This is probably a hot take from me among software developers, but I see nothing wrong with using AI as a tool for your coding as long as you aren't just blindly copy-and-pasting code without understanding them.
Posted by jlgrijal@reddit | learnprogramming | View on Reddit | 145 comments
There's been such a massive fear-mongering and dislike towards AI I see from many people and contempt towards people who even remotely use them. It's not even just from the Computer Science/Programming field either.
Fun-Diamond1363@reddit
It’s definitely a tool to be used, just like an IDE. But you should learn how to park with mirrors before relying on the backup cameras all the time. And turn off autocomplete when you’re working on homework or through a tutorial
kodaxmax@reddit
You sound like a math teacher trying to justify avoiding caclulators, insisting i wont have one in the work place and real life.
The analgy that would be closer is taping over your mirrors so you dont over rely on them, simply because back in my day we didnt have mirrors.
Fun-Diamond1363@reddit
You sound like someone that copies code from Copilot and doesn’t understand what it’s doing or know how to fix it when it doesn’t work
kodaxmax@reddit
actually like most AI copilot is quite good at that exact scenario. Though i prefer gemini myself, just because its a bit faster and uses my google ecossytem.
It's kind of hilarious your accusing somone with actual published software of not knowing how to develop or correct code. Though additonally, being able to correct somone elses code is notoriously difficult. To the point most devs would rather code it themselves than reverse engineeer and parse somone elses asset or framework.
Fun-Diamond1363@reddit
Real published software? That millions of people use? Wow…I can’t imagine what that’s like lol
I use copilot everyday, and no, I’m not blindly copy pasting what it spits back out. But junior engineers gonna junior engineer I guess 🤷♂️
distractal@reddit
I could go over all the reasons not to use AI, but seems you've heard many of them at this point and evidently dismissed them as "fear mongering and dislike" so clearly you're not interested.
If you see nothing wrong with using these tools, you are not looking at the big picture, only at how the tool is usable for you personally, at this particular moment in time, for your x particular applications, completely disregarding the full context.
And if that's the only thing that matters to you, well.
I guess we know why we are where we are.
kodaxmax@reddit
Thats alot fo words that say absolutely nothing. Making up some spooky mysterious "big picture" and being all doom and gloom without explaining yourself or even offering ana rgument is exactly the nonsense fear mongering OP is likely talking about.
Jaeriko@reddit
Here's an argument: AI has its place in big data and text parsing, but using it for your code is going to mess up a lot of peoples code bases long term because they aren't forced to think about or actually understand the code to use it. Even further, any workplace that is firing their juniors because the seniors can now do their work with AI (which does happen) is in for a very rude awakening when they found out that seniors don't magically appear when your job openings go up.
kodaxmax@reddit
Right, like using a caclulator caused all those engineers to forget how to math? /s Your just anti automation for the sake of it.
Jaeriko@reddit
Not at all the same thing, but yeah I would hazard a guess that the amount of people that know practically know their times tables has reduced significantly since the popularization of the smart phone.
I won't say that's a bad thing necessarily, but it absolutely has a consequence.
Comprehensive-Pin667@reddit
It's not going to mess up your codebase if you don't blindly accept the output, which is kind of the point OP was making. Also, I don't know what juniors you work with, but I know that not a single one of our juniors could be replaced by AI.
Jaeriko@reddit
None, my point is that it is happening elsewhere and the mindset that AI is in any way a substitute is the cause of it.
grantrules@reddit
No, I think that's a pretty normal take that most developers have at this point.
lovelacedeconstruct@reddit
Experienced developers opinions mean nothing lmao, they already know and learned stuff the hard way, they are not that smart to figure out what worked and what didn't because they have nothing but their personal experience its not like they can go back in time and do stuff differently, we should ask people who learned to code in AI era and can do good stuff
TanmanG@reddit
I think you got it backwards. Historically it takes at most, what, 6 years to get established in the industry starting from nothing? Meanwhile the average SWE will work for 25-30 years, so there's more value in looking at how valuable it is for experienced developers rather than students.
lovelacedeconstruct@reddit
My senior uses notepad++ without syntax highlighting and learns new libraries by opening the source code, his world view and experience doesnt match mine at all so my point stands, what works for him shouldnt be the rule
NemoOfConsequence@reddit
One shitty senior does not mean all experienced developers are stupid.
lovelacedeconstruct@reddit
He is not shitty though he is the best programmer I have ever met, Its what geniunely works for him he doesnt need all the extra stuff the normies require
TurtleKwitty@reddit
Just to be clear here. The best programmer you've ever met actually learns things and that's what makes him great and you're out here arguing that people shouldn't be learning things and relying on hallucinating ai instead?
lovelacedeconstruct@reddit
How did you conclude this from what I said ? my point is experienced developers cannot judge whether its detrimental to the learning process or not because they already know how to do stuff the old way
RaitzeR@reddit
As a programmer you will have to keep learning throughout your career. A senior dev absolutely can judge how AI affects the learning process, because they have learned "the old way" AND with AI. A programmer who has only learned with AI cannot judge this, because he has only one frame of reference.
I have learned programming the old old way, reading books over 20 years ago, I have learned programming the old way, googling and watching tutorials, AND I have learned programming the new way, using AI. My personal opinion is that AI is very good at explaining things, but you will have to dive into documentation for deeper understanding.
Suh-Shy@reddit
That's like super easy judge.
It's the same than saying you can eventually become an OG athletics by having a machine doing the training for you.
me6675@reddit
They are actually the only ones who can judge because people who learned from AI has nothing to compare to. An experienced dev has seen both juniors who learned with traditional methods and now starts to see juniors who heavily relied on AI.
Most likely there is no black an white answer. AIs are useful for some but they aren't changing the industry that much, especially since they simply parrot the things that people before were saying and coding. It's like the world suddenly got a high number of alien programmers who do and explain stuff for free but are addicted to hallucinogens and don't like admitting they don't know stuff.
alkatori@reddit
Congrats I worked with someone like this.
They wasted so much effort because they wouldn't spend half an hour learning modern tooling.
living_the_Pi_life@reddit
Who would use notepad++ in the era of VSCode!??
jemimamymama@reddit
Such an odd thing to boast about. Does he jack off without the Jergens too?
MatthewMob@reddit
Do you always judge entire swathes of people around the world based on your experience with a single person?
cgoldberg@reddit
Just because your senior is a dipshit and a luddite doesn't mean most experienced programmers are.
caboosetp@reddit
His existence doesn't match the vast majority of experienced programmers either. Most of us use IDEs and documentation because we aren't masochists.
Tanjiro_007@reddit
Their opinion is the one that matters, what kind of logic are you applying? It's common sense that the opinion of the experienced guy is more valuable than that of an inexperienced one.
JaleyHoelOsment@reddit
philosophy major detected
TasPot@reddit
what
grantrules@reddit
Wat
FoCo_SQL@reddit
Halfway through they lost me
Haruchon99@reddit
halfway? the first sentence is enough 😂
King_Dead@reddit
Why even bother to try and learn programming if youre already better than everyone else by default?
BigNero@reddit
The funny thing is that there aren't any periods, so it's all one sentence lmao
HolyPommeDeTerre@reddit
Lol, ok, so ignore experts and find a unicorn. Good luck.
Echleon@reddit
To everyone reading this comment and thinking about how stupid it is: this is the average person offering advice on this sub lmao
Potterrrrrrrr@reddit
What in the fucketh are you talking about
lqxpl@reddit
If you can’t articulate your point, your opinions have no meaning.
That smarmy wall-of-text is anything but coherent.
hellbound171_2@reddit
Find them
stiky21@reddit
It's a tool. If you hate it, don't use it. It's not as deep as some redditors make it out to be.
je386@reddit
You are right, but who uses HTML Tables anymore?
RobMig83@reddit
Those unfortunate to be assigned the design of a fancy email template
RedditSucksShit666@reddit
Try mjml
je386@reddit
Oh, right. You can only use a subset of HTML in an email template.
RobMig83@reddit
Yeah and email CSS is pretty much stuck on the 90's ao you really have to be pretty creative with those things...
stiky21@reddit
Hopefully no one.
fiddle_n@reddit
Disagree with this take. HTML tables have their place; not in abusing them for page layout, but for their original purpose - when you genuinely have tabular data you want to display.
Ratatoski@reddit
There's been the occasional time where I have actual data that needs a proper table. But I have to remind myself that it's OK and the actual use case.
berdulf@reddit
How the hell else am I supposed to organize my page? You millennials and your fancy flexboxes.
SaltyBarker@reddit
You mean you don’t like my “grid grid-cols-12 gap-5” tailwindcss?
TomWithTime@reddit
"but the ai generated code has no soul!"
After working for AT&T for several years, neither do I.
stiky21@reddit
I lost my soul when using Ruby for 8 months.
bravopapa99@reddit
I was more impressed by RubyMine than Ruby.
stiky21@reddit
This is so relatable.
IAmADev_NoReallyIAm@reddit
Thanks... I almost had to buy a new keyboard because of you....
EarPersonal3025@reddit
this is a funny comment
RobMig83@reddit
C++, java and a non-voluntary compiler project took my soul years ago...
cheezballs@reddit
HTML tables???? What year is it????
muncuss@reddit
I'm just too lazy to code :(
NoAlbatross7355@reddit
Well, as long as you know how to make them without it.
The_Troll_Gull@reddit
That’s my shit right there. For absolutely complicated tasks that I know and what to look for, 5 seconds, 1 minute review. 10 minute test, fix anything if needs it and deploy. The
nomoreplsthx@reddit
As a learner or a working developer?
Because for professionals that would be the coldest take ever.
For learners, there's a ton of data showing that doing it from scratch is much much better for lesrning that looking at an example and understanding it. That's why we have homework for kids, not just lectures. If you use AI as you described, you've effectively reduced your study to an interactive lecture, which is nor going to help yoy much
kodaxmax@reddit
show me this data.
Homework and lectures are among the worst ways to teach. We only do that because it's cost effective and can "cover" a bunch of students at once. Frankly an interactive lecture is a great way to learn. Like all animals humans learn best by doing the thing under the guidance of a mentor. Obviously a human teacher is ideal, but you can't dispute that google, youtube and AI can still fill that role in most cases.
Your also putting words in OPs mouth by implying it's a choice between traditonal archaic academic methods and AI. It isn't, you can combine them. But frankly most people dont have access to an "official" course/teacher anyway. Making online tools the best and often only choice.
While it would be great if we could just magically learn without examples, we can't. and especially when getting stuck on something, getting advice or even the exact answer from online tools is incredibly beneficial. The alternative is making no progress, getting frusterated and quitting most of the time.
Serializedrequests@reddit
Okay, I think homework just means practice in this conversation. You can't get good without practice. The example gives you an idea, the practice makes it a learned skill.
kodaxmax@reddit
That wouldn't make sense in the context of this post. That is still true while using AI.
nomoreplsthx@reddit
When did I talk about 'lectures'? Where did I suggest it was a binary choice?
Here is a quick summary with a bunch of citations. I'll pull some more data for you, but studies are annoying to search.
https://www.apa.org/education-career/k12/practice-acquisition
Unguided practice is an essential element of learning. Even 1-1 tutors do substantial unguided practice with students.
To learn a skill, you must have some point where you transition from doing the thing guided to unguided. In the middle of a basketball game, you can't pause and ask your coach to give you free throw pointers. That's why the classic pattern in coaching of all sorts has been 'I do, we do, you do' for, well, forever.
Bad lecture based classroom instruction skips 'we do' (though there are many, many ways around this). AI skips you do, or rather, requires the student to have the discipline to stop using it. A mentor can force 'you do', by just not helping.
I have not personally met a student who had the self control to start learning unguided once they started using AI.
The problem with AI is not that it is AI. It's that teaching is largely the art of not answering questions strategically so that students have to think exactly as much as they are capable of at all times. Current AI tools don't do this.
kodaxmax@reddit
Your arguments entire premise makes no sense unless we presume it's a binary choice. If we don't, then your just randomly praising an unrelated learning system.
in other words you just made up " a ton of data " and when i called your bluff, desperately searched through google for soemthing that vagueley seems to support you?
Yes, but only as small part of a learning system and only after the student has the knowledge to actually try on their own. This comes naturally in self taught game development anyway. As you will naturally want to minimize time spent researching in favor of making progress and detour from existing examples and tutorials to make your own unique game or emchanic etc..
Actually im pretty sure most sportsball games litterally do allow you to take a time out to confer with the coach and your teamates. This analagy doesn't work anyway. In what situation would you need to program soemthing, but not have access to teh internet? Thats like math teachers insisting you wont have a calculator with you in real life.
That pattern is a common mantra among surgeons and doctors. ive never heard it elsewhere. "See one, do one, teach one". and in that context they are already highly trained in the basics and theory and being closely guided by a mentor.
are you going to claim to be some sort of proffessor now? when would you have met any students?
current teachers dont do this and once again, most people dont have access to a teacher anyway.
TurtleKwitty@reddit
Just to clarify it's not the homework that helps kids learn it's the doing the exercises part, in class not that they get overloaded with more than they need
nomoreplsthx@reddit
Unguided practice, where the instructor will not help if you get stuck is necessary to learning. Homwework is a quick and dirty way of doing that, with some serious weaknesses.
But the key is that a student who is not struggling us not learning. If it isn't hard, no new skill is being acquired.
Joewoof@reddit
Not a hot take. Experienced coders use AI as a "smart search" tool.
RobMig83@reddit
AI is just a glorified search engine... The bad reputation AI has is just a normal reaction from old players. Are we going to forget all the people that demonized Stack Overflow for the very same reasons?
I mean, Autocompletion had that distrust in the past..
MaTrIx4057@reddit
Terrible comparisons.
kodaxmax@reddit
Not really. people made all these same arguments about getting advice on reddit, using youtube tutorials, being self taught, trusting autocompletes etc.. It might seem inconceivable if your young, but we see all this same fearmongering, techniphobia and fear of change with every new popular tech and cultural sensation, all the way back to the printing press atleast.
MaTrIx4057@reddit
Any of the things you mentioned didn't have threat of literally changing people while AI does, and guess what, there are thousands of lays off happening now.
kodaxmax@reddit
AI cant litterally change anyone anymore than a printing press can. your talking like this is a scifi movie.
Layoffs are a good sign. look at how much work that ai can take off humanities plate. All those people could do something more productive with their time if we didn't live in a capatalist dystopia, but thats not AIs fault.
Thats like arguing people should have to manually debug their code, like they did for the 50 000 pages of moonlander code. Just for the sake of inventing jobs for people.
lurgi@reddit
If you use it that way it can be helpful, just as it can be helpful to look at answers on Stack Overflow, copy them, and move on with your life.
The problem is that people are lazy and it's awfully tempting when you have a magic machine that will do all your homework to use it to do all your homework. We see a bunch of questions here of the form "I have used AI for my first two years of CS classes and I find that I haven't learned anything at all. Halp!"
kodaxmax@reddit
Thats just begs the question "if a machine can do it for me, why should i learnt it all". It reminds me of math teachers insisting i won't have a calulator outside of school. Meanwhile i ahve the sum total of almost all human knowledge in my pocket a few taps away.
We saw those sorts of questions decades before generative AI had even been conceived. Its a great example of why traditional schooling focussed on elctures and theory are a terrible way to learn. Had the teacher taken an ounce of interest in the student and checked his work, the teacher would have realized the kid was clueless and falling behind.
But of course the teacher was clueless, likely knowing only how to regurgitate excerpts from ancient textbooks that he himself probably wrote.
lurgi@reddit
The machine can't do it all for you, so there's that.
You get expert programmers by beginning programmers getting experience. If the beginning programmers use AI all the time, how are they going to get the experience?
If you have been driving a car for a decade and then an accident happens, ideally you'd have enough experience to avoid it or do the right thing. If you've been using self-driving for a decade and an accident happens and the self-driving ability says "Oh, shit! Take the wheel" then I can guarantee you you won't know what to do.
kodaxmax@reddit
Exactly my point. these arnt magic, they cant do it all for you. they are just tools that take skill to use well, like anything else. It can't do your homework for you as you explicitly claimed, if you used it to help complete your homework, thats no different tor eferencing a textbook , forum post or asking a peer in a study group.
You could say the same about using google, or intellisense or error checkers or any debugging tool or GUIs or even IDEs itself. "How are kids today going to learn syntax and grammar if Visual Studio just gives them all the answers?"
It's a stupid argument that's thrown out by any example of a developer that has used AI and didn't magically have their brains dribble out their ears as you insist.
No you litterally don't. Thats why we have speed limits and modern cars are full of saftey features. Even gaming athletes dont have the reaction time for that sort of thing, it's superhuman.
Do you forget how to ride a bike just because you havnt done it for a while? Do you remember how to make hot water with a stove or kettle despite hot water automatically coming out of your tap? does using a forklift make you forget how to carry things? Do you forget how to walk or take a bus when you spend so much time driving?
It's hard to take these ridiculous leaps of logic seriously. Your not even trying to think critically or argue constructively.
Mementoes@reddit
I did my cs classes by myself and I didn’t learn anything either. I would not hire anyone based on their college degree personally, because they don’t teach people to be good programmers. (Not that I’m in the position to hire anyone)
cnydox@reddit
Yes. Thanks intellicode that I don't have to Ctrl+C Ctrl+V my own code snippets anymore
DoctorFuu@reddit
This is probably a hot take but I believe using calculators will not make the world destroy itself.
Hefty_Fruit2670@reddit
Ppl will always hate on whatevers new, nothing unusual
Hari___Seldon@reddit
Winner winner! You posted the lowest effort thought limiting cliché out of this avalanche of them. Hopefully your day gets better!
Mementoes@reddit
Perhaps „thought limiting cliche“ is your thought limiting cliche
Hari___Seldon@reddit
"I know you are but what am I?" Wow...that's some genius rhetoric you've got going there 🤣
AdreKiseque@reddit
> hot take
> coldest take on earth
RobertD3277@reddit
Long before buzz words and cliches of marketeering that have plagued the last 3 years, knowledge bases and natural language programming have been used within programming world in general for at least the last 30 years.
I can't count how many times as a programmer I've been told over the course of my career, that a given company has language standards and they have an NLP that reformats old documentation to those standards. Not using that framework would be justification for termination from the job.
Modern LLM architecture or AI as the fancy rhetoric likes to put it, is nothing more but an extension of existing technology that has been in place for a very long time. There will always be weak minded individuals and lazy people who think that the technology is just going to magically do their job of one of them. Soon enough, they will find themselves without a job. It's just that simple.
ColoRadBro69@reddit
As long as you're breaking any policies. Like some AI models train themselves on the questions people ask them, so if you paste a class in and ask the AI what it thinks, you might have just given your company's trade secret away. There are ways to not do that, your company should have a policy, you should follow it.
kodaxmax@reddit
i feel like the only companies with code worth steal probably already have their own in house chat AI. People really overestimate the value of a script or code snippet. The reality is you litterally couldn't give away most code if you tried.
ColoRadBro69@reddit
It doesn't matter if you think your code is worth stealing, it matters that you follow your company policy.
bravopapa99@reddit
40YOE. I don't loathe AI, I do use it on occasion to save time on needless grunt work, simple scripts for shovelling shit around the place etc but I don't use it for coding because I don't need it for coding. When "I" write code "I" write the code, that's just me. I've used it to write unit tests, flesh out Jira tickets and analyse a stack trace or two and it is useful BUT... you HAVE to have the background knowledge and depth of experience to look at its output and feel the Spidey sense that it has just lied to you. If you can't do that you are in for a world of pain and aggravation as a beginner... KNOW THE ROPES then you can begin to use AI as a "Jarvis" to your Iron Man.
Racke7@reddit
I think, in my opinion, the argument that actually makes sense against AI is an economical one.
If you ignore the regular arguments (the hallucinations, the theft, the potential spyware, the inability to be consistent, etc), you're left with a very simple question:
"How are they making money off of this tool?"
You'd think that that's easily explained by just adding a subscription, except... the AI-companies will reluctantly admit that even their ridiculously expensive subscription-services are losing them money. So they'd need them to cost a LOT more than they currently does (or they need to bring the costs WAY down, before their delicious investor-money dries up).
And at that point? Since the tools are no longer "basically free", companies would be forced to look at the cost-benefit of it (is it more efficient to have an AI-subscription, or to hire a new employee to boss around). And since a lot of companies would likely opt out (for a variety of reasons)? You're left with two options for an AI-model.
Either you cancel the whole thing before you lose too much money into the money-sink (and have the CEOs give themselves nice bonuses for being so clever as to "get out fast"), or you figure out some other way to monetize your customers. Such as by... selling their data, for example.
After all, the AI is technically a black-box. What's to stop a company from just... having it remember things about "user-preferences"? And there's no reason to mention this to the end-users, because they'll just "overreact" like they always do. And if we have all of this data, we're in truth legally obligated (promise) to sell it to the highest-bidder so that we can give our shareholders more money.
From the perspective of the end-user? This basically means that a few options will play out:
So from the perspective of a potential end-user, I just think it sounds somewhat naive to learn how to "rely" on a tool that's likely to fall apart in the near future, when you could instead just... learn to do it yourself.
skhds@reddit
It's good for writing simple but tedious tasks, but not when I start asking for very domain-specific complex algorithms. It keeps spitting wrong code to the point where it's just faster to write them myself.
This whole AI hype seems way overblown, the way AI feels to me is that it's an efficient data processor, but incapable of any logical coherence or creating new knowledge. So, it ONLY works for codes that many people probably have already done, in my experience.
TheBewlayBrothers@reddit
It's no diffrent to coyping from stackoverflow. Arguably it's better since you can actually ask the AI for an explenation (though you may not want to trust it). And just like stack overflow the answer wont not work immediatly
IAmADev_NoReallyIAm@reddit
Not a hot take at all. That's how it should be. It's a tool, just like anythying else we use. It's not and should not be a replacement.
ninhaomah@reddit
To OP , pls read this : https://www.reddit.com/r/learnpython/comments/1j8ebof/my_code_works_and_idk_why/
No-Yogurtcloset-755@reddit
Yeah I’m not a developer at the moment I’m doing my PhD, but I use AI all the time. I think the issue is how people use it, I like to use it as a sounding board I can sort of discuss my ideas with it and it is much faster and less full of adverts than Google. When you’re doing high level stuff and you understand the topic it’s really useful, but it becomes dangerous if you don’t know how to spot the mistakes and hallucinations.
skul_and_fingerguns@reddit
vibe coding is all about blind faith; ai religion
alexplivings@reddit
I agree, it can be a great learning tool if you actually look at what it did.
It’s also amazing for filling in easy tedious code. Type some comments, watch it fill stuff in, eyeball/change a couple things and move on.
kodaxmax@reddit
I like to just paste my scripts in, because it writes better comments than i do XD and occassionally teaches me a way i could the same with less characters or more efficently.
reverendsteveii@reddit
>There's been such a massive fear-mongering and dislike towards AI I see from many people and contempt towards people who even remotely use them.
Is there? I've been in the industry about 8 years now which is just long enough to have started when AI was something we just chatted about. I think there's some fear about AI schtupping us out of a pretty dope job but I've not seen any animosity toward people using it. Most of us are excited about it, because it's one more step eliminated between "have idea" and "deliver product"
kodaxmax@reddit
Theres plenty even in the top 10 comments. Just try searching ai on this forum.
Some of the posts i just saw when searching:
and most of the positive posts get downvoted and bullied. It's even worse in game dev communities.
koosley@reddit
Even before AI, IDEs did a lot of heavy lifting on boilerplate code and scaffolding tools could quickly build the framework of your application as well leaving you to do the actual interesting stuff.
AI Generated code is pretty reasonable if you give it a limited scope compared to asking for an entire application from the ground up. You as the developer still need to know what to ask but your more or less building with Legos instead of injecting plastic into lego molds first.
NamerNotLiteral@reddit
Yeah, before I started using codegen LLMs for doing basic data processing shit I just had a list of pre-written blocks for basic functions where I would just ctrl-F to find the fragment I needed and copypaste it. All LLMs have done is save me time doing that for multiple code segments.
Mementoes@reddit
Why not create a macro or function?
reverendsteveii@reddit
God it's so nice to just be able to say "loop through this collection and for each element search this other collection and if there's a match set this boolean". People thought that they were getting a genie but tbh if you're at a senior level it's pretty much just natural language programming. You still have to understand everything that's happening and articulate what you want to change, but that's all you have to do now. Which is the dream we've had since we started doing this, really
iOSCaleb@reddit
Maybe you just gave a poor example, but I think i could type the code to “loop through this collection and for each element search this other collection and if there’s a match set this Boolean” in about the same time that it took me to copy that description. Using higher order functions available in many languages that’s maybe three lines of code that’s easier to write in code than describe in English.
koosley@reddit
I do admit that my job is like 15-20% programming, 50% meetings/design work and 30-35% 'scripting'. Most of our programming we do at work is limited to 50-1000 lines that fits into an existing platform (Cisco work) and the language seems to change every day. Outside of Java and C#, I can't remember the syntax on how to loop through a collection/array/list oh whatever programming/scripting language the particular product I am dealing with uses anyways. So even before generative AI, I had to look it up.
RobMig83@reddit
It's a normal reaction from OG's against a newer tool: they claimed stack overflow was educating people to copy-paste, they claimed that autocompletion was making programmers dumber, they argued that IDEs were promoting bad habits and so on...
But in the end everything depends on the user...
Fridux@reddit
My problem with AI is that, in addition to the hallucinations, and being factually and logically confidently wrong in many situations, it also reduces your cognitive exercise significantly, which ultimately reduces your learning rate while giving you the impression that you are accomplishing a lot.
I work on an actual AI product, fortunately not on the AI components themselves, and every once in a while have to refute AI-generated nonsense on Slack or in code reviews because people refuse to actually think and come up with their own arguments. My biggest problem with that is not having to refute AI spam, which is already bad enough, it's the fact that in many occasions people lose conceptual track of the discussion, and beyond that point it's just me debating with a machine without any productive results since the humans operating it aren't actually learning anything..
My view on AI is that it's pretty good and productive at solving very specific problems, but commercially viable large language models are only useful as knowledge bases with some ability to fill in the blanks in cases of prompt ambiguity, and will ultimately contribute to a generation of incompetent professionals. The biggest problem with commercially viable AI is that it is not driven buy curiosity, as implementing a model that would actually reflect on its own thoughts in a feedback loop designed to increase the soundness of its own knowledge foundation would require significantly more computing resources, so there's zero motivation to invest into that.
Some people on this thread claim that AI is pretty good at generating boilerplate code. While I don't disagree with that, my problem is the general waste of computing resources without any actual benefit compared to deterministic algorithmic solutions whose correctness is much easier to verify, but even worse than that is that many people are fooling themselves into thinking that only AI can do that kind of work, which couldn't be farther from the truth.
RangePsychological41@reddit
This isn’t a hot take at all.
Dense-Employment9930@reddit
Before AI, if you got stuck in learning people recommended google or asking on forums. No one questioned that as a legit tool to help solve problems and extend learning.
AI for the most part is a better version of that process. So what is the problem?
There were always dumbasses in programming (and every other vocation) and always will be. People just equate now that because dumbasses use AI to get by, AI is the reason they are a dumbass.
It's not. It's the person, not the tool.
HolyPommeDeTerre@reddit
Since the last 22 years I am convinced AGI will save our world. My opinion since I am 16 yo.
You'll find me in the group of people saying learning programming shouldn't be done with AI. I am not fear mongering anyone.
I trained in neural nets and linear algebra. I worked in companies on AI projects (vision, stt mostly). Not a expert, but I understand the work and how it works.
I've been playing with AI since a long time and I've been using the LLMs as part of my job and hobby. I am testing them.
All I can say is that I spend my time teaching it instead of actually getting help. And the not seniors in my team are relying on it too much, in the end they loose skills...
I am not fear mongering. This tool isn't what you think it is. I hoped it was what we all wait for. But this is just an illusion backed up by the hype.
Hari___Seldon@reddit
You've glossed over deep systemic problems with the current crop of tools being marketed as AI. It's an understandable mistake, given the relentless narrative bending that passes as "facts" from the major players. It will be interesting to see if we can sustain things until a more legitimate round of tools can gain a foothold.
At the moment, it's in the companies' best interest (individually and collectively) to entrench the status quo for as long as possible in hopes of being one of the few who will survive that transition. That's bad for everyone in the long run, but the best interests of the public stopped being a consideration long ago.
HollyShitBrah@reddit
Take as hot as 1 + 1 = 2
plantfumigator@reddit
Take so cold atoms move in reverse
Jackasaurous_Rex@reddit
I’m so glad I didn’t have it in college because I could have something like cursor fly though literally every project in minutes. To be fair, copying and pasting from stack overflow was always an option on the easy assignments but you still had those learning moments where you had to think your way out of situations.
Glad I didn’t have it my first few years in industry either. Now it’s incredible, I have it copy my style and just turn my comments into all of the code I’m already envisioning. Huge speed boost
Logic_Badger@reddit
Mostly agree to this, but during your learning stages you should avoid it as much as you can to build problem solving skills of your own. As a Compsi student, once I stopped relying on it to solve tough problems, I built up the ability to solve hard problems on my own. Which is a great skill to have
i-Blondie@reddit
Some people like be self righteous or appear above others so they’ll denounce it and I just don’t absorb that condescension. People can do what they like, if they blindly copy paste they won’t learn much but they’ll make something. If they learn by using it as a tool they get that benefit. If they boycott it because they think it’s cheating or has no place for “real” developers they don’t use it. None of that affects me personally.
Zesher_@reddit
No tools allowed, like we shouldn't have spell checkers or IDEs adding squiggles when we fuck up. /s
In all seriousness, yeah, AI is a great tool and I don't think many people would disagree. The only issue I have is if people rely on it too much and so they don't actually know how to do things on their own. AI can speed up work a lot, but it can also be dumb as shit at times, if you send me a PR and can't understand why it doesn't work, I won't be a happy camper.
jlgrijal@reddit (OP)
Agree. Hence why I stressed that I see nothing wrong with AI as long as you aren't just blindly copy-and-pasting AI-generated code without even trying to understand what the AI-generated snippets of code does.
My thought process on copying any snippet of code, be it from AI, Stackoverflow, or anywhere else, if you're going to copy code, you better fully understand what they do.
ekaylor_@reddit
That's not a hot take
Lorevi@reddit
Despite all the comments saying how common an opinion this is, I 100% get why you get the impression it's not.
Reddit is such an echo chamber where the 'popular opinion' (subreddit dependent) is the only one you see due to upvotes.
Depending on which subreddit you end up on, you'll come away thinking one of two opinions is mainstream.
AI will completely replace developers (or already has) and we're days away from an AGI overlord. Also the only possible way to use AI for software development is to get it to generate your entire codebase for you and to copy and paste the output without reading it. This works flawlessly.
AI is absolutely useless and has no redeeming qualities. Also the only possible way to use AI for software development is to get it to generate your entire codebase for you and to copy and paste the output without reading it. This doesn't work, hence AI is useless. It also means new devs are super dumb because they just ask gpt to generate code for them or something.
They're both obviously ridiculous and neither are the mainstream opinion but if you just read reddit it's what comes across lol.
NotTooShahby@reddit
I use AI as a supplement to Google, and oftentimes a replacement if it’s simple enough, that’s it. The only skill we lost is the ability to skim different forms of documentation, which is highly likely to be automated in some form anyway.
slurpinsoylent@reddit
the most lukewarm take of all time.
Rwdscz@reddit
Those are usually the most accurate.
NoAlbatross7355@reddit
It's called group-think and it's not accurate lol.
Whatever801@reddit
I think the dislike, from I've seen and what I feel, is the notion that it can do the job of programmers or will replace programmers. People post on this subreddit constantly thinking they shouldn't join the field due to AI, which is ridiculous. There is also a lot of misunderstanding about what AI is and what it's not. Generative AI at it's core predicts the next most likely character. That's definitely useful in a lot of ways across a lot of disciplines, but it's also bad at creative problem solving and has no way to validate its own correctness. As such I think beginners tend to rely too heavily on AI while learning, not understand how the code words, not be able to fix issues with the code, not learn to read documentation and end up with loosely strung together AI slop.
So yeah, it's just a tool. Can be useful if used appropriately. But the hype and reality of AI are way far apart IMO.
cgoldberg@reddit
Wow... that take was so hot I had to drop my phone!
(jk... it was tepid at best)
TurtleSandwich0@reddit
I disagree completely!
Only true developers know how to program: copy and paste from StackOverflow without understanding.
/s
Aggressive_Ad_5454@reddit
Yeah. s/AI/StackOverflow/ and s/AI/random blog post/ too.
Comprehensive-Pea812@reddit
during my time, many people said you should learn programming by using a notepad.
and before that, I was told to use blank paper.
I probably can't code without IDE auto complete now. and it is ok.
well-its-done-now@reddit
That’s a normal take from good engineers. Most engineers are bad and defer to the AI’s “opinion”. See CoPilot PR reviews as an example
ffrkAnonymous@reddit
Meh
oblong_pickle@reddit
That's the normal view imo. If the commit has your name on it, it's your code. it doesn't matter if it came from ai or stackover flow. You're responsible for it.
alexplivings@reddit
1 take
particlemanwavegirl@reddit
There are plenty of pitfalls. But there are also superpowers. If you don't know a term, never having been exposed to the concept it represents: can you Google it? No! But you can ask an LLM what you're missing. It may take a couple of tries and you will have to intelligent sifting of what is really unintelligent babble.
aidencoder@reddit
Friend, people are just letting the models commit and push. Never mind copy and paste.
_Mag0g_@reddit
I 100% agree that is the only way to correctly use AI when coding.
Duckter1@reddit
I've always thought this way about the use of AI, especially in the exact description mentioned by OP. It's like using a calculator, no? You can just copy paste, but if you dont understand what you are putting in, it'll spit out gibberish and fuck shit up.
louleads@reddit
To be honest, I think it's actually necessary. If you don't use AI (as a senior), you will be left behind and replaced.
AI is a tool, sure, but if you don't use it, you won't replaced by AI, you'll be replaced by developers who use AI.