Technology

75365 readers

1486 users here now

This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.

Our Rules

Follow the lemmy.world rules.
Only tech related news or articles.
Be excellent to each other!
Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
Politics threads may be removed.
No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.

Approved Bots

founded 2 years ago

MODERATORS

L3s@lemmy.world

enu@lemmy.world

technopagan@lemmy.world

L4s@lemmy.world

L3s@hackingne.ws

L4s@hackingne.ws

239

The Copilot Delusion (deplet.ing)

submitted 4 months ago by cabbage@piefed.social to c/technology@lemmy.world

84 comments fedilink hide all child comments

The thing I hate the most about AI and it's ease of access; the slow, painful death of the hacker soul—brought not by war or scarcity, but by convenience. By buttons. By bots. [...]

There was once magic here. There was once madness.

Kids would stay up all night on IRC with bloodshot eyes, trying to render a cube in OpenGL without segfaulting their future. They cared. They would install Gentoo on a toaster just to see if it’d boot. They knew the smell of burnt voltage regulators and the exact line of assembly where Doom hit 10 FPS on their calculator. These were artists. They wrote code like jazz musicians—full of rage, precision, and divine chaos.

Now? We’re building a world where that curiosity gets lobotomized at the door. Some poor bastard—born to be great—is going to get told to "review this AI-generated patchset" for eight hours a day, until all that wonder calcifies into apathy. The terminal will become a spreadsheet. The debugger a coffin.

Unusually well-written piece on the threat AI poses to programming as an art form.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[+] Lembot_0002@lemm.ee -33 points 4 months ago (13 children)

AI is the best thing that happened to us for ages: now we can do whatever we do without the pain and humiliation of spending enormous amount of time seeking through some shitty documentation or, in too many cases, straightforwardly bruteforcing the libs by guessing what the fuck parameters this or that function needs.

Now I can just ask an AI if there is a method in this class that does something I need and receive a useful answer, not a RTFM like in the times you're so fond of.

[–] dataprolet@lemmy.dbzer0.com 9 points 4 months ago (1 children)

I'd say both is true. If I need a quick meal I'm glad I can just order something ready-made, but I also enjoy to cook an intricate meal for hours. OP is maybe worried that people forget about the latter and only prefer the ready-made solution.

[–] cabbage@piefed.social 8 points 4 months ago

I think chapter 2 does a good job presenting the advantages.

Maybe you inherited someone else’s codebase. A minefield of nested closures, half-commented hacks, and variable names like d and foo. A mess of complex OOPisms, where you have to traverse 18 files just to follow a single behaviour. You don’t have all day. You need a flyover—an aerial view of the warzone before you land and start disarming traps.

Ask Copilot: "What’s this code doing?" It won’t be poetry. It won’t necessarily provide a full picture. But it’ll be close enough to orient yourself before diving into the guts.

So—props where props are due. Copilot is like a greasy, high-functioning but practically poor intern:

Great with syntax

Surprisingly quick at listing out your blind spots.

Good at building scaffolding if you feed it the exact right words.

Horrible at nuance.

Useless without supervision.

Will absolutely kill you in production if left alone for 30 seconds.

load more comments (11 replies)