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I Will Fucking Piledrive You If You Mention AI Again — Ludicity
(ludic.mataroa.blog)
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This. Many of these tools are good at incredibly basic boilerplate that's just a hint outside of say a wizard. But to hear some of these AI grifters talk, this stuff is going to render programmers obsolete.
There's a reality to these tools. That reality is they're helpful at times, but they are hardly transformative at the levels the grifters go on about.
I interviewed a candidate for a senior role, and they asked if they could use AI tools. I told them to use whatever they normally would, I only care that they get a working answer and that they can explain the code to me.
The problem was fairly basic, something like randomly generate two points and find the distance between them, and we had given them the details (e.g. distance is a straight line). They used AI, which went well until it generated the Manhattan distance instead of the Pythagorean theorem. They didn't correct it, so we pointed it out and gave them the equation (totally fine, most people forget it under pressure). Anyway, they refactored the code and used AI again to make the same mistake, didn't catch it, and we ended up pointing it out again.
Anyway, at the end of the challenge, we asked them how confident they felt about the code and what they'd need to do to feel more confident (nudge toward unit testing). They said their code was 100% correct and they'd be ready to ship it.
They didn't pass the interview.
And that's generally my opinion about AI in general, it's probably making you stupider.
I just don't bother, under the assumption that I'll spend more time correcting the mistakes than actually writing the code myself. Maybe that's faulty, as I haven't tried it myself (mostly because it's hard to turn on in my editor, vim).
Nah perfectly fine take. Each their own I say. I would absolutely say that where it is, not bothering with it is completely fine. You aren't missing all that much really. At the end of the day it might have saved me ten-fifteen minutes here and there. Nothing that's a tectonic shift in productivity.
Yeah, most of my dev time is spent reading, and I'm a pretty fast typist, so I never bothered.
Maybe I'll try it eventually. But my boss isn't a fan anyway, so I'm in no hurry.
It can be useful in explaining concepts you're unsure about, in regards to the reading part, but you should always verify that information.
But it has helped me understand certain concepts in the past, where I struggled with finding good explanations using a search engine.
Ah, ok. I'm pretty good with concepts (been a dev for 15-ish years), I'm usually searching for specific API usage or syntax, and the official docs are more reliable anyway. So the biggest win would probably be codegen, but that's also a relatively small part of my job, which is mostly code reviews and planning.
Yeah. I haven't bothered with it much but the best use I can see of it is just rubber ducking.
Last time I used it was to asked how to change contrast in a numpy image. It said to multiply each channel by contrast. (I don't even think this is right and it should be
((original value-128) * contrast) + 128)
notoriginal value * contrast
as it suggested), but it did remind me I can just run operations on colour channels.Wait what's my point again? Oh yeah, don't trust anyone that can't tell you what the output is supposed to do.