• Badabinski@kbin.earth
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    2 months ago

    I wrote a comment about this several months ago on my old kbin.social account. That site is gone and I can’t seem to get a link to it, so I’m just going to repost it here since I feel it’s relevant. My kbin client doesn’t let me copy text posts directly, so I’ve had to use the Select feature of the android app switcher. Unfortunately, the comment didn’t emerge unscathed, and I lack the mental energy to fix it due to covid brain fog (EDIT: it appears that many uses of I were not preserved). The context of the old post was about layoffs, and it can be found here: https://kbin.earth/m/asklemmy@lemmy.ml/t/12147

    I want to offer my perspective on the Al thing from the point of view of a senior individual contributor at a larger company. Management loves the idea, but there will be a lot of developers fixing auto-generated code full of bad practices and mysterious bugs at any company that tries to lean on it instead of good devs. A large language model has no concept of good or bad, and it has no logic. happily generate string- templated SQL queries that are ripe for SQL injection. I’ve had to fix this myself. Things get even worse when you have to deal with a shit language like Bash that is absolutely full of God awful footguns. Sometimes you have to use that wretched piece of trash language, and the scripts generated are horrific. Remember that time when Steam on Linux was effectively running rm -rf /* on people’s systems? I’ve had to fix that same type of issue multiple times at my workplace.

    I think LLMs will genuinely transform parts of the software industry, but I absolutely do not think they’re going to stand in for competent developers in the near future. Maybe they can help junior developers who don’t have a good grasp on syntax and patterns and such. I’ve personally felt no need to use them, since spend about 95% of my time on architecture, testing, and documentation.

    Now, do the higher-ups think the way that do? Absolutely not. I’ve had senior management ask me about how I’m using Al tooling, and they always seem so disappointed when I explain why I personally don’t feel the need for it and what feel its weaknesses are. Bossman sees it as a way to magically multiply IC efficiency for nothing, so absolutely agree that it’s likely playing a part in at least some of these layoffs.

    Basically, I think LLMs can be helpful for some folks, but my experience is that the use of LLMs by junior developers absolutely increases the workload of senior developers. Senior developers using LLMs can experience a productivity bump, but only if they’re very critical of the output generated by the model. I am personally much faster just relying on traditional IDE auto complete, since I don’t have to change from “I’m writing code” mode to “I’m reviewing code mode.”

    • mashbooq@infosec.pub
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      2 months ago

      The one colleague using AI at my company produced (CUDA) code with lots of memory leaks that required two expert developers to fix. LLMs produce code based on vibes instead of following language syntax and proper coding practices. Maybe that would be ok in a more forgiving high level language, but I don’t trust them at all for low level languages.

      • lightnsfw@reddthat.com
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        2 months ago

        I was trying to use it to write a program in python for this macropad I bought and I have yet to get anything usable out of it. It got me closer than I would have been by myself and I don’t have a ton of coding experience so it’s problems are probably partially on me but everything it’s given me has required me to correct it to work.

      • unconfirmedsourcesDOTgov@lemmy.sdf.org
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        2 months ago

        The same one they have now, perhaps with a steeper learning curve. The market for software developers is already saturated with disillusioned junior devs who attended a boot camp with promises of 6 figure salaries. Some of them did really well, but many others ran headlong into the fact that it takes a lot more passion than a boot camp to stand out as a junior dev.

        From what I understand, it’s rough out there for junior devs in certain sectors.