@Purple lot of people were always sloppy and now they have free rein to just have absolutely zero care

@Purple @mhartle That is scary, but the lack of sufficiently trained and skilled professionals in software engineering has been scary for a long time. My colleague (a bona fide wizard) once wrote a cross-compiler that would turn other people’s code into something he would write. Often it would fail — because the other code would fail. We didn’t really use it as a test tool, but it was hellagreat at optimizing!

@suriele
This tool is noteworthy because it can produce bad code orders of magnitude faster than a human. It's faster even than doing a web search and hitting Stack Overflow.

It's also good at naming variables and adding comments that, at first glance, can look like what you want. So it takes longer to review.

It has also democratized things, such that anyone that can track down a bug report can now slam keywords into a chatbot and get code that purports to fix the issue, even if they don't know the language (or, indeed, how to program at all).

It's noble to try to avoid blaming tools, but this is drastically different than most others, if it can be called a tool at all. Last I heard, companies making heavy use of it aren't seeing any productivity gain.

LLMs have drastically increased the cost of doing open source, at questionable-if-any benefit.
@Purple

@Purple

I do not have any fellow senior engineers I work with so I cannot speak directly to the question you asked. I do however have a lot of experience with AI. This is my take on it; for what that is worth.

I have been working on AI since the late 80's and there have been some drastic changes. Modern day artificial neural networks are a real game changer. It is amazing what we can achieve with them. With that said there are a lot of concerns to be had with the monetization of AI by large corporations. I personally only use local AI with models I train specifically for a task with high quality data that is public domain. Where corporate AI tends to train with anything they can scrape from the internet with little to no vetting. This produces inferior training that produces poor results with frequency.

People tend to forget that AI is more than just chat bots on the internet. We use visual AI for searching landmarks to help find lost people in the wilderness. We use visual AI to provide adaptive cruise control, parallel parking assistance, etc. AI is a lot more than chat bots. Though people tend to look at corporate AI as AI when it is typically the worst quality AI you could choose to use. Now I get it, you cannot train a base model yourself without a significant investment in a high end GPU. Though, you can train a minimally trained model of smaller size with a RTX 3060 TI that is only around $200.00 - $300.00 USD. This is going to be painfully slow but doable.

I see such negative comments constantly on AI from people that really do not understand what AI actually is, demonstrated by their comments. Corporations setting up server farms that would require their own dedicated nuclear power plant? No, I am not with that. Local AI that can be tailored to very specific needs can indeed be a great help. We should always keep in mind that we are dealing with a neural network. Just like humans are not always correct AIs will not always be correct either. You have to vet the information you get from an AI.

AI is like fire. Fire has burned down communities and it has made food more nutritious (via cooking) and in some cases edible (many vegetables are toxic even to a lethal level when consumed raw). It has heated habitations to make them livable in colder months. To judge something only by its worst possible metric is not rational. AI is used in the Medical field and many others for a very long time. Saving the lives of many people. I wish that when people get upset at corporate AI they would direct their frustrations where they belong. On the corporations that are doing everything they can to monetize AI, including having ridiculous classes on writing prompts .

@Purple I ripped out some unit tests from a project recently because I couldn't see any use for them (e.g. one test had PHPUnit create an object based on a trait, then check it implements the trait... which means it's literally testing PHPUnit's ability to create mocks instead of doing anything useful).

After a while staring at the code and wondering why on earth anyone would have written it, I noticed a comment at the top of the file saying it was generated by Claude 🫠