this post was submitted on 15 Sep 2023
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As is with software developing, actually writing the stuff down is the easiest part of the work. If you already have someone fact checking and editing.. why do you need AI to shit out crap just for the writing? It would be easier to gather the facts first, fact check them, then wrangle them through the AI if you don't want to hire a writer (+ another pass for editing).
LLMs look like magic on a glance, but people thinking they are going to produce high quality content (or code for god's sake) are delusional.
Yeah. I'm a programmer. Everyone has been telling me that I'm about to be out of a job any day now because the "AI" is coming for me. I'm really not worried. It's way harder to correct bad code than it is to just throw it all away and start fresh, and I can't even imagine how difficult it's going to be to try to debug whatever garbage some "AI" has spewed out. If you employ a dozen programmers now, if you start using AI to generate your code you're going to need two dozen programmers to debug and fix it's output.
The promise with "AI" (more accurately machine learning, as this is not AI) as far as code is concerned is as a sort of smart copy and paste, where you can take a chunk of code and say "duplicate this but with these changes", and then verify and tweak its output. As a smart refactoring tool it shows a lot of promise, but it's not like you're going to sit down and go "write me an app" and suddenly it's done. Well, unless you want Hello World, and even then I'm sure it would find a way to introduce a bug or two.
Yep, I've had plenty of discussion about this on here before. Which was a total waste of time, as idiots don't listen to facts. They also just keep moving the goal posts.
One developer was like they use AI to do their job all the time, so I asked them how that works. Yeah, they "just" have to throw 20% of the garbage away that's obviously wrong when writing small scripts, then it's great!
Or another one who said AI is the only way for them to write code, because their main issue is getting the syntax right (dyslexic). When I told them that the syntax and actually writing the code is the easiest part of my job they shot back that they don't care, they are going to continue "looking like a miracle worker" due to having AI spit out their scripts..
And yet another one that discussed at length how you obviously can't magically expect AI to put the right things out. So we went to the topic of code reviews and I tried to tell them: Give a real developer 1000+ line pull requests (like the AI might spit out) and there is a chance of a snowball in hell you'll get bug free code despite reviews. So now they argued: Duh, you give the AI small bite sized Jira tickets to work on, so you can review it! And if the pull request is too long you tell the AI to make a shorter more human readable one! And then we're back to square one: The senior developer reviewing the mess of code could just write it faster and more correct themselves.
It's exhausting how little understanding there is about LLMs and their limitations. They produce a ton of seemingly high quality stuff, but it's never 100% correct.
It seems to mostly be replacing work that is both repetitive and pointless. I have it writing my contract letters, ‘executive white papers’, and proposals.
The contract letters I can use without edit. The white papers I need to usually redirect it, but the second or third output is good. The proposals it functionally does the job I’d have a co-op do… put stuff on paper so I can realize why it isn’t right, and then write to that. (For the ‘fluffy’ parts of engineering proposals, like the cover letters, I can also use it.)