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Comment by username223

6 days ago

If calculators were unreliable... Well, we'd be screwed if everyone blindly trusted them and never learned math.

They'd also be a whole lot less useful. Calculators are great because they always do exactly what you tell them. It's the same with compilers, almost: imagine if your C compiler did the right thing 99.9% of the time, but would make inexplicable errors 0.1% of the time, even on code that had previously worked correctly. And then CPython worked 99.9% of the time, except it was compiled by a C compiler working 99.9% of the time, ...

But bringing it back on-topic, in a world where software is AI-generated, and tests are AI-generated (because they're repetitive, and QA is low-status), and user complaints are all fielded by chat-bots (because that's cheaper than outsourcing), I don't see how anyone develops any expertise, or how things keep working.

Early calculators were unreliable. Assume that AI based coding will improve.

  • What early calculators were unreliable?

    I’m unaware of any, but even if there is an example it was before they were in widespread use.