Big brain tech dude got yet another clueless take over at HackerNews etc? Here's the place to vent. Orange site, VC foolishness, all welcome.
This is not debate club. Unless it’s amusing debate.
For actually-good tech, you want our NotAwfulTech community
As a non-programmer, I have zero understanding of the code and the analysis and fully rely on AI and even reviewed that AI analysis with a different AI to get the best possible solution (which was not good enough in this case).
This is the most entertaining thing I've read this month.
I tried asking some chimps to see if the macaques had written a New York Times best seller, if not MacBeth, yet somehow Random house wouldn't publish my work
"I can't sing or play any instruments, and I haven't written any songs, but you *have* to let me join your band"
Man trust me you don't want them. I've seen people submit ChatGPT generated code and even generated the PR comment with ChatGPT. Horrendous shit.
The maintainers of curl recently announced any bug reports generated by AI need a human to actually prove it's real. They cited a deluge of reports generated by AI that claim to have found bugs in functions and libraries which don't even exist in the codebase.
Today the CISO of the company I work for suggested that we should get qodo.ai because it would "... help the developers improve code quality."
I wish I was making this up.
My boss is obsessed with Claude and ChatGPT, and loves to micromanage. Typically, if there's an issue with what a client is requesting, I'll approach him with:
He will then, almost always, ask if I've checked with the AI. I'll say no. He'll then send me chunks of unusable code that the AI has spat out, which almost always perfectly illuminate the first point I just explained to him.
It's getting very boring dealing with the roboloving freaks.
Where is the good AI written code? Where is the good AI written writing? Where is the good AI art?
None of it exists because Generative Transformers are not AI, and they are not suited to these tasks. It has been almost a fucking decade of this wave of nonsense. The credulity people have for this garbage makes my eyes bleed.
If the people addicted to AI could read and interpret a simple sentence, they'd be very angry with your comment
It's been almost six decades of this, actually; we all know what this link will be. Longer if you're like me and don't draw a distinction between AI, cybernetics, and robotics.
The general comments that Ben received were that experienced developers can use AI for coding with positive results because they know what they’re doing. But AI coding gives awful results when it’s used by an inexperienced developer. Which is what we knew already.
That should be a big warning sign that the next generation of developers are not going to be very good. If they're waist deep in AI slop, they're only going to learn how to deal with AI slop.
As a non-programmer, I have zero understanding of the code and the analysis and fully rely on AI and even reviewed that AI analysis with a different AI to get the best possible solution (which was not good enough in this case).
What I'm feeling after reading that must be what artists feel like when AI slop proponents tell them "we're making art accessible".
Watched a junior dev present some data operations recently. Instead of just showing the sql that worked they copy pasted a prompt into the data platform's assistant chat. The SQL it generated was invalid so the dev simply told it "fix" and it made the query valid, much to everyone's amusement.
The actual column names did not reflect the output they were mapped to, there's no way the nicely formatted results were accurate. Average duration column populated the total count output. Junior dev was cheerfully oblivious. It produced output shaped like the goal so it must have been right
Hot take, people will look back on anyone who currently codes, as we look back on the NASA programmers who got the equipment and people to the moon.
They won't understand how they did so much with so little. You're all gourmet chefs in a future of McDonalds.
Nah, we're plumbers in an age where everyone has decided to DIY their septic system.
Please, by all means, keep it up.
I got an AI PR in one of my projects once. It re-implemented a feature that already existed. It had a bug that did not exist in the already-existing feature. It placed the setting for activating that new feature right after the setting for activating the already-existing feature.
Baldur Bjarnason's given his thoughts on Bluesky:
My current theory is that the main difference between open source and closed source when it comes to the adoption of “AI” tools is that open source projects generally have to ship working code, whereas closed source only needs to ship code that runs.
I’ve heard so many examples of closed source projects that get shipped but don’t actually work for the business. And too many examples of broken closed source projects that are replacing legacy code that was both working just fine and genuinely secure. Pure novelty-seeking
The headlines said that 30% of code at Microsoft was AI now! Huge if true!
Something like MS word has like 20-50 million lines of code. MS altogether probably has like a billion lines of code. 30% of that being AI generated is infeasible given the timeframe. People just ate this shit up. AI grifting is so fucking easy.
No the fuck it's not
I'm a pretty big proponent of FOSS AI, but none of the models I've ever used are good enough to work without a human treating it like a tool to automate small tasks. In my workflow there is no difference between LLMs and fucking grep for me.
People who think AI codes well are shit at their job
In my workflow there is no difference between LLMs and fucking grep for me.
Well grep doesn't hallucinate things that are not actually in the logs I'm grepping so I think I'll stick to grep.
(Or ripgrep rather)
The only people impressed by AI code are people who have the level to be impressed by AI code. Same for AI playing chess.
Damn, this is powerful.
If AI code was great, and empowered non-programmers, then open source projects should have already committed hundreds of thousands of updates. We should have new software releases daily.
Good hustle Gerard, great job starting this chudstorm. I’m having a great time
the prompt-related pivots really do bring all the chodes to the yard
and they're definitely like "mine's better than yours"
It's so bad at coding... Like, it's not even funny.
This broke containment at the Red Site: https://lobste.rs/s/gkpmli/if_ai_is_so_good_at_coding_where_are_open
Reader discretion is advised, lobste.rs is home to its fair share of promptfondlers.
Well that took a turn.
The initial comment spawned a GIANT THREAD which I haven't had time to parse, but after 2 days or so the initiator (username Kerrick) ragequit.
Here's the modlog message (timestamp 2025-05-15 23:02)
User 7u026ne9se
Action: Banned
Reason: Was ~Kerrick from kerrick.blog who picked and lost every fight in /s/gkpmli, deleted/disowned all his comments, lied about stalking bc someone told a maintainer he admitted to misleading them, and asked us to delete his username change from the modlog. No.
Here's the old profile:
http://web.archive.org/web/20250312141826/https://lobste.rs/~Kerrick
I suggest open source projects keep an eye out for this username and maybe take an extra look at their contributions.
Edit found the last comment they made before deleting. Textbook DARVO, considering they have almost unmerited amounts of positive karma in the thread itself.
I came here to give a simple explanation of why people aren’t noticing as many open source vibe coded contributions as they’d expect. Fights were picked with me by others: I was called a sneak, incapable, a pedant, an ignorer of consent, and a threat to human expression. All through that I’ve worked extremely hard to steer it away from such abhorrent behavior and towards the free expression of ideas, rather than engaging in the same kind of name calling.
Even so, I’ve been emailed, text messaged, and even called on my cell phone about this thread. Someone stalked me to other social media to bring it up there. This thread has brought about the most toxicity I’ve ever experienced on any forum, and these last couple days have been the among the worst in my life.
I have downloaded the relevant page from an open tab in Firefox ("Save as HTML), but it doesn't contain the latest craziness. If anyone is interested, let me know the best way to host such content.
What's scary is the raw number of upvotes he got for basically admitting to defrauding a FLOSS maintainer.
You can hardly get online these days without hearing some AI booster talk about how AI coding is going to replace human programmers.
Mostly said by tech bros and startups.
That should really tell you everything you need to know.
Had a presentation where they told us they were going to show us how AI can automate project creation. In the demo, after several attempts at using different prompts, failing and trying to fix it manually, they gave up.
I don't think it's entirely useless as it is, it's just that people have created a hammer they know gives something useful and have stuck it with iterative improvements that have a lot compensation beneath the engine. It's artificial because it is being developed to artificially fulfill prompts, which they do succeed at.
When people do develop true intelligence-on-demand, you'll know because you will lose your job, not simply have another tool at your disposal. The prompts and flow of conversations people pay to submit to the training is really helping advance the research into their replacements.