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Comment by pessimizer

5 hours ago

Every single high-profile story that shows up on the feeds about how LLMs are just about there and coders are doomed, if you actually read them and are a programmer, seems like a story about how LLMs are bad and generate trash code that rarely even looks superficially good and definitely doesn't work.

There was a story going around about LLMs making minesweeper clones, and they were all terrible in extremely dumb ways. The headline wasn't obvious, so I thought the take that people were getting from it is that AI is making the same dumb mistakes that it was making a year ago. Nope. It was people ranting about how coders are going to be out of a job next week. Meanwhile, none of them can do a minesweeper clone with like 50 working examples online, maybe 8 things you have to do right to be perfect, and 9000 articles about minesweeper and even mathematical papers about minesweeper to make everything about the game and its purpose perfectly clear. And then AI generates buttons that don't do anything and timers that don't stop.

Unfortunately management is the audience for AI fluff stories. Management then fires a huge percentage of their staff on the promise AI will write everything.

It doesn't matter to the people that were fired that the AI isn't as capable as promised. They're still job hunting in a shitty job market. When management does eventually figure out the AI underperforms they'll hire back staff at a fraction of the salary.

So executives and management look great no matter what and everyone else gets screwed.