Comment on Coinbase CEO explains why he fired engineers who didn’t try AI immediately
hypna@lemmy.world 1 day agoI’d be interested in some proper studies, but most of the devs I know, myself included, use it for reference at least. Haven’t met a vibe coder yet though.
In my left hand, I have a manfile, written by the very same people who wrote the tool or language that I’m trying to use. It is concise, contains true information, and won’t change if I look up the same thing again later.
In my right hand, I have a pathological liar, who also kinda sorta read the manfile and then smooshed it together with 20 other manuals.
I wonder which of these options is a more reliable reference tool for me? Hmm. It’s difficult to tell.
It is concise, contains true information,
In my experience that is not necessarily guaranteed, documentation is sometimes not updated and the information may be outdated or may even be missing entirely.
Documentation is much more reliable, yes, but not necessarily always true or complete, sadly enough.
I’ve started using an AI driver for my car. And by “AI” I mean I use a bungee cord on the steering wheel to keep it straight. Straight is the correct answer 40% of the time, so it works out.
Oh, and by “my car”, I mean the people that work for me. I insist that they use my bungee-cord idea to steer their cars if they want to work for me. There may be a few losses, but that’s ok. I can always fire the ones that die and hire more.
I’m a genius.
I mostly vibecode throw away shit. I am not shipping this python script that is resizing and then embedding images into this .xls. Or the simple static html/css generator because hosting a full blown app is overkill when I just wanna show something to some non-tech colleagues. Stuff that would take half, to an hour to throw together now takes like 5-10min. I wouldn’t trust it to do anything more complicated because it fucks up all the time, leans too heavily on its training data instead of referencing docs and it is way too confident about shit when it is wrong. Pro-tip, berate the slop machines. They perform better and stop being so god damn sycophantic when you do. I am a divine being of consciousness and considerable skill, and it is a slop machine: useful, but beneath me.
That last line is hillarious. I’ll remember that. but also the robots will remember this post when they take over.
SpaceNoodle@lemmy.world 1 day ago
I tried using it as reference, but it lied more than the datasheets.
hypna@lemmy.world 1 day ago
Yeah it’s not a miracle, but it’s probably useful. I find the most common scenario for when the LLM wasted my time was when I was asking it how to do something which can’t be done. Like I would ask it how to use library X to do operation Y, where in truth library X doesn’t support operation Y. Rather than responding that I should find a different library, it would just make up some functions or parameters. When it works well, it’s faster than hunting down the docs or finding examples/tutorials.
SpaceNoodle@lemmy.world 1 day ago
Or you could just bookmark the documentation
msage@programming.dev 1 day ago
If you’re a senior coder who can’t search the documentation fast enough, I don’t consider you to be a senior.
There are other things that are very important, but this is one of the most basic cornerstones.
homesweethomeMrL@lemmy.world 1 day ago
😱