Comment by gspencley

I went through the parents, looking for a claim somewhere that AI was "useless." I couldn't find it.

Yes there are lots of skeptics amongst programmers when it comes to AI. I was one myself (and still am depending on what we're talking about). My skepticism was rooted in the fact that AI is trained on human-generated output. Most human written code is not very good, and so AI is going to produce not very good code by design because that's what it was trained on.

Then you add to that the context problem. AI is not very good at understanding your business goals, or the nuanced intricacies of your problem domain.

All of this pointed to the fact, very early on, that AI would not be a good tool to replace programmers. And THAT'S the crux of why so many programmers pushed back. Because the hype was claiming that automation was coming for engineering jobs.

I have started to use LLMs regularly for a variety of tasks. Including some with engineering. But I always end up spending a lot of time refactoring what LLMs produce for me, code-wise. And much of the time I find that I"m still learning what the LLMs can do for me that truly saves me time, vs what would have been faster to just write myself in the first place.

LLMs are not useless. But if only 20% of a programmer's time is actually spent writing code on average then even if you can net a 50% increase in coding productivity... you're only netting a 10% overall productivity optimization for an engineer BEST CASE SCENARIO.

And that's not "useless" but compared to the hype and bullshit coming out of the mouths of CEOs, it's as good as useless. It's as good as the MIT study finding that only 5% of generative AI projects have netted ANY measurable returns for the business.