It 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 columnist
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.
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.
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).
the person in your scenario is just fkin stupid. When people say that llms are helpful for coding, they aren’t talking about telling an llm to rewrite an entire codebase.
You are right, but right now we are living in a very messy reality where it’s hard to know who’s being stupid and who is using it well. One person I know that, well, I was never a huge fan of his work but at least it was somewhat serviceable is now all-in on AI and his code has been rewritten in a similar manner as the parent poster comments. He’s got no idea how it works or how it should worked, the AI decided to rewrite it in an entirely different language, and it’s a buggy mess and it never fixes the bugs without making new bugs. Then he hit his token quota 3 weeks early and basically said he was going to stop working on it because he no longer could manually work the codebase. He didn’t ask for a rewrite, but AI advised him that his language choice was a poor fit and reworked things in another language, one that none of us use to that level of seriousness. It also made it largely based on super convoluted regular expressions.
The problem is that the leadership is singing the praises of these people, they were on their ‘leaderboards’ of AI adoption and much like the craze of praising “lines of codes”, we are neck deep in the most stupid non-technical evaluation of technical work you could imagine.
In other words, you’re arguing that their usage without discernment is detrimental.
Cory agrees on this very same article, and it also includes the same nuance this chain is trying to give voice to:
The other question Suresh implicitly raises is: “How can you reconcile the failure of AI in the enterprise with the individual claims of skilled technologists who insist that AI is helping them do great work?” The answer is that these AI users are “centaurs” – experienced workers who are assisted by automation on terms that they set for themselves.
Thanks to their skill and experience, these workers possess discernment, the ability to tell good code from bad, and (more importantly) good uses of code-generation tools from bad. They demonstrate the adage that worker-driven automation improves quality, while capital-driven automation improves throughput.
We wouldn’t be having this conversation if LLMs had been given the chance to grow into being the same way the web did. Whereas we would be having this same conversation with the letters swapped if corporations were the ones to spawn the WWW instead of the way it came about.
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.
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.
I’m not a kid doing some vibe coding, of course I know what I want and basically know how to implement it, the AI is just helping me writing it, auto-complete and all.
The overwhelming majority of software development occurs on a team. You understanding what you’ve asked an AI to do doesn’t mean jack when you need to make sure an entire team can understand it five years from now. And LLMs tend to write code that is incomprehensible to another person the next day.
? developer can write 50 lines per day, LLM help us for some auto-complete or some easy 5 lines routine/functions, but we are not blind and do not accept them blindly without understanding them. And we have pull request and reviews etc and prior to this we have architecture and class diagram and SDD and acceptance criteria and all kinds of things.
You do think that in big companies a developer will use LLM to generate thousands of line per day by himself?
I’m my experience people give tech demos, everyone is impressed, my coworkers say it makes them multiples faster, then I have more work making sure the wheels don’t fall off.
The echo chamber on this site about AI is really quite something. Someone confidently told me Mythos probably didn’t exist and they were upvoted for it and I was downvoted for pointing out the existence of Project Glasswing.
Like, Mythos isn’t real? Fable has been out for like two months lmao
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.
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.
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).
the person in your scenario is just fkin stupid. When people say that llms are helpful for coding, they aren’t talking about telling an llm to rewrite an entire codebase.
You are right, but right now we are living in a very messy reality where it’s hard to know who’s being stupid and who is using it well. One person I know that, well, I was never a huge fan of his work but at least it was somewhat serviceable is now all-in on AI and his code has been rewritten in a similar manner as the parent poster comments. He’s got no idea how it works or how it should worked, the AI decided to rewrite it in an entirely different language, and it’s a buggy mess and it never fixes the bugs without making new bugs. Then he hit his token quota 3 weeks early and basically said he was going to stop working on it because he no longer could manually work the codebase. He didn’t ask for a rewrite, but AI advised him that his language choice was a poor fit and reworked things in another language, one that none of us use to that level of seriousness. It also made it largely based on super convoluted regular expressions.
The problem is that the leadership is singing the praises of these people, they were on their ‘leaderboards’ of AI adoption and much like the craze of praising “lines of codes”, we are neck deep in the most stupid non-technical evaluation of technical work you could imagine.
In other words, you’re arguing that their usage without discernment is detrimental.
Cory agrees on this very same article, and it also includes the same nuance this chain is trying to give voice to:
We wouldn’t be having this conversation if LLMs had been given the chance to grow into being the same way the web did. Whereas we would be having this same conversation with the letters swapped if corporations were the ones to spawn the WWW instead of the way it came about.
The reason is the same. There is only one war.
Dumb people use their tools incorrectly. That’s all you’re describing.
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.
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.
I’m not a kid doing some vibe coding, of course I know what I want and basically know how to implement it, the AI is just helping me writing it, auto-complete and all.
The overwhelming majority of software development occurs on a team. You understanding what you’ve asked an AI to do doesn’t mean jack when you need to make sure an entire team can understand it five years from now. And LLMs tend to write code that is incomprehensible to another person the next day.
? developer can write 50 lines per day, LLM help us for some auto-complete or some easy 5 lines routine/functions, but we are not blind and do not accept them blindly without understanding them. And we have pull request and reviews etc and prior to this we have architecture and class diagram and SDD and acceptance criteria and all kinds of things.
You do think that in big companies a developer will use LLM to generate thousands of line per day by himself?
… we had autocomplete that worked better before LLMs came along. If you’re not using an LLM to generate more code then what the fuck is the point.
I’m my experience people give tech demos, everyone is impressed, my coworkers say it makes them multiples faster, then I have more work making sure the wheels don’t fall off.
Yep I’ve got nearly 30 years of professional dev experience and Claude code/copilot/etc are absolutely groundbreaking.
I like it for making a quick crappy version of something, so then they’ll tell me the double secret requirements, and then I write the real version.
The echo chamber on this site about AI is really quite something. Someone confidently told me Mythos probably didn’t exist and they were upvoted for it and I was downvoted for pointing out the existence of Project Glasswing.
Like, Mythos isn’t real? Fable has been out for like two months lmao