Comment by sublinear
12 hours ago
Can we finally just admit that using AI for coding is equivalent (or maybe even slightly inferior) to web search?
A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush. Giving junior devs or non-devs what is essentially automated stackoverflow copypasta on steroids only amplified all the downsides of inexperience that we already learned well over a decade ago.
If your position is AI for coding is equivalent or worse than web search, I am curious how you arrived there. I could see that a few years ago, but with the state of the tooling now it is hard for me to understand.
imo we're all being treated to a live demonstration of why the pareto principle is stupid. AI agents are excellent at making prototypes, and a lot of people are happy to just stop there (well, I wouldn't say happy. More like can't/won't take ownership once the rot of code they dont understand has taken hold) I find it all the time where I start side projects but fail to feel any connection to the output, I can't show people or feel proud. I need to start trying to go back to entirely no LLMs tbh
No, its not. Since when did stack overflow or google find and fix thousands of security issues.
I’m old enough to remember computers replacing thousands of pages of paper.
What does that have to do with productivity?
Bugs and security flaws are just oversights. Those oversights are caused by inattention either through fatigue or acting too quickly. An inexperienced person delegating what they don't understand to AI produces more bugs, not less.
Those mindlessly copying from stackoverflow were in a similar situation, but only because they ignored or didn't understand the warnings from the discussion. You're rolling the dice if you expect AI to explain itself, as it can only ever know at most what it scraped from (stackoverflow and poorly documented github repos).
As it was not too long ago, searching on stackoverflow was already a hail mary play. AI just makes the problem worse. At best, with AI there's a lot of reinventing the wheel with no hope of ever doing better than merely approximating the wheel.
> Bugs and security flaws are just oversights. Those oversights are caused by inattention either through fatigue or acting too quickly.
Being able to work more quickly is pretty much the definition of productivity.
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this is just false...
Curious, how?
To me it is obvious that an org with a good culture will be more able to identify and reach its targets than a dysfunctional org lacking trust and safety.