posted in Technology
Cory Doctorow: The people who tell you ‘AI is changing everything’ are lying
www.thenerve.news/p/cory-doctorow-ai-business-incentive-to-lie-useless-chatbots-report-nikhil-suresh
The NerveCory Doctorow: The people who tell you ‘AI is changing everything’ are lyingIt has become impossible to tell managers mesmerised by artificial intelligence that the tools are not, in fact, helpful. So employees just play along with the fiction to keep their jobs, writes our tech columnistReplying to @floofloof@lemmy.ca
On the contrary - the people who tell you AI doesn’t add any value and will disappear in a few years are either lying, dumb, or completely ignorant of what AI can already do.
Replying to @GoatSynagogue@lemmy.world
I’m a software developer since the 90s, basically before the internet, we had some C books for reference and that’s it. I can tell you that I started last year to use copilot in vscode and some chatgpt on a web page, and it basically changed my world, and all my 50+ years old coworkers are amazed by what it can do really.
You are right it will not fade at all in software development.
Replying to @Magister@lemmy.world
Completely disagree. The difficult part of software development was never writing code OR speed of delivery. It was understanding requirements and problem solving. LLMs still can not do either of those things and there is no evidence they ever will be able to.
An example of how harmful LLMs actually are to development can succinctly be described with an issue I had a few weeks ago. I found an issue in an open source project, code was fine if a bit hard to understand. I came up with a PR to fix the problem.
In the time from me checking out the code to submitting the PR, a little less than 24 hours, the maintainer had completely rewritten the entire project with Claude. It was complete nonsense. Incredibly difficult to understand. Abstracting things that didn’t need abstracting. My PR was useless, because the entire project was new. The maintainer definitely didn’t understand the changes either. If a bug came up there’s no way AI would be able to solve it (the bug was still there even though the code was entirely new).
LLMs don’t understand the code. They just make things that look like they will work. And then a human has to maintain it (or keep paying billions of dollars for Claude to try to fix it).
Replying to @tyler@programming.dev
Dumb people use their tools incorrectly. That’s all you’re describing.
Replying to @GoatSynagogue@lemmy.world
I gave one example. In fact that’s one of the least bad examples. If that was the only problem with LLMs it wouldn’t really be that bad. But the actual reality is so much worse. But I was arguing to the point that the person I replied to made, which was about development. The problems I have with AI are not fixable without literally every government on earth taking a stand, which just will not happen.
Replying to @tyler@programming.dev
Using LLMs for development is fantastic as long as you know how to use it, which is how it is for every tool.
The difference with LLMs and other tools is that anyone can use them easily and get incredible results……as long as you don’t look under the covers. The developers that use them well are getting results and code that are indistinguishable from code they’d write themselves.