I'm quite surprised by the negativity of the comments in this thread, especially contrasted with the positivity and enthusiasm I see in other threads. I'm an AI pessimist. I don't like it. I have resisted it. You'll find plenty of Rage against the Machine comments in my account history on Hacker News. The AI optimists drive me up the wall.
And I can tell all of the nay-sayers in this thread, from first-hand experience, that the AI tools can be useful. When you use them well, they can save time. If you're writing just a dinky webapp for your "radio on the internet" startup, it can do a lot of grunt work. It's better auto completion, at a minimum.
Last week I was struggling with an annoying, interlocking-race-condition/-stale-state bug. Fixing one issue kept reintroducing others that I'd just fixed. Skill issue, right? Right. And Clause 4.6 Opus diagnosed the problem and fixed it with just a little bit of coaxing.
Then I asked it to fix another issue and it wound up chasing its tail, as it tried to apply the same principle to unrelated code with unrelated problems.
Call these tools stochastic parrots. Call them autocorrect on steroids. Call them whatever you want. If you think they're worthless or have no use, you're living either in a fantasy land or in 2022 just after openai released its first, hilariously stupid chatbot.
I think the unstated assumption here is that some of the criticism comes from different places.
1. what you have identified here, thinking they're useless
2. wanting them to be useless because they like the process of writing code itself, and AI makes that less important, so it's a form of wishful thinking.
3. having ethical concerns about AI, so they want it to fail. And part of that is dismissing their usefulness (after all, it's easier to get rid something which isn't that useful...)
I personally find the third one quite fascinating -- like the cognitive dissonance about how the whole free software movement started out as a way to subvert copyright and nowadays they're almost the biggest defenders of it... but I do understand the reasoning here.
And I can tell all of the nay-sayers in this thread, from first-hand experience, that the AI tools can be useful. When you use them well, they can save time. If you're writing just a dinky webapp for your "radio on the internet" startup, it can do a lot of grunt work. It's better auto completion, at a minimum.
Last week I was struggling with an annoying, interlocking-race-condition/-stale-state bug. Fixing one issue kept reintroducing others that I'd just fixed. Skill issue, right? Right. And Clause 4.6 Opus diagnosed the problem and fixed it with just a little bit of coaxing.
Then I asked it to fix another issue and it wound up chasing its tail, as it tried to apply the same principle to unrelated code with unrelated problems.
Call these tools stochastic parrots. Call them autocorrect on steroids. Call them whatever you want. If you think they're worthless or have no use, you're living either in a fantasy land or in 2022 just after openai released its first, hilariously stupid chatbot.