Comment on AI Coding Is Massively Overhyped, Report Finds

arc99@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

• ikirin@feddit.org ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  I’ve seen and used AI for snippets of code and it’s pretty decent at that.

  With my colleagues I always compare it to a battery powered drill. It’s very powerful and can make shit a lot easier. But you’d not try to build furniture from scratch with only a battery powered drill.

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  • setsubyou@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    What bothers me the most is the amount of tech debt it adds by using outdated approaches.

    For example, recently I used AI to create some python scripts that use polars and altair to parse some data and draw charts. It kept insisting to bring in pandas so it could convert the polars dataframes to pandas dataframes just for passing them to altair. When I told if that altair can use polars dataframes directly, that helped, but two or three prompts later it would try to solve problems by adding the conversion again.

    This makes sense too, because the training material, on average, is probably older than the change that enabled altair to use polars dataframes directly. And a lot of code out there just uses pandas in the first place.

    The result is that in all these cases, someone who doesn’t know this would probably be impressed that the scripts worked, and just not notice the extra tech debt from that unnecessary dependency on pandas.

    It sounds like it’s not a big deal, but these things add up and soon your AI enhanced code base is full of additional dependencies, deprecated APIs, unnecessarily verbose or complicated code, etc.

    I feel like this is one aspect that gets overlooked a bit when we talk about productivity gains. We don’t necessarily immediately realize how much of that extra LoC/time goes into outdated code and old fashioned verbosity. But it will eventually come back to bite us.

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• theterrasque@infosec.pub ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  I’ve used Claude code to fix some bugs and add some new features to some of my old, small programs and websites. Not things I can’t do myself, but things I can’t be arsed to sit down and actually do.

  It’s actually gone really well, with clean and solid code. easily readable, correct, with error handling and even comments explaining things. It even took a gui stream processing program I had and wrote a server / webapp with the same functionality, and was able to extend it with a few new features I’ve been thinking to add.

  These are not complex things, but a few of them were 20+ files big, and it manage to not only navigate the code, but understand it well enough to add features with the logic touching multiple files (model, logic, view layer for example, or refactor a too big class and update all references to use the new classes).

  So it’s absolutely useful and capable of writing good code.

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  • chicagohuman@lemmy.zip ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    This is the truth. It has tremendous value but it isn’t a solution – it’s a tool. And if you don’t know how to code or what good code looks like, then it is a tool you can’t use!

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  • Corridor8031@lemmy.ml ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    would you deploy this server?

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• bountygiver@lemmy.ml ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  for me it typically don’t cause syntax errors, but the main thing it fucks up is what you specifically told them to do, where the output straight up does not perform the way your specification requires. If it’s just some syntax errors at least the compiler can catch them, this you won’t even know if you don’t bother testing the output.

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• Auli@lemmy.ca ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  Eh I had it write a program that finds my PCs ip and sends it to the Unifi gateway to change a rule. Worked fine but I guess tech ically it is mostly using the go libraries written by someone else.

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• hietsu@sopuli.xyz ⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  [deleted]

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  • maskofdaisies@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    To add on to what others have said, vibe coding is ushering in a new golden age for black hat hackers. If someone is rely entirely on AI to generate code they likely don’t understand what the code they have is actually doing. This tends to lead to an app that works correctly for what the prompted specified but behaves badly the instant it has to handle anything outside of the prompt, like a malformed request or data outside the prompted parameters. As a result these apps tend to be easy to exploit by malicious actors, often in ways the original prompter never thought of.

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    • korazail@lemmy.myserv.one ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      I think this is what will kill vibe coding, but not before there’s significant damage done. Junior developers will be let go and senior devs will be told they have to use these tools instead and to be twice as efficient. At some point enough major companies will have had data breaches through AI-generated code that they all go back to using people, but there will be tons of vulnerable code everywhere. And letting Cursor touch your codebase for a year, even with oversight, will make it really tricky to find all the places it subtly fucked up.

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  • arc99@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    If the code doesn’t compile, or is badly mangled, or uses the wrong APIs / imports or forgets something really important then it’s broken. I can use AI to inform my opinion and sometimes makes use of what it outputs but critically I know how to program and I know how to spot good and bad code.

    I can’t speak for how you use it, but if you don’t have any real programmers and you’re iterating until something works then you could be producing junk and not know it. Maybe it doesn’t matter in your case if its a bunch for throwaway scripts and helpers but if you have actual code in production where money, lives, reputation, safety or security are at risk then it absolutely does.

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  • LaMouette@jlai.lu ⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    It’s not bad for your use case but going beyond that without issues and actual developpers to fix the vibe code is not yet possible for llms

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