Comment on Why are people seemingly against AI chatbots aiding in writing code?

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leftzero@lemmynsfw.com ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

I’ve been finding it a lot harder recently to find what I’m looking for when it comes to coding knowledge on search engines

Yeah, the enshittification has been getting worse and worse, probably because the same companies making the search engines are the ones trying to sell you the LLMs, and the only way to sell them is to make the alternatives worse.

That said, I still manage to find anything I need much faster and with less effort than dealing with an LLM would take, and where an LLM would simply get me a single answer (which I then would have to test and fix), while a search engine will give me multiple commented answers which I can compare and learn from.

I remembered another example: I was checking a pull request and it wouldn’t compile; the programmer had apparently used an obscure internal function to check if a string was empty instead of string.IsNullOrWhitespace() (in C# internal means “I designed my classes wrong; this member should be private or protected, but I need to access it from outside the class hierarchy, so I’ll allow other classes in the same assembly to access it, but not ones outside of the assembly”; it’s used a lot in standard .NET libraries).

Now, that particular internal function isn’t documented practically anywhere, and being internal can’t be used outside its particular library, so it wouldn’t pop up in any example the coder might have seen… but .NET is open source, and the library’s source code is on GitHub, so chatgpt/copilot has been trained on it, so that’s where the coder must have gotten it from.

The thing, though, is that LLM’s being essentially statistic engines that’ll just pop up the most statistically likely token after a given sequence of tokens, they have no way whatsoever to “know” that a function is internal. Or private, or protected, for that matter.

That function is used in the code they’ve been trained on to figure if a string is empty, so they’re just as likely to output it as string.IsNullOrWhitespace() or string.IsnullOrEmpty().

Hell, if(condition) and if(!condition) are probably also equally likely in most places… and I for one don’t want to have to debug code generated by something that can’t tell those apart.

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