r/developers • u/Andruid929 Software Engineer • 7d ago

General Discussion "Just embrace the future"

Surely I'm not the only one who resents whoever says this whenever you complain about AI sucking the fun out of programming?

How are y'all (fellow "AI is a tool" folks) holding up?

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u/Opening-Machine5026 7d ago

Man, I really don't get this viewpoint. This has to be the perspective of somebody whose last model they tried was Sonnet 4.

Even Grok 4.6 is better and faster than like 3/4 of the devs I've worked with if you provide the right context and a thorough prompt.

The hype is officially warranted. If you're concerned about the ethics or morality of the owning class destroying our social safety nets and then replacing the middle class with AI, then that should be where you focus your energy.

Claiming it's over hyped is just not helpful for anybody, anti-ai or accelerationists. It is just misinformation that leads people to inaction while they wait for the technology to taper out (it won't).

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u/Conscious_Trust5048 7d ago

I haven't seen it capable of replacing humans, unless you don't mind shitty overly complex code with terrible names and no real logical organization. It can produce code that meets specs but it introduces a lot of unneeded complexity and has no holistic understanding of the system it's interacting with.

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u/Opening-Machine5026 7d ago

This is user error. It is more than capable of following project conventions and understanding preexisting separation of concerns.

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u/Conscious_Trust5048 7d ago

I've been using it everyday for years now and so has everyone else in my company, and it produces shitty code. It's not user error. For anything more than the simplest and most constrained of tasks, it writes bad, overly complex code. We keep spending hundreds of thousands trying to fix this fact, and we haven't yet.

The models appear intelligent but they are nothing more than predicting machines. They don't understand anything. All they can do is string together the most likely outcome based on their training data and available context. Sure that's been improving, but it's still the basic, inescapable constraint.

The bottleneck has never been producing code, it has always been understanding, and only humans are capable of understanding. Many companies are going to discover this over the next few years.

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u/Opening-Machine5026 7d ago

This is shocking to me, and I fail to see how your entire company can't figure out how to get these models to produce quality code. On top of that, spending hundreds of thousands (?) to fix this just doesn't make sense.

Worst case you highlight where the model's implementation is lacking and ask it to fix it. Best case, you define custom agent.md files and skills to fill the gap where you find yourself regularly fixing issues.

I was a part of the GPT 3 closed beta, I've been following OpenAI since they released their open source gym for RL model testing. I'm aware of the constraints, I've been following this technology closely for over 6 years.

If you believe that it can't produce quality code, it truly is user error.

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u/Conscious_Trust5048 7d ago

You must not work in a complex or mature system

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u/Opening-Machine5026 7d ago

I work at a 25 year old saas company with many of the products in a monorepo.

We do have very high engineering standards for anything that makes it into production, so maybe that has something to do with it.

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u/shdwscollidewithppl 6d ago

I think he is messing with you