483
Tech's Dumbest Mistake: Why Firing Programmers for AI Will Destroy Everything
(defragzone.substack.com)
this post was submitted on 11 Feb 2025
483 points (96.4% liked)
Technology
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I'm just a dabbler at coding and even i can see getting rid of programmers and relying to ai for it will lead to disaster. Ai is useful, but only for smallest scraps of code because anything bigger will get too muddled. For me, it liked to come up with its own stupid ideas and then insist on getting stuck on those so i had to constantly reset the conversation. But i managed to have it make useful little function that i couldnt have thought up myself as it used some complex mathematical things.
Also relying on it is quick way to kind of get things done but without understanding at all how things work. Eventually this will lead to such horrible and unsecure code that no one can fix or maintain. Though maybe its good thing eventually since it will bring those shitty companies to ruin. any leadership in those companies should be noted down now though, so they cant pretend later to not have had anything to do with it.
Even if I ask AI for how to do a process it will frequently respond with answers for the wrong version, even though I gave the version, parameters that don't work, hand waving answers that are useless, etc.
I find it's the most useful when asking it for small snippets of code or dealing with boilerplate stuff. Anything more complicated usually results in something broken.
give it a few more years
Given that even stack overflow is being mostly answered by AI, don't expect that to actually get better, unless you're counting on sensitive coding data being "legally" siphoned from AI users
yeah, there are many things its easier to just give up having the ai do it. even if you somehow succeed it will likely be such mess it gives you its not worth it
AI mostly seems useful when you don't know a specific concept and just need the base ideas. That said, given it's often confidently wrong and doesn't involve humans actively steering you toward better ideas, I still find Stack Overflow more helpful. Sometimes the answer to your problem is to stop doing what you are trying to do and attack the problem from a different angle.
yeah, though for questions people on stackoverflow would consider stupid or beneath them, ai was superior as it never gets angry with you. How i see the ai is kind of like being able to ask the knowledge it consists of questions. But since it has also been fed with garbage and its all there like ingredients of a soup, who knows what affects what so you really dont want to trust it too much.
I also find it is best when I'm very specific and give as many identifiers as possible. App name, version, OS, quoted error code, etc.
Like relying on automated systems for aircraft so much. You get things like planes going into landing mode because they think they are close to the runway.