Four months ago I asked if and how people used AI here in this community (https://lemmy.world/post/37760851).
Many people said that didn’t use it, or used only for consulting a few times.
But in those 4 months AIs evolved a lot, so I wonder, is there people who still don’t use AI daily for programming?
I never used them. AI is shit, and they’re still at the “burning money” stage, wait 2-3 years and they’ll enter the enshittification stage, where it will be even worse.
Plenty of times I’ve seen coworkers stuck at the same problem for hours. Until they come and ask for help and I give them a simple answer for their simple problem. Every time it is “well, I asked the AI and it said this thing and it didn’t work, so I asked it to fix it and it didn’t either, a bunch of times.”. I just tell them “you’re surrounded by a lot of people here that know a lot about programming, why don’t you ask any of them?”.
For real, why use an AI at work where you are surrounded by people that can actually answer your question? It just makes no sense. Leave AI to those that can’t pay an artist for their game. Or to those that have a “game design idea that will change the world” but won’t pay a programmer even if they can’t program themselves.
Wait, you guys still haven’t tried cocaine?
Using it you can work with much more energy and focus! You don’t get tired either!
Zero use. No need. Been doing this for 15+ years. Plus, if I don’t know how to do something I kind of want the mental reward from figuring it out myself.
The great prof. Edsger Dijkstra explained much better than I ever could myself why trying to program computers using a natural language is a truly poor idea, in this now classic essay of his from 1978, On the foolishness of “natural language programming”:
https://www.cs.utexas.edu/~EWD/transcriptions/EWD06xx/EWD667.html
Doesn’t really do anything for me. It doesn’t feel to me like it has changed all that much.
Sometimes I use it to translate to and from Japanese and English, does that count?
I don’t. Personally, I don’t believe that AI assisted coding has a future, and I don’t like the quality of what it produces. Either we achieve AGI or whatever the finance bros are hyping up this week, or we don’t. If we do, then AI can write code without having a human in the loop, so “vibe coding” is dead. If we don’t, then AI code stays where its at right now, which is garbage quality. After a few years vibe coding disasters, demand for human coding will increase, and my skills will be much more valuable than even before all this craziness. In that case, letting those skills atrophy today would be the wrong move.
And if I’m wrong? Well, if AI code generation makes it so anyone who doesn’t know how to code can do it… then surely I’ll be able to figure it out? My existing skills wouldn’t hurt.
Online AI might crash, burn and go away
But open weight local models are here to stay and not going anywhere. We’re not going back to pure intellisense and simple tab completes
My company GitHub has copilot do code reviews. That is the extent of my AI use. I’ve had to correct copypasta from AI agents that coworkers used that was just wrong.
I use it as an overconfident rubber duck to bounce ideas and solutions off of in my code, but I don’t let it write for me. I don’t want the skills I’ve practiced to atrophy
I don’t, it’s not better than simply thinking about things myself. There isn’t institutional pressure to use it and if there was I would simply lie and not use it.
I don’t, and probably never will. A whole bunch of reasons:
- The current state of affairs isn’t going to last forever; at some point the fact that nobody’s making money with this is going to catch up, a lot of companies providing these services are going to disappear and what remains will become prohibitively expensive, so it’s foolish to risk becoming dependent on them.
- If I had to explain things in natural language all the time, I would become useless for the day before lunch. I’m a programmer, not a consultant.
- I think even the IntelliSense in recent versions of Visual Studio is sometimes too smart for its own good, making careless mistakes more likely. AI would turn that up to 11.
- I have little confidence that people, including myself, would actually review the generated code as thoroughly as they should.
- Maintaining other people’s code takes a lot more effort than code you wrote yourself. It’s inevitable that you end up having to maintain something someone else wrote, but why would you want all the code you maintain to be that?
- The use-cases that people generally agree upon AI is good at, like boilerplate and setting up projects, are all things that can be done quickly without relying on an inherently unreliable system.
- Programming is entirely too fun to leave to computers. To begin with, most of your time isn’t even spent on writing code, I don’t really get the psychology of denying yourself the catharsis of writing the code yourself after coming up with a solution.
You wrote this all a lot better than I could have, but to expand on 2) I have no desire whatsoever to have a “conversation” (nay, argument) with a machine to try and convince/coerce/deceive/brow-beat (delete as appropriate) it into maybe doing what I wanted.
I don’t want to deal with this grotesque “tee hee, oopsie” personality that every company seems to have bestowed on these awful things when things go awry, I don’t want its “suggestions”. I code, computer does. End of transaction.
People can call me a luddite at this point and I’ll wear that badge with pride. I’ll still be here, understanding my data and processes and writing code to work with them, long after (as you say) you’ve been priced out of these tools.
More like a manual. Google has become really shitty for complex queries, LLMs can find relevant keywords, documents much realiably. Granted, if you are asking questions about niche libraries it hallucinates functions quite often so I never ask it to write full pieces of code but just use it more like a stepping stone.
I find it amusing how shamelessly it lies about its hallucinations though. When I point out that a certain function it makes up does not exist the answer is always sth of the form “Sorry you are right that function existed before version X / that function existed in some of the online documentation” etc lol. It is like a halluception. If you ask it to find some links regarding these old versions or documentations they also somehow don’t exist anymore.
I wonder if you need to explicitly prompt it to check if a function really exists before suggesting it? Think about how a human brain works… we are constantly evaluating whether or not things are really true based on info in our heads… but we are not telling the models to do the same thing and instead they just yolo some shit that is confidently-wrong (not unlike many humans, admittedly).
I don’t and never will. I’m one of the only people at my ~450 person company that doesn’t use an LLM.
Do you believe you will still be working in said company in a year without using LLM?
Are your skills so specific you’re irreplaceable? Or are you as productive without extra tools as your coworkers with them?
Why?
Yeah. I prefer not externalizing my ability to think.
Please, continue to “use AI daily”. Rot your brain, see if I care.
If my competitors want to shoot themselves in the foot that’s fine by me, I won’t stop them.
Never used it to write my code. Others have given great reasons, which resonate with me, but the biggest one for me is that I enjoy writing code and designing programs. Why would I outsource one of the things I love to do? It’s really that simple for me.
