Comment by maccard
4 months ago
> I’ve already had to spend hours at work tracking down bugs that ending up being in there because someone just blindly accepted the code an LLM wrote, I fear it’s only going to get worse
And I’ve also had to spend hours at work tracking down badly copy pasted stack overflow code, or from other places in the codebase that didn’t do what the programmer thought it did. A shitty carpenter will build a shitty staircase whether they have a chisel or a dremel
But what about a middling carpenter? Moralism about "shitty programmers" is not helpful when we're really talking about aggregate trends, and when it comes to aggregates -- tools do matter. Defaults matter. Precedent matters. Things like these are why culture has such an outsized impact on a teams' ability to ship good, quality code over a long period of time.
One difference is that orgs are tracking AI coding assistant usage as a (positive) metric, soemthing they never did with SO. Given finite time, being pushed to AI code whether or not it makes sense or is efficient in either quality or delivery time, and with no relief of time constraints, means other things will fall by the wayside.
A good carpenter will build a shitty staircase if he is forced to use the wrong tool, given a timeline that doesn't accommodate it, and paid for delivering something that superficially resembles a staricase on time regardless of quality.