Comment by LogicFailsMe
2 days ago
Sure sure, but it is surprisingly like managing an intern, or a fresh engineer where there is a pre-existing language barrier. At least in my experience it is. There might be a dash of carefully negotiating with the devil himself in the mix to make sure you ask for precisely what you wish to have built or you get something that meets the spec of what you told it but it isn't what you wanted.
And sometimes this intern which can produce code at blazing speeds get some subtleties wrong, so you can never trust their output and have to check every time.
And when you point out the error they sometimes insist what they did is correct, or they confidently "correct" it to something still wrong.
> And sometimes this intern which can produce code at blazing speeds get some subtleties wrong, so you can never trust their output and have to check every time.
You're just describing junior employees lol.
Juniors turn to seniors. You can never trust AI won't glitch...
lol
6 replies →
thats the reason why I always focus on one function per thread / or one class per thread, and I copy it by hand in VS.NET, to exactly prevent this - never ever I would let it run "unattended" on the codebase :)
Babylon 5 Crusade had a device called The Apocalypse Box. It knew everything and you could ask it questions. Unfortunately, it lied strategically so as to both give you an edge here and there whilst it drove you insane with all the lying. I have always seen the similarity to large language models here myself and that was in 1999.
https://babylon5.fandom.com/wiki/Apocalypse_Box
What has surprised me is that JMS has never seemingly noticed this.
To me, it feels closer to dealing with a personal outsourcing agency than working with internal coworkers, because the agents have zero skin in the game.
It's great. You can get a lot of stuff done in parallel. But it's much more a game of checkbox compliance than working with someone who has their head in the same context as you all day. Even a very junior teammate has some situational awareness inside a company/team.
It is exactly that until the moment it isn't and it does something amazing, truly amazing, and I never see it coming when it does happen. But it doesn't happen all that often. It's just that it does happen here and there.