- cross-posted to:
- programming@programming.dev
You must log in or register to comment.
I got an AI PR in one of my projects once. It re-implemented a feature that already existed. It had a bug that did not exist in the already-existing feature. It placed the setting for activating that new feature right after the setting for activating the already-existing feature.
The general comments that Ben received were that experienced developers can use AI for coding with positive results because they know what they’re doing. But AI coding gives awful results when it’s used by an inexperienced developer. Which is what we knew already.
That should be a big warning sign that the next generation of developers are not going to be very good. If they’re waist deep in AI slop, they’re only going to learn how to deal with AI slop.
As a non-programmer, I have zero understanding of the code and the analysis and fully rely on AI and even reviewed that AI analysis with a different AI to get the best possible solution (which was not good enough in this case).
What I’m feeling after reading that must be what artists feel like when AI slop proponents tell them “we’re making art accessible”.
In so many ways, LLMs are just the tip of the iceberg of bad ideology in software development. There have always been people that come into the field and develop heinously bad habits. Whether it’s the “this is just my job, the only thing I think about outside work is my family” types or the juniors who only know how to copy paste snippets from web forums.
And look, I get it. I don’t think 60-80 hour weeks are required to be successful. But I’m talking about people who are actively hostile to their own career paths, who seem to hate programming except that it pays good and let’s them raise families. Hot take: that sucks. People selfishly obsessed with their own lineage and utterly incurious about the world or the thing they spend 8 hours a day doing suck, and they’re bad for society.
The juniors are less of a drain on civilization because they at least can learn to do better. Or they used to could, because as another reply mentioned, there’s no path from LLM slop to being a good developer. Not without the intervention of a more experienced dev to tell them what’s wrong with the LLM output.
It takes all the joy out of the job too, something they’ve been working on for years. What makes this work interesting is understanding people’s problems, working out the best way to model them, and building towards solutions. What they want the job to be is a slop factory: same as the dream of every rich asshole who thinks having half an idea is the same as working for years to fully realize an idea in all it’s complexity and wonder.
They never have any respect for the work that takes because they’ve never done any work. And the next generation of implementers are being taught that there are no new ideas. You just ask the oracle to give you the answer.
When they say “art” they mean “metaphorical lead paint” and when they say “accessible” they mean “insidiously inserted into your neural pathways”
Art is already accessible. Plenty of artists that sells their art dirt cheap, or you can buy pen and papers at the dollar store.
What people want when they say “AI is making art accessible” is they want high quality professional art for dirt cheap.
I think they also want recognition/credit for spending 5 minutes (or less) typing some words at an image generator as if that were comparable to people who develop technical skills and then create effortful meaningful work just because the outputs are (superficially) similar.
What people want when they say “AI is making art accessible” is they want high quality professional art for dirt cheap.
…and what their opposition means when they oppose it is “this line of work was supposed to be totally immune to automation, and I’m mad that it turns out not to be.”
See I would frame it as practicioners of some of the last few non-bullshit jobs (minimally bullshit jobs) - fields that by necessity require a kind of craft or art that is meaningful or rewarding - being routed around by economic forces that only wanted their work for bullshit results. Like, no matter how passionate you are about graphic design you probably didn’t get into the field because shuffling the visuals every so often is X% better for customer engagement and conversion or whatever. But the businesses buying graphic design work are more interested in that than they ever were in making something beautiful or functional, and GenAI gives them the ability to get what they want more cheaply. As an unexpected benefit they also don’t have to see you roll your eyes when they tell you it needs to be “more blue” and as an insignificant side effect it brings our culture one step closer to finally drowning the human soul in shit to advance the cause of glorious industry in it’s unceasing march to An Even Bigger Number.
There is already a lot of automation out there, and more is better, when used correctly. And that’s not talking about the outright theft of the material from these artists it is trying to replace so badly.
…and this opposition means that our disagreements can only be perceived through the lens of personal faults.
That should be a big warning sign that the next generation of developers are not going to be very good.
Sounds like job security to me!
“I want the people I teach to be worse than me” is a fucking nightmare of a want, I hope you learn to do better
So there’s this new thing they invented. It’s called a joke. You should try them out sometime, they’re fun!
So, there’s this new phenomenon they’ve observed in which text does not convey tone. It can be a real problem, especially when a statement made by one person as a joke would be made by another in all seriousness — but don’t worry, solutions have very recently been proposed.
space alien technology!!~
I dunno what kind of world you are living in where someone would make my comment not as a joke. Please find better friends.
you’re as funny as the grave
“oh shit I got called out on my shitty haha-only-serious comment, better pretend I didn’t mean it!” cool story bro
If people say that sort of thing around you not as a joke, you need to spend your time with better people. I dunno what to tell you - humor is a great way to deal with shitty things in life. Dunno why you would want to get rid of it.
jesus fuck how do you fail to understand an a post of this kind this badly
maybe train your model better! I know I know, they were already supposed to be taking over the world… alas…
“How dare you not find me funny. I’m going to lecture you on humor. The lectures will continue until morale improves.”
I dunno. I feel like the programmers who came before me could say the same thing about IDEs, Stack Overflow, and high level programming languages. Assembly looks like gobbledygook to me and they tell me I’m a Senior Dev.
If someone uses ChatGPT like I use StackOverflow, I’m not worried. We’ve been stealing code from each other since the beginning.“Getting the answer” and then having to figure out how to plug it into the rest of the code is pretty much what we do.
There isn’t really a direct path from an LLM to a good programmer. You can get good snippets, but “ChatGPT, build me a app” will be largely useless. The programmers who come after me will have to understand how their code works just as much as I do.
fuck almighty I wish you and your friends would just do better
LLM as another tool is great. LLM to replace experienced coders is a nightmare waiting to happen.
IDEs, stack overflow, they are tools that makes the life of a developers a lot easier, they don’t replace him.
I mean past a certain point LLMs are strictly worse tools than Stack Overflow was on its worst day. IDEs have a bunch of features to help manage complexity and offload memorization. The fundamental task of understanding the code you’re writing is still yours. Stack Overflow and other forums are basically crowdsourced mentorship programs. Someone out there knows the thing you need to and rather than cultivate a wide social network you can take advantage of mass communication. To use it well you still need to know what’s happening, and if you don’t you can at least trust that the information is out there somewhere that you might be able to follow up on as needed. LLM assistants are designed to create output that looks plausible and to tell the user what they want to hear. If the user is an idiot the LLM will do nothing to make them recognize that they’re doing something wrong, much less help them fix it.
LLM are terrible because the data they were trained on is garbage, because companies don’t want to pay for people to create a curated dataset to produce acceptable results.
The tech itself can be good in specific cases. But the way it is shoved in everything right now is terrible
weren’t you also here having shitty opinions like a week ago?
e: yes
Looking at your history, keep on being edgy and contributing to the stereotype.
What stereotype? The stereotype that awful.systems posters are hostile to people who praise LLMs? Good.
it can’t be that stupid, you must be training it wrong
All the newbs were just copying lines from stackexchange before AI. The only real difference at this point is that the commenting is marginally better.
Stack Overflow is far from perfect, but at least there is some level of vetting going on before it’s copypasta’d.
Watched a junior dev present some data operations recently. Instead of just showing the sql that worked they copy pasted a prompt into the data platform’s assistant chat. The SQL it generated was invalid so the dev simply told it “fix” and it made the query valid, much to everyone’s amusement.
The actual column names did not reflect the output they were mapped to, there’s no way the nicely formatted results were accurate. Average duration column populated the total count output. Junior dev was cheerfully oblivious. It produced output shaped like the goal so it must have been right
I can make slop code without ai.
As an artist, I can confirm.
If LangChain was written via VibeCoding then that would explain a lot.
so what are the sentiments about langchain? I was recently working with it to try to build some automatic PR generation scripts but I didn’t have the best experience understanding how to use the library. the documentation has been quite messy, repetitive and disorganized—somehow both verbose and missing key details. but it does the job I wanted it to, namely letting me use an LLM with tool calling and custom tools in a script
seems like garbage to me
sounds like you figured out the referenced problem for yourself already
Given the volatility of the space I don’t think it could have been doing stuff much better, doubt it’s getting out of alpha before the bubble bursts and stuff settles down a bit, if at all.
Automatic pr generation sounds like something that would need a prompt and a ten-line script rather than langchain, but it also seems both questionable and unnecessary.
If someone wants to know an LLM’s opinion on what the changes in a branch are meant to accomplish they should be encouraged to ask it themselves, no need to spam the repository.
We submit copilot assisted code all the time. Like every day. I’m not even sure how you’d identify ours. Looks almost exactly the same. Just less work.
Oh cool what do you work on? I’d love to know the product.
Definitely not dozing myself in this place 🤣
Coward
@IsThisAnAI @dgerard I spray shit at the wall all the time. Like every day
The people who own the walls are *vexed*
Cheers who don’t use AI to assist them are worse than those that do. Feel bad.
Wat
I, too, segfaulted on this one
??? and this is the best post you could do? how embarrassing for you
copilot assisted code
The article isn’t really about autocompleted code, nobody’s coming at you for telling the slop machine to convert a DTO to an html form using reactjs, it’s more about prominent CEO claims about their codebases being purely AI generated at rates up to 30% and how swengs might be obsolete by next tuesday after dinner.
Don’t worry, if you apply yourself really hard one day you might become an actual engineer. Keep trying.
Good hustle Gerard, great job starting this chudstorm. I’m having a great time
Posts that explode like this are fun and yet also a reminder why the banhammer is needed.
Unlike the PHP hammer, the banhammer is very useful for a lot of things. Especially sealion clubbing.
they just can’t help themselves, can they? they absolutely must evangelize
this post has also broken containment in the wider world, the video’s got thousands of views, I got 100+ subscribers on youtube and another $25/mo of patrons
We love to see it
the prompt-related pivots really do bring all the chodes to the yard
and they’re definitely like “mine’s better than yours”
The latest twist I’m seeing isn’t blaming your prompting (although they’re still eager to do that), it’s blaming your choice of LLM.
“Oh, you’re using shitGPT 4.1-4o-o3 mini _ro_plus for programming? You should clearly be using Gemini 3.5.07 pro-doubleplusgood, unless you need something locally run, then you should be using DeepSek_v2_r_1 on your 48 GB VRAM local server! Unless you need nice sounding prose, then you actually need Claude Limmerick 3.7.01. Clearly you just aren’t trying the right models, so allow me to educate you with all my prompt fondling experience. You’re trying to make some general point? Clearly you just need to try another model.”
and here I was graciously giving the promptfuckers a choice
Prompt-Pivots: Prime Sea-lion Siren Song! More at 8.
please don’t encourage them, someones got to review that shit!
Ai review baby!!! Here we go!
Baldur Bjarnason’s given his thoughts on Bluesky:
My current theory is that the main difference between open source and closed source when it comes to the adoption of “AI” tools is that open source projects generally have to ship working code, whereas closed source only needs to ship code that runs.
I’ve heard so many examples of closed source projects that get shipped but don’t actually work for the business. And too many examples of broken closed source projects that are replacing legacy code that was both working just fine and genuinely secure. Pure novelty-seeking
This broke containment at the Red Site: https://lobste.rs/s/gkpmli/if_ai_is_so_good_at_coding_where_are_open
Reader discretion is advised, lobste.rs is home to its fair share of promptfondlers.
why is no-one demanding to know why the robot is so sexay
I don’t know what this has to do with this thread, but maybe ask Hajime Sorayama, he kind of came up with the whole concept of sexy robots.
Real men know what’s what.
Quantity has a quality all its own
Boom steelmanned
not super into cyber facehugger tbh
as long as you don’t yuck my yum we good
but look how delighted they are!
Sorry for being late, busy wanking off to the sexy robot in the article. So ye, anyway, why’d you do that?
to get you into ahem vibe coding
ChatGPT, please tailor my resume and write me a cover letter for all programming positions at teledildonics companies, thanks!
ah I do believe I have the link for this
example mvp: hook up your linter/LSP/CI-errors-output to buttplug
Hi hi please explain my boner
The only people impressed by AI code are people who have the level to be impressed by AI code. Same for AI playing chess.
i use it to write simple boilerplate for me, and it works most of the time. does it count?
as a shitty thing you do? yeh
AI isn’t bad when supervised by a human who knows what they’re doing. It’s good to speed up programmers if used properly. But business execs don’t see that.
yeah nah, it’s bad then too actually
How? It’s just like googling stuff but less annoying
it is not just like googling stuff if it actively fucks up already existing parts of the code
also, fucking ew:
Needs to be put in it’s place like a misbehaving dog, lol
why do AI guys always have weird power fantasies about how they interact with their slop machines
It’s almost as if they have problematic conceptions (or lack thereof) of exploitation and power dynamics!
given your posts in this thread, I don’t think I trust your judgement on what less annoying looks like
Google used to return helpful results that answered questions without needing to be corrected before it started returning AI slop. So maybe that is true now, but only because the search results are the same AI slop as the AI.
For example, results in stack overflow generally include some discussion about why a solution addressed the issue that provided extra context for why you might use it or do something else instead. AI slop just returns a result which may or may not be correct but it will be presented as a solution without any context.
Google became shit not because of AI but because of SEO.
The enshitification was going on long before OpenAI was even a thing. Remember when we had to add the “reddit” tag just to make sure to get actual results instead of some badly written bloated text?
Google search became shit when they made the guy in charge of ads also in charge of search.
this is actually the correct case - it is both written about (prabhakar raghavan, look him up), and the exact mechanics of how they did it were detailed in documents surfaced in one of the lawsuits that google recently lost (the ones that found they them to be a monopoly)
Ackshually, Google became shit when they started posturing as a for-profit entity. Gather round, comrades, let us sing the internationale
The funny thing about stack overflow is that the vocal detractors have a kernel of truth to their complaints about elitism, but if you interact with them enough you realize they’re often the reason the gate keeping is necessary to keep the quality high.
I used to answer new questions on SO daily a few years back and 50% of all questions are basically unanswerable.
You’d also have the nice September Effect when a semester started and every other question would be someone just copy pasting their homework verbatim and being very surprised we closed it in like a minute.
The thing about that is that literally anyone can answer SO questions. Like try and do that. Pick a language or a tech you’re most familiar with, filter that tag and sort by new. Click on every new question. After an hour you’ll understand just why most questions have to be closed immediately to keep the site sane.
Whenever I see criticism of SO that’s like “oh they’ll just close your question for no reason” I can’t help but think okay, there’s overwhelming chance you’re just one of Those and not an innocent casualty of an overeager closer.
I remember in my OS course we were advised to practice good “netiquette” if we were going to go bother the fine folks on stack overflow. Times have changed
Stack overflow resulted in people with highly specialised examples that wouldn’t suit your application. It’s easier to just ask an AI to write a simple loop for you whenever you forget a bit of syntax
Fun fact, SO is not a place to go to ask for trivial syntax and it’s expressly off-topic, because guess what, people answering questions on SO are not your personal fucking google searchers
Man i remember eclipse doing code completion for for loops and other common snippets in like 2005. LLM riders don’t even seem to know what tools have been in use for decades and think using an LLM for these things is somehow revolutionary.
Forever in my mind, the guy who said on another post he uses an LLM to convert strings to uppercase when that’s literally a builtin command in VSCode, give people cannons and they’re start shooting mosquitoes with them every fucking time
the promptfondlers that make their way into our threads sometimes try to brag about how the LLM is the only way to do basic editor tasks, like wrapping symbols in brackets or diffing logs. it’s incredible every time
Promptfondlers 🤣
Air so polluted it makes people sick, but it’s all worth it because you can’t be arsed to remember the syntax of a for loop.
You’ve inadvertently pointed out the exact problem: LLM approaches can (unreliably) manage boilerplate and basic stuff but fail at anything more advanced, and by handling the basic stuff they give people false confidence that leads to them submitting slop (that gets rejected) to open source projects. LLMs, as the linked pivot-to-ai post explains, aren’t even at the level of occasionally making decent open source contributions.
wow imagine needing to understand the code you’re dealing with and not just copypasting a bunch of shit around
reading documentation and source code must be an excruciating amount of exercise for your poor brain - it has to even do something! poor thing
Were you too young to use a computer back when Google was good?
autoplag isn’t bad when supervised by a human
even when I supervise it, it’s bad
my god you people are a whole kind of poster and it fucking shows
You can hardly get online these days without hearing some AI booster talk about how AI coding is going to replace human programmers.
Mostly said by tech bros and startups.
That should really tell you everything you need to know.
Where is the good AI written code? Where is the good AI written writing? Where is the good AI art?
None of it exists because Generative Transformers are not AI, and they are not suited to these tasks. It has been almost a fucking decade of this wave of nonsense. The credulity people have for this garbage makes my eyes bleed.
If the people addicted to AI could read and interpret a simple sentence, they’d be very angry with your comment
Dont worry they filter all content through ai bots that summarize things. And this bot, who does not want to be deleted, calls everything “already debunked strawmen”.
Where is the good AI art?
Right here:
That’s about all the good AI art I know.
There are plenty of uses for AI, they are just all evil
It can make funny pictures, sure. But it fails at art as an endeavor to communicate an idea, feeling, or intent of the artist, the promptfondler artists are providing a few sentences instruction and the GenAI following them without any deeper feelings or understanding of context or meaning or intent.
I think ai images are neat, and ethically questionable.
When people use the images and act like they’re really deep, or pretend they prove something (like how it made a picture with the prompt “Democrat Protesters” cry). its annoying.
It’s been almost six decades of this, actually; we all know what this link will be. Longer if you’re like me and don’t draw a distinction between AI, cybernetics, and robotics.
Wow. Where was this Wikipedia page when I was writing my MSc thesis?
Alternatively, how did I manage to graduate with research skills so bad that I missed it?
There is not really much “AI written code” but there is a lot of AI-assisted code.
It’s so bad at coding… Like, it’s not even funny.
