Microsoft has set up copilot to make contributions for the dotnet runtime https://github.com/dotnet/runtime/pull/115762 I’m sure maintainers spends more time to review and interact with copilot than it would have to write it themselves
I am not a programmer and I think it’s silly to think that AI will replace developers.
But I was working through a math problem in Moscow Puzzles with my kiddo.
We had solved it, but I wasn’t sure he got it at a deep level. So I figured I’d do something in Excel or maybe just do cut outs. But I figured I’d try to find a web app that would do this better. Nothing really came up that was a good match. But then thought, let’s see how bad AI programming can be. I’d fought with it over some excel functions and it’s been mainly useful in pointing me in the right direction, but only occasionally getting me over the finish line.
After about 6 to 8 hours of work, a little debugging, havinf teach and quiz me occasionally, and some real frustration of pointing out that the feature previously changed and re-emeged, I eventually had something that worked.
The Shooting Range Simulator is a web-based application designed to help users solve a logic puzzle involving scoring points by placing blocks on vertical number lines.
A buddy developer friend of mine said: “I took a quick scroll through the code. Looks pretty clean, but I didn’t dive in enough to really understand it. Definitely all that css BS would take me ages to do without AI.”
I don’t take credit for this and don’t pretend that this was my work, but I know my kiddo is excited to try the tool. I hope he learns from it and we bond over a math problem.
I know that everyone is worried about this tool, but moments like those are not nothing. Personally, I’m a Luddite and think the new tools should be deployed by the people’s livelihood it will effect and not the business owners.
Personally, I’m a Luddite and think the new tools should be deployed by the people’s livelihood it will effect and not the business owners.
Thank you for correctly describing what a Luddite wants and does not want.
I’ll admit I did used AI for code before, but here’s the thing. I already coded for years, and I usually try everything before last resort things. And I find that approach works well. I rarely needed to go to the AI route. I used it like for .11% of my coding work, and I verified it through stress testing.
If AI was good at coding, my game would be done by now.
Can Open Source defend against copyright claims for AI contributions?
If I submit code to ReactOS that was trained on leaked Microsoft Windows code, what are the legal implications?
what are the legal implications?
It would be so fucking nice if we could use AI to bypass copyright claims.
To be honest, all of this is cope.
It’s true that ai isn’t a replacement for good coders …YET.
But it will be. You all can be as mad as you want, publish as many articles about how much ai sucks as you want. but it won’t stop anything from happening.
I say this as someone who has just started to learn to code myself.
The reason you all are mad is because you suddenly feel unsafe and unappreciated. And you’re right.
Ai is still gonna happen though. It will take away a lot of your jobs (especially starting with jr coders just getting into the market). It will lower your pay. You can yell about it, or you can adapt. Sucks, but it is what it is.
Think of it this way: what do you think the market is gonna be like in 5 years? Then 10? Brah, start preparing now. Right fucking now. Cuz it ain’t gonna get easier for you. I promise.
It happened with blue-collar factory works in the midwest regions of the US because of automation and offshoring. People bitched and tried to stop it. Lots of snooty white-color workers yelled, “learn to code!” But none of that saved their jobs.
And you guys won’t stop it happening with your jobs either. I don’t like the idea of AI taking over everything either. But it will. Adapt or die.
I’ve just started to learn to code. I am enjoying it. But in no way, shape, or form am I thinking it’s going to lead to a job for me.
EDIT: To copy what some else said, much better than me:
The idea that AI will some day be good at coding isn’t the issue. The issue is that some people in management think it’s already well on the way to being a good substitute, and they’re trying to do more with fewer coders to everyone’s detriment.
To be honest, you sound like you’re only just starting to learn to code.
Will coding forever belong to humans? No. Is the current generative-AI technology going to replace coders? Also no.
The reaction you see is frustration because it’s obvious to anyone with decent skill that AI isn’t up to the challenge, but it’s not obvious to people who don’t have that skill and so we now spend a lot of time telling bosses “no, that’s not actually correct”.
Someone else referenced Microsoft’s public work with Copilot. Here’s Copilot making 13 PRs over 5 days and only 4 ever get merged you might think “30% success is pretty good!” But compare that with human-generated PRs and you can see that 30% fucking sucks. And that’s not even looking inside the PR where the bot wastes everyone’s time making tons of mistakes. It’s just a terrible coworker and instead of getting fired they’re getting an award for top performer.
It’s the Dunning-Kruger effect.
And it’s fostered by an massive amount of spam and astroturfing coming from “AI” companies, lying that LLMs are good at this or that. Sure, algorithms like neural networks can recognize patterns. Algorithms like backtracking can play chess or solve or transform algebraic equations. But these are not LLMs and LLMs will not and can not replace software engineering.
Sure, companies want to pay less for programming. But they don’t pay for software developers to generate some gibberish in source code syntax, they need working code. And this is why software engineers and good programmers will not only remain scarce but will become even shorter in supply.
And companies that don’t pay six-figure salaries to developers will find that experienced developers will flat out refuse to work on AI-generated codebases, because they are unmaintainable and lead to burnout and brain rot.
To be honest, you sound like you’re only just starting to learn to code.
I definitely am. But I have no doubts that ai is going to take a lot of entry-level type jobs soon, and eventually higher end jobs.
We’ll always need good, smart coders. Just not as many as we have now.
but it’s not obvious to people who don’t have that skill and so we now spend a lot of time telling bosses “no, that’s not actually correct”.
I get it. But those clueless people are gonna be the people in charge of hiring, and they’ll decide to hire less, and expect current staff to do more. I’ve seen in hundreds of time in industries, and it’s already happening now in yours.
For context, I’m old. So I’ve seen your arguments in many different industries.
And to your point, they’ll have ai replacing good people, long before ai is good enough to. But you’re approaching the issue with logic. Corporate lacks a lot of logic.
I’m already seeing it in your industry. Plenty of reddit/Lemmy posts talking about how coders have been laid off, and having a much much more difficult time getting another job than at any point in their careers.
Again, I’m saying AI is a good solution. I’m saying management will think that. Just like they did when they offshored jobs to much less skilled, yet way more inexpensive workers.
To copy what someone else in this thread said:
The idea that AI will some day be good at coding isn’t the issue. The issue is that some people in management think it’s already well on the way to being a good substitute, and they’re trying to do more with fewer coders to everyone’s detriment.
I don’t understand how you think this works.
If I say, “now we have robots that can build a car from scratch!” the automakers will be salivating. But if my robot actually cannot build a car, then I don’t think it’s going to cause mass layoffs.
Many of the big software companies are doing mass layoffs. It’s not because AI has taken over the jobs. They always hired extra people as a form of anti-competitiveness. Now they’re doing layoffs to drive salaries down. That sucks and tech workers would be smart to unionize (we won’t). But I don’t see any radical shift in the industry.
A big part of the changed software job market in the US is caused by the rise of interest rates, and in consequence a large part of high-risk venture capital money drying up. This was finsncing a lot of start-ups without any solid product or business model. And, this began very clearly before the AI hype.
The trope that AI is actually replacing jobs is a lie that AI companies want you to believe.
If you walk around in my city and open your eyes, you will see that half of the bars and restaurants are closed because there is a shortage of even unskilled staff and restaurants didn’t pay enough to people. They now work in other sectors.
And yes, software developers are leaving jobs with unreasonable demands and shitty work conditions. Last not least because conserving mental health is more important. Go, for exanple, to the news.ycombinators.com forum and just search for the keyword “burnout”. That’s becoming a massive problem for companies because rising complexity is not matched by adequate organizational practices.
And AI is not going to help with that - it is already massively increasing technical debt.
Do you think there’s any reason to believe that these tools are going to continue their breakneck progress? It seems like we’ve reached a point where throwing more GPUs and text at these things is not yielding more results, and they still don’t have the problem solving skills to work out tasks outside of their training set. It’s closer to a StackOverflow that magically has the answers to most questions you ask than a replacement for proper software engineering. I know you never know if a breakthrough is around the corner, but it feels like we’ve hit a plateau for the foreseeable future.
Do you think there’s any reason to believe that these tools are going to continue their breakneck progress?
I do.
And as I mentioned in another comment, it’s not so much that I think AI will do a better job, it’s that I think MANAGEMENT will think AI does a cheaper job. Already many tech people who have been laid off are saying it’s the worst job market they’ve ever seen.
AI sucks. But management is about dollars NOW. The are shortsided, fall into fads, and they will see the cost savings now as outweight the long term problems. I don’t agree with them, I am saying they will do that tho. Even if we don’t agree.
To copy what someone else in this thread said:
The idea that AI will some day be good at coding isn’t the issue. The issue is that some people in management think it’s already well on the way to being a good substitute, and they’re trying to do more with fewer coders to everyone’s detriment.
The idea that AI will some day be good at coding isn’t the issue. The issue is that some people in management think it’s already well on the way to being a good substitute, and they’re trying to do more with fewer coders to everyone’s detriment.
100 percent. YOu said in two sentences what I have been trying to say to others. I think you are 100 percent correct. Management will count on AI long before they actually should. That shortsightedness has always been around and always will be.
I think the biggest difference between this and blue-collars workers losing their jobs, though, is that the same people losing their jobs are also placed very to benefit from the technology. Blue collared workers losing manufacturing jobs couldn’t, because they were priced out of obtaining that mafacturing hardware themselves, but programmers can use AI on an individual basis to augment their production. Not sure what the industry will look like in 10 years, but I feel like there will be plenty of opportunities for people who build digital things.
That being said, people who were looking to be junior developers exactly right now… uhhh… that’s some extrememly unlucky timing. I wish you luck.
They could now, because big “AI” companies sell their product on a loss.
The individual programmer is already outpriced when it comes to training those kind of models themselves. Once the companies want to turn a profit, the just laid off worker is outpriced as well. If an LLM can really do as good as a human programmer, who costs 70-100k, nothing stops the LLM provider to charge 35-50k easily. Try to augment your productivity at that price point, especially without a job.
I mean, society came through the change of the first and second work sector, we could reap the new productivity gains for the benefit of all, but, alas here we are at the beginning of a new crisis 😅
mmm so I’ve only used the online models, since I’m on a laptop and lack the hardware, but my understanding is that local models like devstral and llama are relatively competitive, and those can be used on like… a gaming rig? I don’t think they’d be able to push the price that much.
But I don’t disagree that big companies will try their darnedest to.
Well I’m old, so no looking for a job, I am just learning programming because i want to. But to your point, I am seeing LOTS of developers who have been laid off and finding another job is proving more challenging than ever before. It’s rough out there and I feel for them.
To copy what someone else in this thread said:
The idea that AI will some day be good at coding isn’t the issue. The issue is that some people in management think it’s already well on the way to being a good substitute, and they’re trying to do more with fewer coders to everyone’s detriment.
Oh layoffs are definitely happening. I’m just not sure if it’s caused by AI productivity gains, or if it’s just the latest excuse (the pandemic, then soft layoffs of “back to office” enforcement, and now AI). Esp since the companies most talking about AI productivity gains are the same companies that benefit from AI adoption…
What I wanted to explain is just that the skills to program actually translate pretty well. At my old company, we used to say “you know someone’s a staff engineer, because they only make PowerPoint presentations and diagrams, and don’t actually write any code”. And those skills directly translate to directing an AI to build the thing you need. The abstracted architect role will probably increase in value, as the typing value decreases.
My biggest concern is probably that AI is currently eating junior dev jobs, since what it excels at is typically the kind of work you’d give to a junior engineer. And I think that more gruntwork kinda tasks are the way that someone develops the higher level skills that are important later; you start to see the kinds of edge cases first hand, so it makes them memorable. But I feel like that might just be a transition thing; many developers these days don’t know bare code down to the 1s and 0s. The abstraction might just move up another level, and people will build more things. At least, this is the optimistic view. 🤷 But I’m an optimistic guy.
AI is at its most useful in the early stages of a project. Imagine coming to the fucking ssh project with AI slop thinking it has anything of value to add 😂
The early stages of a project is exactly where you should really think hard and long about what exactly you do want to achieve, what qualities you want the software to have, what are the detailed requirements, how you test them, and how the UI should look like. And from that, you derive the architecture.
AI is fucking useless at all of that.
In all complex planned activities, laying the right groundwork and foundations is essential for success. Software engineering is no different. You won’t order a bricklayer apprentice to draw the plan for a new house.
And if your difficulty is in lacking detailed knowledge of a programming language, it might be - depending on the case ! - the best approach to write a first prototype in a language you know well, so that your head is free to think about the concerns listed in paragraph 1.
the best approach to write a first prototype in a language you know well
Ok, writing a web browser in POSIX shell using yad now.
I’m going back to TurboBASIC.
writing a web browser in POSIX shell
Not HTML but the much simpler Gemini protocol - well you could have a look at Bollux, a Gemini client written im shell, or at ereandel:
https://github.com/kr1sp1n/awesome-gemini?tab=readme-ov-file#terminal
AI is only good for the stage when…
AI is only good in case you want to…
Can’t think of anything. Edit: yes, I really tried
Playing the Devils’ advocate was easier that being AI’s advocate.
I might have said it to be good in case you are pitching a project and want to show some UI stuff maybe, without having to code anything.
But you know, there are actually specialised tools for that, which UI/UX designers used, to show my what I needed to implement.
And when I am pitching UI, I just use a pencil and paper and it is so much more efficient than anything AI, because I don’t need to talk to something, to make a mockup, to be used to talk to someone else. I can just draw it in front of the other guy with 0 preparation, right as it came into my mind and don’t need to pay for any data center usage. And if I need to go paperless, there is Whiteboards/Blackboards/Greenboards and Inkscape.After having banged my head trying to explain code to a new developer, so that they can hopefully start making meaningful contributions, I don’t want to be banging my head on something worse than a new developer, hoping that it will output something that is logically sound.
AI is good for the early stages of a project … when it’s important to create the illusion of rapid progress so that management doesn’t cancel the project while there’s still time to do so.
Ahh, so an outsourced con
mancomputer.
Its good as a glorified autocomplete.
Except that an autocomplete, with simple, lightweight and appropriate heuristics can actually make your work much easier and will not make you have to read it again and again, before you can be confident about it.
True, and it doesn’t boil the oceans and poison people’s air.
It’s not good because it has no context on what is correct or not. It’s constantly making up functions that don’t exist or attributing functions to packages that don’t exist. It’s often sloppy in its responses because the source code it parrots is some amalgamation of good coding and terrible coding. If you are using this for your production projects, you will likely not be knowledgeable when it breaks, it’ll likely have security flaws, and will likely have errors in it.
And I’ll keep saying this: you can’t teach a neural network to understand context without creating a generalised context engine, another word for which is AGI.
Fidelity is impossible to automate.
So you’re saying I’ve got a shot?
Have you used AI to code? You don’t say “hey, write this file” and then commit it as “AI Bot 123 aibot@company.com”.
You start writing a method and get auto-completes that are sometimes helpful. Or you ask the bot to write out an algorithm. Or to copy something and modify it 30 times.
You’re not exactly keeping track of everything the bots did.
I used it only as last resort. I verify it before using it. I only had used it for like .11% of my project. I would not recommend AI.
My dude, I very code other humans write. Do you think I’m not verifying code written by AI?
I highly recommend using AI. It’s much better than a Google search for most things.
yeah, that’s… one of the points in the article
I’ll admit I skimmed most of that train wreak of an article - I think it’s pretty generous saying that it had a point. It’s mostly recounts of people complaining about AI. But if they hid something in there about it being remarkably useful in cases but not writing entire applications or features then I guess I’m on board?
Well, sometimes I think the web is flooded with advertising an spam praising AI. For these companies, it makes perfect sense because billions of dollars has been spent at these companies and they are trying to cash in before the tides might turn.
But do you know what is puzzling (and you do have a point here)? Many posts that defend AI do not engage in logical argumentation but they argue beside the point, appeal to emotions or short-circuited argumentation that “new” always equals “better”, or claiming that AI is useful for coding as long as the code is not complex (compare that to the objection that mathematics is simple as long it is not complex, which is a red herring and a laughable argument). So, many thanks for you pointing out the above points and giving in few words a bunch of examples which underline that one has to think carefully about this topic!
The problem is that you really only see two sorts of articles.
AI is going to replace developers in 5 years!
AI sucks because it makes mistakes!
I actually see a lot more of the latter response on social media to the point where I’m developing a visceral response to the phrase “AI slop”.
Both stances are patently ridiculous though. AI cannot replace developers and it doesn’t need to be perfect to be useful. It turns out that it is a remarkably useful tool if you understand its limitations and use it in a reasonable way.
Don’t forget all these artists and developers are staring unemployment in the face so it’s no wonder they phone it in when they “try” to use AI.
“Make me a program that does this complex thing across many systems… It didn’t work on the first try AI SLOP REEEEEEE!”
Forks suck at eating soup yet are still useful.
it’s a car that only explodes once in a blue moon!
No, it’s a car that breaks down once you go faster than 60km/h. It’s extremely useful if you know what you’re doing and use it only for tasks that it’s good at.
if that’s the analogy yoou want, make it 20 kmh
Hey @dgerard@awful.systems, care to weigh in on this “train wreak [sic] of an article?”
I asked Github Copilot and it added
import wreakto .NET, so we’ll get back to you.
Or to copy something and modify it 30 times.
This seems like a very bad idea. I think we just need more lisp and less AI.
Good point.
This is the point that the “AI will do it all” crowd is missing. Current AI doesn’t innovate. Full stop. It copies.
The need for new code written by folks who understand what they’re writing isn’t gone, and won’t go away.
Whether those folks can be AI is an open question.
Whether we can ever create an AI that can actually innovate is an interesting open question, with little meaningful evidence in either direction, today.
“Hey AI - Create a struct that matches this JSON document that I get from a REST service”
Bam, it’s done.
Or
"Hey AI - add a schema prefixed on all of the tables and insert statements in the SQL script.
People have such a hate boner for AI here that they are downvoting actual good use of it…
Yeah integrating APIs has really become trivial with copilots. You just copy paste the documentation and all the boring stuff is done in the blink of an eye ! I love it
It’s exactly the sort of “tedious yet not difficult” task that I love it for. Sometimes you need to clean things up a bit but it does the majority of the work very nicely.
Microsoft is doing this today. I can’t link it because I’m on mobile. It is in dotnet. It is not going well :)
Yeah, can’t find anything on dotnet getting poisoned by AI slop, so until you link it, I’ll assume you’re lying.
I guess they were referring to this.
OMG, this is gold! My neighbor must have wondered why I am laughing so hard…
The “reverse centaur” comment citing Cory Doctorow is so true it hurts - they want that people serve machines and not the other way around. That’s exactly how Amazon’s warehouses work with workers being paced by facory floor robots.
If humans are so good at coding, how come there are 8100000000 people and only 1500 are able to contribute to the Linux kernel?
I hypothesize that AI has average human coding skills.
The average coder is a junior, due to the explosive growth of the field (similar as in some fast-growing nations the average age is very young). Thus what is average is far below what good code is.
On top of that, good code cannot be automatically identified by algorithms. Some very good codebases might look like bad at a superficial level. For example the code base of LMDB is very diffetent from what common style guidelines suggest, but it is actually a masterpiece which is widely used. And vice versa, it is not difficult to make crappy code look pretty.
“Good code” is not well defined and your example shows this perfectly. LMDBs codebase is absolutely horrendous when your quality criterias for good code are Readability and Maintainability. But it’s a perfect masterpiece if your quality criteria are Performance and Efficiency.
Most modern Software should be written with the first two in mind, but for a DBMS, the latter are way more important.
Average drunk human coding skils
A million drunk monkeys on typewriters can write a work of Shakespeare once in a while!
But who wants to pay a 50$ theater ticket in the front seat to see a play written by monkeys?
Well according to microsoft mildly drunk coders work better
My theory is not a lot of people like this AI crap. They just lean into it for the fear of being left behind. Now you all think it’s just gonna fail and it’s gonna go bankrupt. But a lot of ideas in America are subsidized. And they don’t work well, but they still go forward. It’ll be you, the taxpayer, that will be funding these stupid ideas that don’t work, that are hostile to our very well-being.
who makes a contribution made by aibot514. noone. people use ai for open source contributions, but more in a ‘fix this bug’ way not in a fully automated contribution under the name ai123 way
Counter-argument: If AI code was good, the owners would create official accounts to create contributions to open source, because they would be openly demonstrating how well it does. Instead all we have is Microsoft employees being forced to use and fight with Copilot on GitHub, publicly demonstrating how terrible AI is at writing code unsupervised.
Bingo
Yes, that’s exactly the point. AI is terrible at writing code unsupervised, but it’s amazing as a supportive tool for real devs!
Ask Daniel Stenberg.
Mostly closed source, because open source rarely accepts them as they are often just slop. Just assuming stuff here, I have no data.
To be fair if a competent dev used an ai “auto complete” tool to write their code, I’m not sure it’d be possible to detect those parts as an ai code.
I generally dislike those corporate AI tools but gave a try for copilot when writing some terraform script and it actually had good suggestions as much as bad ones. However if I didn’t know that well the language and the resources I was deploying, it’d probably have led me to deep hole trying to fix the mess after blindly accepting every suggestion
They do more than just autocomplete, even in autocomplete mode. These Ai tools suggest entire code blocks and logic and fill in multiple lines, compared to a standard autocomplete. And to use it as a standard autocomplete tool, no Ai is needed. Using it like that wouldn’t be bad anyway, so I have nothing against it.
The problems arise when the Ai takes away the thinking and brain functionality of the actual programmer. Plus you as a user get used to it and basically “addicted”. Independent thinking and programming without Ai will become harder and harder, if you use it for everything.
They do more than just autocomplete, even in autocomplete mode. These Ai tools suggest entire code blocks and logic and fill in multiple lines,
We know. “Improved autocomplete” is still an accurate (the most accurate) description for what current generation AI can do.
When compared to current autocomplete, AI is a delight. (Though it has a long way to go to improve at not adding stupid bullshit. But I’m confident that will get better.)
When measured against a true intelligence, I know I’m interacting with a newbie or a con man, because there’s no honest reason an informed person would even consider making that comparison.
People seem to think that the development speed of any larger and more complex software depends on the speed the wizards can type in code.
Spoiler: This is not the case. Even if a project is a mere 50000 lines long, one is the solo developer, and one has a pretty good or even expert domain knowledge, one spends the mayor part of the time thinking, perhaps looking up documentation, or talking with people, and the key on the keyboard which is most used doesn’t need a Dvorak layout, bevause it is the “delete” key. In fact, you don’t need yo know touch-typing to be a good programmer, what you need is to think clearly and logically and be able to weight many different options by a variety of complex goals.
Which LLMs can’t.
I don’t think it makes writing code faster, just may reduce the number of key presses required
And when they contribute to existing projects, their code quality is so bad, they get banned from creating more PRs.
Creator of curl just made a rant about users submitting AI slop vulnerability reports. It has gotten so bad they will reject any report they deem AI slop.
So there’s some data.
