuer@discuss.tchncs.de avatar

Nobody should trust LLMs with anything

ftfy

also any inputs are probably scrapped and used for training, and none of these people get GDPR

mox , (edited )

also any inputs are probably scraped

ftfy

Let’s hope it’s the bad outputs that are scrapped. <3

curbstickle ,

Eh, I’d say mostly.

I have one right now that looks at data and says “Hey, this is weird, here are related things that are different when this weird thing happened. Seems like that may be the cause.”

Which is pretty well within what they are good at, especially if you are doing the training yourself.

blackjam_alex ,

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.
TaintPuncher ,

That sums up my experience too, but I have found it good for discussing functions for SQL and Powershell. Sometimes, it’ll throw something into its garbage code and I’ll be like “what does this do?” It’ll explain how it’s supposed to work, I’ll then work out its correct usage and solve my problem. Weirdly, it’s almost MORE helpful than if it just gave me functional code, because I have to learn how to properly use it rather than just copy/paste what it gives me.

Telorand ,

That’s true. The mistakes actually make learning possible!

Man, designing CS curriculum will be easy in future. Just ask it to do something simple, and ask your CS students to correct the code.

saltesc ,

All the while it gets further and further from the requirements. So you open five more conversations, give them the same prompt, and try pick which one is least wrong.

All the while realising you did this to save time but at this point coding from scratch would have been faster.

sugar_in_your_tea , (edited )

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.

9488fcea02a9 ,

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

sugar_in_your_tea ,

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

SketchySeaBeast ,
@SketchySeaBeast@lemmy.ca avatar

I wish we could say the students will figure it out, but I’ve had interns ask for help and then I’ve watched them try to solve problems by repeatedly asking ChatGPT. It’s the scariest thing - “Ok, let’s try to think about this problem for a moment before we - ok, you’re asking ChatGPT to think for a moment. FFS.”

USSEthernet ,

Critical thinking is not being taught anymore.

djsaskdja ,

Has critical thinking ever been taught? Feel like it’s just something you have or you don’t.

Sauerkraut ,

Critical thinking is essentially learning to ask good questions and also caring enough to follow the threads you find.

For example, if mental health is to blame for school shootings then what is causing the mental health crisis and are we ensuring that everyone has affordable access to mental healthcare? Okay, we have a list of factors that adversely impact mental health, what can we do to address each one? Etc.

Critical thinking isn’t hard, it just takes time, effort.

sugar_in_your_tea ,

I had a chat w/ my sibling about the future of various careers, and my argument was basically that I wouldn’t recommend CS to new students. There was a huge need for SW engineers a few years ago, so everyone and their dog seems to be jumping on the bandwagon, and the quality of the applicants I’ve had has been absolutely terrible. It used to be that you could land a decent SW job without having much skill (basically a pulse and a basic understanding of scripting), but I think that time has passed.

I absolutely think SW engineering is going to be a great career long-term, I just can’t encourage everyone to do it because the expectations for ability are going to go up as AI gets better. If you’re passionate about it, you’re going to ignore whatever I say anyway, and you’ll succeed. But if my recommendation changes your mind, then you probably aren’t passionate enough about it to succeed in a world where AI can write somewhat passable code and will keep getting (slowly) better.

I’m not worried at all about my job or anyone on my team, I’m worried for the next batch of CS grads who chatGPT’d their way through their degree. “Cs get degrees” isn’t going to land you a job anymore, passion about the subject matter will.

pirat ,

Altering the prompt will certainly give a different output, though. Ok, maybe “think about this problem for a moment” is a weird prompt; I see how it actually doesn’t make much sense.

However, including something along the lines of “think through the problem step-by-step” in the prompt really makes a difference, in my experience. The LLM will then, to a higher degree, include sections of “reasoning”, thereby arriving at an output that’s more correct or of higher quality.

This, to me, seems like a simple precursor to the way a model like the new o1 from OpenAI (partly) works; It “thinks” about the prompt behind the scenes, presenting only the resulting output and a hidden (by default) generated summary of the secret raw “thinking” to the user.

Of course, it’s unnecessary - maybe even stupid - to include nonsense or smalltalk in LLM prompts (unless it has proven to actually enhance the output you want), but since (some) LLMs happen to be lazy by design, telling them what to do (like reasoning) can definitely make a great difference.

jaggedrobotpubes ,

AI created 17 Security Corporation™️s in response to this comment.

ulkesh ,
@ulkesh@lemmy.world avatar

Oh geez…who could have seen this coming?

Oh wait, every single senior developer who is currently railing against their moron AI-bandwagoning CEOs.

SaharaMaleikuhm ,

But are the shareholders pleased?

Naz ,

I’ve been laughing at this quote for 5 minutes straight

It’s so good

He knows he’s right

Also: I code sometimes, and all of my code is of masterpiece quality. I cannot debug my own code, I ask for outside help and we have to dismantle the NT kernel to find out what’s gone wrong

RobotToaster ,
@RobotToaster@mander.xyz avatar

https://mander.xyz/pictrs/image/0a0d30a5-cafe-4144-842b-6093b6794d42.jpeg

YtA4QCam2A9j7EfTgHrH ,

This must sound terrible. So high pitched

aodhsishaj ,

Maybe so high pitched it’s out of the hearing range of most humans

KellysNokia ,

Mr Krabs playing world’s smallest violin

ShittyBeatlesFCPres ,

If I was still in a senior dev position, I’d ban AI code assistants for anyone with less than around 10 years experience. It’s a time saver if you can read code almost as fluently as you can read your own native language but even besides the A.I. code introducing bugs, it’s often not the most efficient way. It’s only useful if you can tell that at a glance and reject its suggestions as much as you accept them.

Which, honestly, is how I was when I was first starting out as a developer. I thought I was hot shit and contributing and I was taking half a day to do tasks an experienced developer could do in minutes. Generative AI is a new developer: irrationally confident, not actually saving time, and rarely doing things the best way.

Windex007 ,

Even worse than it being wrong, is that by nature of the tool it looks right.

GetOffMyLan , (edited )

I’ve found they’re great as a learning tool where decent docs are available. Or as an interactive docs you can ask follow up questions to.

We mostly use c# and it’s amazing at digging into the MS docs to pull out useful things from the bcl or common patterns.

Our new juniors got up to speed so fast by asking it to explain stuff in the existing codebases. Which in turn takes pressure off more senior staff.

I got productive in vuejs in a large codebase in a couple days that way.

Using to generate actual code is insanely shit haha It is very similar to just copy pasting code and hacking it in without understanding it.

ShittyBeatlesFCPres ,

You make a good point about using it for documentation and learning. That’s a pretty good use case. I just wouldn’t want young developers to use it for code completion any more than I’d want college sophomores to use it for writing essays. Professors don’t have you write essays because they like reading essays. Sometimes, doing a task manually is the point of the assignment.

sugar_in_your_tea ,

Eh, I’m a senior dev, and I don’t ban it (my boss, the director, does that for me lol; he’s worried about company secrets leaking).

In fact, we had an interview for a senior dev position, and the applicant asked if they could use AI, and I told them to use whatever tools they normally would for development. It shouldn’t come as a surprise that they totally botched the programming challenge because of it (introduced the same bug twice, then said they were very confident in the correctness of the code…), and that made it so much easier to filter them out from our hiring pool. If you’re going to use a tool in an interview, you better feel confident with it. If that dev had solved the problem significantly faster than our other applicants, I would’ve taken that to my boss to have the team experiment with it. We target budget 30 min for our challenges, and our seniors generally finish in under 20, and it took them more than our allotted time to get the code to actually run properly (and that’s with us pointing out certain mistakes the AI generated).

But no, I haven’t seen an actually productive use of AI for software development, beyond searching for docs online (which you can totally do w/ Bing or Google w/o involving our codebase). You may feel more productive because more code is appearing on the screen, but the increase in bugs likely reduces overall productivity. We’re always looking for ways to improve, but when I can solve the same problem in my bare-bones editor (vim) faster than my more junior colleagues can with their fancy IDEs, I really don’t think AI is going to be the thing that improves our productivity, actually understanding logic will. If someone demonstrates that AI does save time, I’ll try it out and campaign for it.

Anyway, that’s my take as someone who has been in the industry for something like 15 years. Knowing your tools is more important, IMO, than having more tools.

ShittyBeatlesFCPres ,

I had my suspicions before but the moment I realized for certain Elon Musk couldn’t run a software company was when he judged people by lines of code written.

sugar_in_your_tea ,

Ew, I would hate to be in charge of code reviews at an org like that.

The proper metric is success of the actual product. We have our engineers give estimates, then hold them to those estimates and evaluate based on consistency of on-time releases and number of production bugs. At the end of the day, predictable, high quality delivery is usually more valuable than faster time to market, unless you’re in a startup or something and just need to get early adopters on-board. Judge QA by defects discovered in production and devs by defects found by QA and in production. It’s really not that hard.

JordanZ ,

https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/2c66b4ac-e14d-4e11-96de-7dc0db45777a.jpeg

Except it’s a computer writing the code that somebody probably ran once and said ‘looks good’ for their ‘happy path’ and committed it. So it’s inevitably probably full of weird edge case bugs…have fun.

ChickenLadyLovesLife ,

I always claimed in job interviews to be good at debugging, but there are no certifications for debugging and there’s really no way for an interviewer to verify such a claim. So even though it is an incredibly important skill, companies just do not look for it. There is also the hilariously misguided belief that good coders do not produce bugs so there’s no need for debugging.

PM_Your_Nudes_Please , (edited )

There is also the hilariously misguided belief that good coders do not produce bugs so there’s no need for debugging.

Yeah, fuck this specifically. I’d rather have a good troubleshooter. I work in live events; I don’t care if an audio technician can run a concert and have it sounding wonderful under ideal conditions. I care if they can salvage a concert after the entire fucking rig stops working 5 minutes before the show starts. I judge techs almost solely on their ability to troubleshoot.

Anyone can run a system that is already built, but a truly good technician can identify where a problem is and work to fix it. I’ve seen too many “good” technicians freeze up and panic at the first sign of trouble, which really just tells me they’re not as good as they say. When you have a show starting in 10 minutes and you have no audio, you can’t waste time with panic.

SuperFola ,
@SuperFola@programming.dev avatar

How come the hallucinating ghost in the machine is generating code so bad the production servers hallucinate even harder and crash?

Telorand ,

You have to be hallucinating to understand.

Drunemeton ,
@Drunemeton@lemmy.world avatar

I’ve licked the frog twice! How many does it take?

Telorand ,

A-one. A-two-hoo. A-three… Crumch

MelodiousFunk ,

I take it that frog hadn’t been de-boned.

henfredemars ,

I’m not sure how AI supposed to understand code. Most of the code out there is garbage. Even most of the working code out there in the world today is garbage.

SuperFola ,
@SuperFola@programming.dev avatar

Heck, I sometimes can’t understand my own code. And this AI thing tries to tell me I should move this code over there and do this and that and then poof it doesn’t compile anymore. The thing is even more clueless than me.

elvith ,

Randomly rearranging non working code one doesn’t understand… sometimes gets working code, sometimes doesn’t fix the bug, sometimes it won’t even compile anymore? Has no clue what the problem is and only solves it randomly by accident?

Sounds like the LLM is as capable as me /s

henfredemars ,

Sometimes you even get newer and more interesting bugs!

sugar_in_your_tea ,

As a senior dev, this sounds like job security. :)

henfredemars ,

You know you’re Sr. when it doesn’t even bother you anymore. It amuses you.

sugar_in_your_tea , (edited )

My boss comes to me saying we must finish feature X by date Y or else.

Me:

https://media.makeameme.org/created/continue-you-amuse.jpg

We’re literally in this mess right now. Basically, product team set out some goals for the year, and we pointed out early on that feature X is going to have a ton of issues. Halfway through the year, my boss (the director) tells the product team we need to start feature X immediately or it’s going to have risk of missing the EOY goals. Product team gets all the pre-reqs finished about 2 months before EOY (our “year” ends this month), and surprise surprise, there are tons of issues and we’re likely to miss the deadline. Product team is freaking out about their bonuses, whereas I’m chuckling in the corner pointing to the multiple times we told them it’s going to have issues.

There’s a reason you hire senior engineers, and it’s not to wave a magic wand and fix all the issues at the last minute, it’s to tell you your expectations are unreasonable. The process should be:

  1. product team lists requirements
  2. some software dev gives a reasonable estimate
  3. senior dev chuckles and doubles it
  4. director chuckles and adds 25% or so to the estimate
  5. if product team doesn’t like the estimate, return to 1
  6. we release somewhere between 3 and 4

If you skip some of those steps, you’re going to have a bad time.

henfredemars , (edited )

In my experience, the job of a sr. revolves around expectations. Expectations of yourself, of the customer, of your bosses, of your juniors and individual contributors working with you or that you’re tasking. Managing the expectations and understanding how these things go to protect your guys and gals and trying to save management from poking out their own eyes.

And you may actually have time to do some programming.

sugar_in_your_tea ,

Yup. I actually only take a 50% workload because half of my time is spent in random meetings telling people no, or giving obscenely high estimates that essentially amount to “no.” The other half of my time is fixing problems from when they didn’t listen when I said “no.”

Such is life I guess. But occasionally, I get to work on something new. And honestly, that’s fine, I’ve long since stopped caring about my name showing up on things.

henfredemars ,

Not all heroes wear capes. You’re saving their butts, and they don’t know it.

sugar_in_your_tea ,

Can confirm. At our company, we have a tech debt budget, which is really awesome since we can fix the worst of the problems. However, we generate tech debt faster than we can fix it. Adding AI to the mix would just make tech debt even faster, because instead of senior devs reviewing junior dev code, we’d have junior devs reviewing AI code…

_sideffect ,

“AI” is just good for simple code snippets. (Which it stole from Github repos).

This whole ai bs needs to die already, and the people who lie about it held accountable.

simplejack ,
@simplejack@lemmy.world avatar

Me and my team take our site down the old fashioned way. Code copied from some rando on the internet.

sunzu2 ,

Copy pasting random snippets from search results and chatgpt until something works is how I do my job.

BlitzFitz ,
@BlitzFitz@lemmy.world avatar

“until something works" At least you’re doing a better job than some people.

Some leave it at will ai told me so. And they don’t know better and put that into prod!

corsicanguppy ,

Good old curl|sh

echodot ,

Reminds me of the time that I took down the corporate website by translating the entire website into German. I’d been asked to do this but I hadn’t realized that the auto translation Plug-In actually rewrote code into German, I thought it was just going to alter the HTML with JavaScript at runtime, but nope. It actually edited the files.

It also translated the password into German which was fun because it was just random characters so I have no idea what it translated into.

henfredemars , (edited )

AI can be a useful tool, but it’s not a substitute for actual expertise. More reviews might patch over the problem, but at the end of the day, you need a competent software developer who understands the business case, risk profile, and concrete needs to take responsibility for the code if that code is actually important.

AI is not particularly good at coding, and it’s not particularly good at the human side of engineering either. AI is cheap. It’s the outsourcing problem all over again and with extra steps of having an algorithm hide the indirection between the expertise you need and the product you’re selling.

Ilandar ,

The point of the article isn’t that AI is outright useless as a coding tool but that it lulls programmers into a false sense of security regarding the quality and security of their code. They aren’t reviewing their work as frequently because of this new reliance on AI as a time saver, and as such are more likely to miss any mistakes that they or the AJ made.

9point6 ,

Now now, AJ may not know everything, but he’ll learn

spankmonkey ,

The point of the article isn’t that AI is outright useless as a coding tool but that it lulls programmers into a false sense of security regarding the quality and security of their code.

Lulling them into a false sense of security is half of what makes it useless. The fact that it makes shitty code is the other half.

queermunist ,
@queermunist@lemmy.ml avatar

It basically just turns coders into debuggers.

driving_crooner ,
@driving_crooner@lemmy.eco.br avatar

Everyone is QA now.

fluxion ,

Debugging and maintenance was always the hardest aspect of large code bases… writing the code is the easy part. Offloading that part to AI only makes the hard stuff harder

fuzzy_feeling ,

ahahahaha…

dinckelman ,

I have a lot of empathy for a lot of people. Even ones, who really don’t deserve it. But when it comes to people like these, I have absolutely none. If you make a chatbot do your corporate security, it deserves to burn to the ground

werefreeatlast ,

Also it is pure junk. Chat-GPT code may come out fast on the screen but it’s garbage. I tried python and c++ both just pure garbage. Sure I got it to do what I wanted but only after a day of hair pulling repetitive madness. Simple task, open an image and invert it . Then we’ll it opened the image but didn’t invert. Or maybe it’s upside down. Can you open the image right side up and invert it…fuck fuck, why is the window full screen? Did I ask for full screen, shit heavens no! Anyway it’s a fuckin idiot just rambling code at me.

Zexks ,

Open it how using what at what size what codec where, for how long, for what purpose, using what data structures, use what libraries, what versions. You sound like my PO trying to request an update to software they have no comprehension of.

corsicanguppy ,

I use it for Ansible, so not for code, and just to reduce the time my brain is exposed to Ansible.

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