Comment on After outages, Amazon to make senior engineers sign off on AI-assisted changes
merc@sh.itjust.works 12 hours ago
What is AI good at? Creating thousands of lines of code that look plausibly correct in seconds.
What are humans bad at? Reviewing changes containing thousands of lines of plausibly correct code.
This is a great way to force senior devs to take the blame for things. But, if they actually want to avoid outages rather than just assign blame to them, they’ll need to submit small, efficient changes that the submitter understands and can explain clearly. Wouldn’t it be simpler just to say “No AI”?
If you ask a writer what is Ai good for they will say it’s good for art but never use it for writing because it’s terrible at it.
If you ask a artist what is Ai good for they will say it’s good for writing but never use it for art because it’s terrible at it.
Conclusion… it’s good at neither… or am I missing your point?
The output looks good to people who are poorly versed in the segment for which AI is being asked to perform, but often inefficient or fails in ways that an expert in the field would never miss.
—ignore this part, I’m just rambling from here on Depending on the context, you’ll almost certainly get something that looks correct on first glance, especially if you’re not an expert. If you’re an expert, you wouldn’t need to ask for such a task and, if you did to save time, you’d probably end up adjusting, correcting, or fixing several things to produce a production-ready output. I use it regularly for code because the last language I had any training in proper syntax was Fortran 77. And eventually the simple tasks I ask it to code for me work. I’ve asked it to do some excel calculations (I’m not an excel expert, I do a lot of mathematic manipulation in custom sheets) and some of them work, but most are either wildly convoluted or relay on obscure calls/functions rather than simply using standard logic and mathematic operations which are easy to edit and change. I’ve also asked it to do some graphical illustration (because I’m not a graphic artist) and it has produced nice looking illustrations with zero basis in reality - i.e. “draw me an outline of Scotland in the style you’d see on a tourist map and label, with a star, these four cities”. It produced what I would expect an average American would estimate the outline of Scotland looked like and was equally as accurate with the location of the four cities (i.e. utterly incorrect).
Or I suppose add extra work by walking an AI tool through making small incremental changes.
In my experience, LLMs suck at making smart, small changes. To know how to do that they need to “understand” the entire codebase, and that’s expensive.
Yeah that’s what I mean by extra work. I can make the change myself or I can argue with claude code until it does what I want.
Earthman_Jim@lemmy.zip 11 hours ago
AI’s greatest feature in the eyes of the Epstein class is the ability to shift responsibility. People will do al kinds of crazy shit if they can shift the blame to someone else, and AI is the perfect bag holder.