this post was submitted on 27 Sep 2025
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Fuck AI
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"We did it, Patrick! We made a technological breakthrough!"
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There been so much gaslighting I keep thinking I'm missing something as I keep doing the mandatory AI usage from work and largely throwing away the results. Yet I keep repeatedly hear people hush about how great it is.
Last week I finally had something that I thought would be right up it's alley: a fairly milquetoast program that needed to be ported from one language to another. It generated the ugliest unmaintainable code I could imagine. I went to execute the test suite and it failed every single one. The code was ugly, hard to follow, failed to important a number of sanity checks, kept repeating common code without factoring, making up calls that didn't exist. In trying to salvage it, I decided to ask it to implement a super simple check that should have been a one liner and it suggested splatting over a hundred lines of code all over the file to randomly mess with imaginary end points for no apparent reason and still falling to just check the length of the array I told it to.
Meanwhile people at my company who don't even commit any code are writing on internal blogs about how transformative it is, how much it makes their coding better (that they didn't even do) and executives are commenting their vision and intelligence and promoting them...
There are a few things it does well, like movie suggestions based on a list of shows you like. And its good at reformatting data you feed it. But It's crap overall. Often takes more time to correct it, than starting from scratch.
Definitely feel the waste of time trying to salvage junk it generated. At best I might have it take a horrible stab at it and then just look for key bits to Internet search, read documentation, and do it the actual right and maintainable way.
3-5 lines of code or has a decent chance at being usable or needing a minor tweak. More than that and it just sucks.
Also did use it with some messy list to find essentially duplicate things that weren't exactly duplicate. It wasn't 100%, with false negatives and positives, but it let me find a lot of them easily and the situation didn't require me to find every single duplicate.
I actually tried to get an AI to code a simulation for AI agents. God, it's so shitty at everything it does, it is only good to torture for entertainment...and to teach Excel apparently, only uses I found for it.
I will say there's a few common boilerplate things that is easier to express as quick prose and get 4-5 lines out of it, highly predictable lines that I could have probably done myself, a little more convenient when I'm rusty on a language or library. Also code completion, same thing of only good for like 3-5 lines at a time.
Still have to watch it like crazy and carefully fix the mistakes and still throw out what it suggested and it can be pretty annoying, but I'm willing to believe it saved me a smidge of time on those. But anything beyond that and it's a horrible mess I would never abide that's more trouble to try to fix than just scrap and start over. It's hard to stay vigilant and micromanage the details as I'm used to reviewing human code and the sorts of mistakes the LLMs make are distinct from what humans make.