- cross-posted to:
- technology@midwest.social
- cross-posted to:
- technology@midwest.social
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this is expected, isn’t it? You shit fart code from your ass, doing it as fast as you can, and then whoever buys out the company has to rewrite it. or they fire everyone to increase the theoretical margins and sell it again immediately
But you see. That’s the solution. Now you pay foreigners to clean up the generated code by offshoring the engineers. At 1/100 the cost.
AI doesn’t generate its own code, humans using AI generate code. If a person uses AI to generate code and doesn’t know good practices then of course the code is going to be worse.
I’ve been coding for a while. I did an honest eager attempt at making a real functioning thing with all code written by AI. A breakout clone using SDL2 with music.
The game should look good, play good, have cool effects, and be balanced. It should have an attractor screen, scoring, a win state and a lose state.
I also required the code to be maintainable. Meaning I should be able to look at every single line and understand it enough to defend its existence.
I did make it work. And honestly Claude did better than expected. The game ran well and was fun.
But: The process was shit.
I spent 2 days and several hundred dollars to babysit the AI, to get something I could have done in 1 day including learning SDL2.
Everything that turned out well, turned out well because I brought years of skill to the table, and could see when Claude was coding itself into a corner and tell it to break up code in modules, collate globals, remove duplication, pull out abstractions, etc. I had to detect all that and instruct on how to fix it. Until I did it was adding and re-adding bugs because it had made so much shittily structured code it was confusing itself.
TLDR; LLM can write maintainable code if given full constant attention by a skilled coder, at 40% of the coder’s speed.
This was a very directed experiment at purely LLM written maintainable code.
Writing experiments and proof of concepts, even without skill, will give a different calculation and can make more sense.
Having it write a “starting point” and then take over, also is a different thing that can make more sense. This requires a coder with skill, you can’t skip that.
It depends on the subject area and your workflow. I am not an AI fanboy by any stretch of the imagination, but I have found the chatbot interface to be a better substitute for the “search for how to do X with library/language Y” loop. Even though it’s wrong a lot, it gives me a better starting place faster than reading through years-old SO posts. Being able to talk to your search interface is great.
The agentic stuff is also really good when the subject is something that has been done a million times over. Most web UI areas are so well trodden that JS devs have already invented a thousand frameworks to do it. I’m not a UI dev, so being able to give the agent a prompt like, “make a configuration UI with a sidebar that uses the graphql API specified here” is quite nice.
AI is trash at anything it hasn’t been trained on in my experience though. Do anything niche or domain-specific, and it feels like flipping a coin with a bash script. It just throws shit at the wall and runs tests until the tests pass (or it sneakily changes the tests because the error stacktrace repeatedly indicates the same test line as the problem).
Yeah what you say makes sense to me. Having it make a “wrong start” in something new is useful, as it gives you a lot of the typical structure, introduces the terminology, maybe something sorta moving that you can see working before messing with it, etc.
It would be really interesting to watch a video of this process. Though I’m certain it would be pretty difficult to pull off the editing.
One of the first videos I watched about LLMs, was a journalist who didn’t know anything about programming used ChatGPT to build a javascript game in the browser. He’d just copy paste code and then paste the errors and ask for help debugging. It even had to walk him through setting of VS Code and a git repo.
He said it took him about 4 hours to get a playable platformer.
I think that’s an example of a unique capability of AI. It can let a non-programmer kinda program, it can let a non-Chinese speaker speak kinda Chinese, it’ll let a non-artist kinda produce art.
I don’t doubt that it’ll get better, but even now it’s very useful in some cases (nowhere near enough to justify the trillions of dollars being spent though).
Yeah, I’m not sure the way we allocate resources is justified either, in general. I guess ultimately the problem with AI is that it gives access to skills to capital that they would otherwise have to interact with laborers to get.
I think that people are too enthralled with the current situation that’s centered around LLMs, the massive capital bubble and the secondary effects from the expansion of datacenter space (power, water, etc).
You’re right that they do allow for the disruption of labor markets in fields that were not expecting computers to be able to do their job (to be fair to them, humanity has spent hundreds of millions of dollars designing various language processing software and been unable to engineer the software to do it effectively).
I think that usually when people say ‘AI’ they mean ChatGPT or LLMs in general. The reason that LLMs are big is because neural networks require a huge amount of data to train and the largest data repository that we have (the Internet) is text, images and video… so it makes sense that the first impressive models were trained on text and images/video.
The field of robotics hasn’t had access to a large public dataset to train large models on, so we don’t see large robotics models but they’re coming. You can already see it, compare robotic motion 4 years ago using a human engineered feedback control loop… the motions are accurate but they’re jerky and mechanical. Now look at the same company making a robot that uses a neural network trained on human kinematic data, that motion looks so natural that it breaks through the uncanny valley to me.
This is just one company generating data using human models (which is very expensive) but this is the kind of thing that will be ubiquitous and cheap given enough time.
This isn’t to mention the AlphaFold AI which learned how to fold proteins better than anything human engineered. Then, using a diffusion model (the same kind used in making pictures of shrimp jesus) another group was able to generate the RNA which would manufacture new novel proteins that fit a specific receptor. Proteins are important because essentially every kind of medication that we use has to interact with a protein-based receptor and the ability to create, visualize and test custom proteins in addition to the ability to write arbitrary mRNA (see, the mRNA COVID vaccine) is huge for computational protein design (responsible for the AIDS vaccines).
LLMs and the capitalist bubble surrounding them is certainly an important topic, framing it as being ‘against AI’ creates an impression that AI technology has nothing positive to offer. This reduces the amount of people who study the topic or major in it in college. So in 10 years, we’ll have less machine learning specialists than other countries who are not drowning in this ‘AI bad’ meme.
It is my hope to someday have AI create the assets for game concepts. I have ideas for making a Tetris clone with each piece or color having different properties, but actualizing it is far beyond my abilities.
You want to see someone using say, VS Code to write something using say, Claude Code?
There’s probably a thousand videos of that.
More interesting: I watched someone who was super cheap trying to use multiple AIs to code a project because he kept running out of free credits. Every now and again he’d switch accounts and use up those free credits.
That was an amazing dance, let me tell ya! Glorious!
I asked him which one he’d pay for if he had unlimited money and he said Claude Code. He has the $20/month plan but only uses it in special situations because he’ll run out of credits too fast. $20 really doesn’t get you much with Anthropic 🤷
That inspired me to try out all the code assist AIs and their respective plugins/CLI tools. He’s right: Claude Code was the best by a HUGE margin.
Gemini 3.0 is supposed to be nearly as good but I haven’t tried it yet so I dunno.
Now that I’ve said all that: I am severely disappointed in this article because it doesn’t say which AI models were used. In fact, the study authors don’t even know what AI models were used. So it’s 430 pull requests of random origin, made at some point in 2025.
For all we know, half of those could’ve been made with the Copilot gpt5-mini that everyone gets for free when they install the Copilot extension in VS Code.
It’s more I want to see the process of experienced coders explaining the coding mistakes that typical AI coding makes. I have very little experience and see it as a good learning experience. You’re probably right about there being tons of videos like that.
The mistakes it makes depends on the model and the language. GPT5 models can make horrific mistakes though where it randomly removes huge swaths of code for no reason. Every time it happens I’m like, “what the actual fuck?” Undoing the last change and trying usually fixes it though 🤷
They all make horrific security mistakes quite often. Though, that’s probably because they’re trained on human code that is *also" chock full of security mistakes (former security consultant, so I’m super biased on that front haha).
Oh, gpt def does that’s lol.
Even replaces large bits with just a …
But I don’t use it to rewrite code. I use projects to load everything into it and just ask for pieces that I’ll edit and insert. There’s something about it that works with my adhd in keeping track. It works well for me.
Gemini coughs up more garbage than chatgpt for me by a long shot. For python, anyways.
It’s basically just for if you’re lazy and don’t want to write a bunch of boilerplate or hit your keyboard a bunch of times to move the cursor(s) around
It is great for boilerplate code. It can also explain code for you, or help with an unfamiliar library. It’s even helped me be productive when my brain wasn’t ready to really engage with the code.
But here’s the real danger: because I’ve got AI to do it for me, my brain doesn’t have to engage fully with the code anymore. I don’t really get into the flow where code just flows out of your hands like I used to. It’s becoming a barrier between me and the real magic of coding. And that sucks, because that’s what I love about this work. Instead, I’m becoming the AI’s manager. I never asked for that.
I generally agree with what you’ve said for sure. I think I’ve honestly started to use it for helping me to go pinpoint where to go look for issues in the spaghetti code of new code bases. I’ve also mostly tried to avoid using it in my personal coding time but I feel like it’s gotten harder and harder to get legitimately good search results nowadays which I realize is also because of ai. Given the choice I’d happily just erase it from existence I think. Spending hours sifting through reddit and stack overflow was way more fulfilling + I feel like people used to be slightly less prickly about answering stuff because that was how you had to get answers. It seems like lemmy could replace that space at least, I’ve genuinely gotten helpful comments and I’ve always felt downvotes on here have been productive versus what Reddit is now.
I’ve found the same thing. I’ve turned off the auto suggestions while tying because by the time I’m typing i already know what I’m going I’m to type and having mostly incorrect suggestions popping up every 2 seconds was distracting and counterproductive.
Which is funny because you should be able to just copy and paste And combine from maybe two maybe three GitHub pages pretty easily and you learn just as much
AI code is great for getting over a hump, something you’re stuck on. Used ChatGPT (not the best for coding, I know) to help on a PowerShell script. There was exactly two references on the internet for what I wanted to do (Google Calendar/Sheets integration). Spent hours on the problem.
ChatGPT gave me two things: One solution I didn’t know was a thing, another was a twist I hadn’t thought of. For giggles, I plugged the whole script in. Guess what? Failed instantly. Because of course it did.
No. LLMs don’t write working code. Yes. They can help you, assuming you know what you’re doing in the first place. But here’s the crux of using AI:
It does not, and cannot, give a shit about edge cases, user error and security.
I wrote a simple PS script to swap my TV screens around for work, play and movies. Rolled it out in 30 minutes. Took me 2 more hours to stupid proof it, test it, wrap it an exe, make an icon, deploy it, all that. AI can’t do any of that.
Almost as if it was made to simulate human output but without the ability to scrutinize itself.
To be fair most humans don’t scrutinize themselves either.
(Fuck AI though. Planet burning trash)
(Fuck AI though. Planet burning trash)
It’s humans burning the planet, not the spicy Linear Algebra.
Blaming AI for burning the planet is like blaming crack for robbing your house.
How about I blame the humans that use and promote AI. The humans that defend it in arguments using stupid analogies to soften the damage it causes?
Would that make more sense?
You’ll never ban it. The most you’ll do is ban it for the poor and working class. Do you understand how bad that would be?
How many times are you going to approach the topic this poorly?
Removed by mod
Blaming AI for burning the planet is like blaming guns for killing children in schools, it’s people we should be banning!
Blaming AI is in general criticising everything encompassing it, which includes how bad data centers are for the environment. It’s like also recognizing that the crack the crackhead smoked before robbing your house is also bad.
The number of times I have received an un-proofread two sentence email is too damn high.
And then the follow up email because they didn’t actually finish a complete thought
I do this with texts/DMs, but I’d never do that with an email. I double or triple check everything, make sure my formatting is good, and that the email itself is complete. I’ll DM someone 4 or 5 times in 30 seconds though, it feels like a completely different medium ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
So this article is basically a puff piece for Code Rabbit, a company that sells AI code review tooling/services. They studied 470 merge/pull requests, 320 AI and 150 human control. They don’t specify what projects, which model, or when, at least without signing up to get their full “white paper”. For all that’s said this could be GPT 4 from 2024.
I’m a professional developer, and currently by volume I’m confident latest models, Claude 4.5 Opus, GPT 5.2, Gemini 3 Pro, are able to write better, cleaner code than me. They still need high level and architectural guidance, and sometimes overt intervention, but on average they can do it better, faster, and cheaper than me.
A lot of articles and forums posts like this feel like cope. I’m not happy about it, but pretending it’s not happening isn’t gonna keep me employed.
Source of the article: https://www.coderabbit.ai/blog/state-of-ai-vs-human-code-generation-report
I am a professional software engineer, and my experience is the complete opposite. It does it faster and cheaper, yes, but also noticeably worse, and having to proofread the output, fix and refactor ends up taking more time than I would have taken writing it myself.
AI is shit. Details at 6!
Schrodinger’s AI: It is both useless shit that can only generate “slop” while at the same time being so effective, it is the reason behind 50,000 layoffs/going to take everyone’s jobs.
Those two things aren’t being claimed by the same people.
There are people with functioning brains, who are aware that AI is shit at programming, and there are managers who have been sold a sales pitch and believe that they can replace half of their software engineers.
AI doesn’t actually need to be effective to cost a bunch of jobs, it just needs to have good salespeople. Those jobs will come back when the businesses which decided to rely on AI discover the hole they’ve dug for themselves. That might not be quick though, because there’s no rule saying that major businesses will have competent leaders with good foresight.
Damn, I always think news at 11:00, but I don’t think I’ve ever really watched news at 11:00
Not if Yandev has anything to say about it.
I really, really, want to stop seeing posts about:
- Musk
- Trump
- Israel
- Microsoft
- AI
I swear these are the only things that the entire Lemmy world wants to talk about.
Maybe I should just go back to Reddit… Fuck Spez, but at least there is some variety.
Microsoft could write an AI agent to filter threads based on context you don’t like. Come to think of it, Megagenius Elon Musk already has one he wrote to censor anti-Israel posts on Trump’s Truth Social. There, I think I got them all… Happy holidays!
your frontend of choice probably has some option to hide posts containing specific keywords
Yeah, good point. Was hoping to avoid downloading another random app, but at this stage, I guess It’s something I should look into.
Yes, please just hide these. We ignoring these issues at large is how we got to where we’re at and it’ll continue getting worse if we just stop talking about it. But you need to do what you can to take of yourself, first and foremost.
Ignoring?
I’ve read at least 7 iterations of this exact same article. There is absolutely no originality here at all.
I’m not talking about this particular article, I’m talking about the sentiment of wanting to shut off the conversation about those topics you mentioned. Like I said, do what you have to do and take care of your own mental health. I assume that if you were only talking about reposting of this article you’d not have mentioned your whole list of topics.
No shit.
I actually believed somebody when they told me it was great at writing code, and asked it to write me the code for a very simple lua mod. It’s made several errors and ended up wasting my time because I had to rewrite it.
In a postgraduate class, everyone was praising ai, calling it nicknames and even their friend (yes, friend), and one day, the professor and a colleague were discussing some code when I approached, and they started their routine bullying on me for being dumb and not using ai. Then I looked at his code and asked to test his core algorithm that he converted from a fortran code and “enhanced” it. I ran it with some test data and compared to the original code and the result was different! They blindly trusted some ai code that deviated from their theoretical methodology, and are publishing papers with those results!
Even after showing the different result, they didn’t convince themselves of anything and still bully me for not using ai. Seriously, this shit became some sort of cult at this point. People are becoming irrational. If people in other universities are behaving the same and publishing like this, I’m seriously concerned for the future of science and humanity itself. Maybe we should archive everything published up to 2022, to leave as a base for the survivors from our downfall.
The way it was described to me by some academics is that it’s useful…but only as a “research assistant” to bounce ideas off of and bring in arcane or tertiary concepts you might not have considered (after you vet them thoroughly, of course).
The danger, as described by the same academics, is that it can act as a “buddy” who confirms you biases. It can generate truly plausible bullshit to support deeply flawed hypotheses, for example. Their main concern is it “learning” to stroke the egos of the people using it so it creates a feedback loop and it’s own bubbles of bullshit.
So, linkedin? What if the real artificial intelligence was the linkedin lunatics we met along the way?
That’s not a bad idea. I’m already downloading lots of human knowledge and media that I want backed up because I can’t trust humanity anymore to have it available anymore
It can’t even copy and paste a Hello World example properly. If someone says it’s working well for them, I’m going to now assume they are too ignorant to understand what’s broken.
I use it for things that are simple and monotonous to write. This way I’m able to deliver results to tasks I couldn’t have been arsed to do. I’m a data analyst and mostly use mysql and power query
It works well when you use it for small (or repetitive) and explicit tasks. That you can easily check.
What’s your preferred Hello world language? I’m gunna test this out. The more complex the code you need, the more they suck, but I’ll be amazed if it doesn’t work first try to simply print hello world.
Malbolge is a fun one
Edit: Funny enough, ChatGPT fails to get this right, even with the answer right there on Wikipedia. When I tried running ChatGPT’s output the first few characters were correct but it errors with invalid char at 37
Cheeky, I love it.
Got correct code first try. Failed creating working docker first try. Second try worked.
tmp="$(mktemp)"; cat >"$tmp" <<'MBEOF' ('&%:9]!~}|z2Vxwv-,POqponl$Hjig%eB@@>}=<M:9wv6WsU2T|nm-,jcL(I&%$#" `CB]V?Tx<uVtT`Rpo3NlF.Jh++FdbCBA@?]!~|4XzyTT43Qsqq(Lnmkj"Fhg${z@> MBEOF docker run --rm -v "$tmp":/code/hello.mb:ro esolang/malbolge malbolge /code/hello.mb; rm "$tmp"Output: Hello World!
Why the fuck does this language exist lol
I’m actually slightly impressed it got both a working program, and a different one than Wikipedia. The Wikipedia one prints “Hello, world.”
I guess there must be another program floating around the web with “Hello World!”, since there’s no chance the LLM figured it out on its own (it kinda requires specialized algorithms to do anything)
I’d never even heard of that language, so it was fun to play with.
Definitely agree that the LLM didn’t actually figure anything out, but at least it’s not completely useless
That’d be easy enough to test wouldn’t it? Ask it to write something else like ‘The hippo farts are smelly’
If it needs to understand whatever the fuck that language is to get that output, it either can or can’t?
It works well for recalling something you already know, whether it be computer or human language. What’s a word for… what’s a command/function that does…
For words, it’s pretty good. For code, it often invents a reasonable-sounding function or model name that doesn’t exist.
It’s not even good for words. AI just writes the same stories over and over and over and over and over and over. It’s the same problem as coding. It can’t think of anything novel. Hell it can’t even think. I’d argue the best and only real use for an llm is to help be a rough draft editor and correct punctuation and grammar. We’ve gone way way way too far with the scope of what it’s actually capable of
According to OpenAis internal test suite and system card, hallucination rate is about 50% and the newer the model the worse it gets.
And that fact remains unchanged on other LLM models.
No shit, Sherlock ©
It’s like having a lightning-fast junior developer at your disposal. If you’re vague, he’ll go on shitty side-quests. If you overspecify he’ll get overwhelmed. You need to break down tasks into manageable chunks. You’ll need to ask follow-up questions about every corner case.
A real junior developer will have improved a lot in a year. Your AI agent won’t have improved.
They are improving, and probably faster then junior devs. The models we had had 2 years ago would struggle with a simple black jack app. I don’t think the ceiling has been hit.
Just a few trillion more dollars, bro. We’re almost there. Bro, if you give up a few showers, the AI datacenter will be able to work perfectly.
Bro.
It’s happening regardless. The rich and powerful will have this tech whether you like it or not. Y’all are thinking emotionally about this and not logically. You want to take away this tool from regular people for what reason?
The cost of the improvement doesn’t change the fact that it’s happening. I guess we could all play pretend instead if it makes you feel better about it. Don’t worry bro, the models are getting dumber!
And I ask you - if those same trillions of dollars were instead spent on materially improving the lives of average people, how much more progress would we make as a society? This is an absolutely absurd sum of money were talking about here.
None, because none of it would go to attempting to slow climate change. It would be dumped into consumption as always instead of attempting to right this ship.
The suffering is happening regardless.
Yout desire to delay it only leads to more suffering.
Y’all are mourning a what if that was never in the cards for us.
It’s beside the point. I’m simply saying that AI will improve in the next year. The cost to do so or all the others things that money could be spent on doesn’t matter when it’s clearly going to be spent on AI. I’m not in charge of monetary policies anywhere, I have no say in the matter. I’m just pushing back on the fantasies. I’m hoping the open source scene survives so we don’t end up in some ugly dystopia where all AI is controlled by a handful of companies.
I have the impression that anti-AI people don’t understand that they are giving up agency for the sake of temporary feels. If they truly cared about ethical usage of AI, they would be wanting to have mastery that is at least equal to that of corporations and the 1%.
Making AI into a public good is key to a better future.
They are having an emotional reaction to this situation so it’s all irrational.
I guess we need to force them to think about what they actually want, because the utopic ideal of putting the AI back in the bag is NOT happening and they best not attempt to take it away from the poor and working class while leaving power free reign of it.
That is the most stupid position you can take on this. Absolutely the most short sighted thought. People need to stop and think logically about this.
Don’t worry bro, the models are getting dumber!
That would be pretty impressive when they already lack any intelligence at all.
They might. The amount of money they’re pumping into this is absolutely staggering. I don’t see how they’re going to make all of that money back, unless they manage to replace nearly all employees.
Either way it’s going to be a disaster: mass unemployment or the largest companies in the world collapsing.
I dunno, the death of mega corporations would do the world a great deal of good. Healthier capitalism requires competition, and a handful of corporations of any given sector isn’t going to seriously compete nor pay good wages.
It’s certainly the option I’m rooting for, but it would still be a massive drama and disrupt a lot of lives. Which is why they’ll probably get bailed out with taxpayer money.
Maybe but they also know the fiat currency will collapse sooner rather than later, too. That money is pointless and they are playing the game knowing that as a fact at this point.
My jr developer will eventually be familiar with the entire codebase and can make decisions with that in mind without me reminding them about details at every turn.
LLMs would need massive context windows and/or custom training to compete with that. I’m sure we’ll get there eventually, but for now it seems far off. I think this bubble will have to burst and let hardware catch up with our ambitions. It’ll take a couple of decades.
This is the real thing. You can absolutely get good code out of AI, but it requires a lot of hand holding. It helps me speed some tasks, especially boring ones, but I don’t see it ever replacing me. It makes far too many errors, and requires me to point them out, and to point in the direction of the solution.
They are great at churning out massive amounts of code. They’re also great at completely missing the point. And the massive amount of code needs to be checked and reviewed. Personally I’d rather write the code and have the AI review it. That’s a much more pleasant way to work, and that way it actually enhances quality.
Technically the AI is improving, too. Just not as fast as a human would… yet.
People expect perfection right out of the gate.
I mean damn, AI has only been able to write something resembling code for a few years now. The fact that this is even a headline is pretty amazing when you think about it.
AI apologia is nearly as cringy as MAGA apologia. Stop doing this.
Haven’t you ever seen Star Trek and been amazed by the holodeck? How do you think they got there?
Magnets clearly.
WTF is up with people today using fictional bullshit as grounds to argue dumb shit?
Star Trek isn’t real. Please tell me you understand this. It’s very important to you that you do.
No need to be deliberately obtuse and insulting.
It’s pretty clear that the holodeck’s ability to create a complicated program from a basic prompt is analogous to LLM output.
If too many people have your attitude, we’ll never get there.
Oh for fucks sake. You’re a troll and I fell for it. That’s on me.
I’m having a sensible conversation and you’re freaking the fuck out for no reason.
Freaking out? I’m laughing my ass off! Either you’re a damn good troll, or you actually think Star Trek is real look at a real future.
Either way, it’s funny!
Yes bitching about it is going to make the fucking billionaires quit using it.
You prefer only they get it? Because that’s what’s going to happen if you somehow got any part of your wish.
This isn’t making the point you think it’s making.
A lot of LLM hype is wrapped up in how well it can write code. This hype is being used by corporations to justify pouring mind boggling amounts of money into the tech in the hopes that they can lay off all their staff.
I reserve the right to hate this state of affairs and enjoy seeing every headline that shows just how much of a pipe dream it is.
I don’t mind imperfections while they work out the kinks. I dislike dismantling industries in favor of something that doesn’t work yet.
But as long as the kids get to keep calling themselves “artists” and “musicians”, its all good.
