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Software Engineers Are Facing an Existential Crisis As They Drown In Horrendous AI Code (tech.yahoo.com)
submitted 1 month ago by to c/technology@lemmy.world
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[–] 13 points 1 month ago (3 children)

This comment thread reads 100% like AI astroturfing. AI is not an amplifier, there’s literally no evidence from any study that’s been done that backs that. That’s just AI company marketing.

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  • [–] 4 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (1 child)

    "AI IS AMAZING AND INEVITABLE!!!" = astroturfing

    "AI sucks at X, but sometimes useful at Y... use with caution." = astroturfing

    "AI SUCKS AT LITERALLY EVERY TASK!!! ITS ALL SLOP!!! SLOP SLOP SLOPPITTY SLOP!!!" = only organic discussion and reasonable take....

    Look, there are 100s of valid reasons why AI sucks and is unethical... in fact, it's pretty much 100% built on unethical methods, no doubt...

    But "AI sucks at everything and literally has zero good use cases" is not a real argument, but it seems to be the most popular opinion around here.

    I disagree with 90% of the pro-AI stuff out there, i'm just pointing out that its rare to hear a reasonable discussin on the topic here that isnt just 100% hate

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  • [–] 0 points 1 month ago

    If AI actually adds value, it should be trivial to demonstrate that value-add in a way that passes scientific rigor.

    The underlying problem is that we don't have a good way to measure code value. Software quality is most closely coporable to a weird combination of scientific paper, mechanical diagnostic, and toy instructuon. And we don't have good ways to measure those, either.

    There was apparently one study from Stanford:

    https://medium.com/@manusf08/does-ai-really-boost-developer-productivity-a-stanford-study-of-100-000-devs-has-answers-4f64c64ebe97

    Note that the headline is misleading -- stanford apparently trainded an AI model to "rate code" in a way that agreed with some of their staff and then ran that on a bunch of projects. The "good at simple and new, bad at complex and old" matches my intuition, but isn't really a stronger test than counting minutes spent in a project or dollars spent on programming with or without AI.

    And all AI output is slop. It's just that for some things slop is good enough.

    Which really should be an argument more for discarding those things than boiling oceans to generate more of them, but capitalism loves doing wasteful things

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  • [–] 0 points 1 month ago

    The AI company marketing (and development) I see still seems to focus mostly on the "we can give a really non-specific prompt and get a functioning app out of thet" - which is missing the point for my uses of it.

    My company is very interested in leveraging the new tools where we can, but not laying anybody off (yet) - I think the target is hoping that our exploration time is being roughly balanced with increases in efficiency, which is more or less how we're managing it for the past few months.

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