My company is strongly pushing AI. There are lot of experiments, demos, and effort from decently smart people about integrating it into our workflows. There are some impressive victories that have been made with AI tooling producing some things fast. I am not in denial about this. And the SE department is tracking improved productivity (as measured by # of tickets being done, I guess?)
The problem is I hate AI. I hate every fucking thing about it. Its primary purpose, regardless of what utility is gained, is spam. I think it’s obvious how google search results are spam, how spam songs and videos are being produced, etc. But even bad results from AI that have to be discarded, IMO, are spam.
And that isn’t even getting into all massive amounts of theft to train the data, or the immense amounts of electricity it takes to do training and inference, as well as run, all this crap. Nor the psychosis being inflicted onto people who emplace their trust into these systems. Nor the fact that these tools are being used to empower authoritarian regimes to track vulnerable populations, both here (in the USA) and abroad. And all this AI shit serves to enrich the worst tech moguls and to displace people like artists and people like myself, a programmer.
I’m literally being told at my job that I should view myself basically as an AI babysitter, and that AI has been unambiguously proven in the industry, so the time for wondering about it, experimenting with it, or opposing it is over. The only fault and flaw is my (i.e. any given SE’s) unwillingness to adapt and onboard.
Looking for advice from people who have had to navigate similar crap. Because I feel like I’m at a point where I must adapt or eventually get fired.
Good points aswell. I agree with most, but one: AI writes good code because it’s boring.
There’s fancy code which is too artful to maintain and artful code which is easy and beautiful and good to maintain. Artful code doesn’t have to be fancy and hard to read. Artful code can be boring and stupidly simple.
LLMs tend to write stuff a skilled programmer can write in 10 lines in 50 lines instead. Think about it unwrapping loops into sequential statements [++var;++var;++var… instead of while(++var)] or case statements and nested ifs into if… if… if… chains.
Sure, such code works, but it’s hard to maintain and the alternative is more beautiful, less lines of code, easier to read and to understand. That’s what artful code is to me.
Most code in companies tends to be less than optimal. Most companies employ mostly workers who aren’t skillful. If you compare regular business code with super clean code of Open Source programming frameworks (e.g. Spring), you tend to hit your head against the wall.
LLM code is way harder to maintain than human code, even worse than lifeless, artless, “boring” business code. I doubt it’ll get better because it copies shit code from the average and less-than-average programmers doing a busy-ness.
I mean, you could easily throw lots and lots of already solved and documented problems against an LLM and they’ll be better than humans, because they’re essentially autocorrect with context from stackoverflow and interview question books.
Over time, LLMs will get better input data and produce better output, which will lead to better code and better code quality. You still need to know how to prompt and it still won’t solve any new problems you encounter, only problems others encountered and solved thousands of times.
In that regard, the shit programmers in companies usually churn out can and will be replaced with LLM generated output, which, on average, is better than the median business programmer. I’ll give you that. I guess it will make bad programmers less obvious and harmful, which might be good. Or bad, if your company only employs prompt monkeys and not a single sane developer.
I’d argue that most people in companies can’t even judge what’s good and meets the specs 🤓