The Copilot Delusion

Comments

• Plebcouncilman@sh.itjust.works ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  Old man shakes hands at clouds.

  You can still do things the old way, AI existing does not impact your ability to do so.

  People still make mechanical watches by hand. People choose to carve things instead of 3D printing them. People choose to drive stick instead of automatic.

  source

  • BrianTheeBiscuiteer@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    I think at most of the disdain comes from the business side. Sure I can opt out of AI at home but at work I’m constantly getting asked how AI has helped my productivity and potentially “graded” on how much or how effectively I use it. Business doesn’t care about your personal fulfillment, just your productivity, and if they grind you into dust to w acchere you no longer find any joy or motivation in your work they’ll get the next college graduate that’s already used AI for 80% of their assignments and wonder why quality has tanked, integrations are failing, security breaches are up, and energy costs have doubled.

    A coworker that regularly uses AI code assistants asked me to review 78 brand new files he made. That really puts my back against the wall. Do I spend a day going through everything “the old way”? Do I ask AI to summarize each function to bridge the gap in knowledge? Do I ask it, file by file, if it sees any issues? Or do I just rubber stamp it because I should the million-dollar product my boss thinks I should use more than Google or official docs?

    source

    • AdamBomb@lemmy.sdf.org ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      PRs still need to be reasonable size for human review, regardless of how they were authored. IMO

      source

      • -> View More Comments
    • sturger@sh.itjust.works ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      Tell your coworker to review it with his AI and then ship it.

      source
  • criss_cross@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    Yeah like I’m a lot cooler on the AI hype than most but the articles argument is weak. This is the same shit people were saying when SO and Google were gaining traction. Surprisingly having one tool does not limit people from digging further into internals

    source

    • reiterationstation@lemm.ee ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      The article is written by ai.

      source

      • -> View More Comments
  • corsicanguppy@lemmy.ca ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    Old man shakes hands at clouds.

    I love the ageism in this “but you’re just old” defence. It was comically bad when your parents told you to wear your seatbelt, and it’s weak now.

    source

    • Plebcouncilman@sh.itjust.works ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      Yes hyper fixate on the meme reference rather than the actual argument that sits below it.

      source
• plumbercraic@lemmy.sdf.org ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  The thing I hate the most about the printing press and its ease of access: the slow, painful death of the scribe’s soul—brought not by war or scarcity, but by convenience. By type. By machines. […]

  There was once magic here. There was once madness.

  Monks would stay up all night in candlelit scriptoriums with bloodshot eyes, trying to render illuminated manuscripts without smudging their life’s work. They cared. They would mix pigments from crushed beetles just to see if they’d hold. They knew the smell of burnt parchment and the exact angle of quill where their hand would cramp after six hours. These were artists. They wrote letters like master craftsmen—full of devotion, precision, and divine chaos.

  Now? We’re building a world where that devotion gets mechanized at the door. Some poor bastard—born to be great—is going to get told to “review this Gutenberg broadsheet” for eight hours a day, until all that wonder calcifies into apathy. The scriptorium will become a print shop. The quill a lever.

  source

  • floquant@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    Stupid comparison, tbh. Scribing is just boring and repetitive work, programming is cognitive work.

    source

    • plumbercraic@lemmy.sdf.org ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      That’s wildly incorrect and somehow serves to underscore the original point.

      Scribes were not glorified photocopiers; they had to reconcile poorly written and translated sources, do a lot of research on imperfect and incomplete information, try to figure out if the notes in the margin should be included in future transcriptions, etc. Their work required real subject matter expertise, training and technique, was painstaking and excruciating, and many hand written manuscripts are absolutely works of art.

      source

      • -> View More Comments
    • AdamBomb@lemmy.sdf.org ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      There are definitely parts of programming that are boring and repetitive. I’ve been using AI to speed that up. I still do the creative parts 100% myself.

      source
    • Zexks@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      You are wildly out of touch with both history and reality if you think this was stupid

      quocirca.com/…/the-gutenberg-revolution-how-the-p….

      source
  • XeroxCool@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    The slow, painful death of technological privacy - brought not by war, not by scarcity, but by convenience of another app that saves you 3 clicks per transaction paired with the forced usage of certain functions within an existing environment

    source
• killeronthecorner@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  When you outsource the thinking, you outsource the learning.

  Stealing this because it manages to put technical concerns into hand-waving manager speak.

  And a pretty solid article. I think leaning on micro-enhancements to performance a little to hard at the end but the rest jibes with my experiences working in a large company where non-technical bloviators are leading the charge of changing the approach field they don’t understand and have no training in.

  “We’re bringing AI to OKRs!” they say hungrily, as their weak arms attempt to pull the rug.

  “Sure you are”, I say, pretending to stumble.

  source
• Valmond@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  I’m more and more distancing myself with computers, it already was “use this library”, then use this app, now it seems just ask the “AI”.

  I took up painting and chess, viable replacements I hope.

  source

  • Photuris@lemmy.ml ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    I want to do this, too, but computers is how I earn money.

    source

    • Valmond@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      Yeah same here, I’m working on a “work less, spend less” lifestyle but it’s quite hard for some resaon to convince people to hire you at less than at full time. Personally I think I’d do the same job, or better, in 4 days. 3 days would yield less total work but more per day.

      🤷🏼‍♀️

      source

      • -> View More Comments
    • supersquirrel@sopuli.xyz ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      It won’t be for long after Great Depression 2 hits :(

      source
• Curious_Canid@lemmy.ca ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  It amazes me how often I see the argument that people react this way to all tech. To some extent that’s true, but it assumes that all tech turns out to be useful. History is littered with technologies that either didn’t work or didn’t turn out to serve any real purpose. This is why we’re all riding around in giant mono-wheel vehicles and Segways.

  source
• cdkg@lemm.ee ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  I get when people say: “hey, this happened with every new tech…” But this one in particular gas many inherent problems: it’s built on stolen material, it doesn’t encourage critical thinking and it will create mini socio cognitive bubbles, distancing each other more and more. It’s built that way because the people that makes it want it to be like that.

  source

  • AugustWest@lemm.ee ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    You lose me at stolen. If we are talking code anyway.

    source

    • Doomsider@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      Of all the arguments against AI this is not one of them that holds any water. Copyright is bullshit and AI proved it in a very visceral way.

      Plenty of good reasons to hate AI besides Intellectual Property.

      source

      • -> View More Comments
  • toastmeister@lemmy.ca ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    We have laws out the ass for every stupid thing. Bureaucracy so heavy that it prevents many people from ever attempting to compete. AI is the first realistic means of bypassing it, its going to be a renaissance of innovation and productivity from the bottom up.

    source

    • cdkg@lemm.ee ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      Milei vibes here. Dangerous.

      source

      • -> View More Comments
    • pulsewidth@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      “AI is the first realistic means of bypassing [laws and bureaucracy]”

      Huge disagreement on all fronts.

      The AI companies state in their Terms of Service broadly that users have commercial rights to their prompt outputs, and can even copyright them - while also keeping the output for their own data naturally. It doesn’t bypass laws or bureaucracy… At all. Rather its the billionaires trying to steal all creative arts, coding, and any other industry works they can manage - and package into their “same but slightly different” slop that outcompetes the original creators - with no protection given to those creators whose original has been copied without any kind of compensation or agreement. Its another wealth transfer.

      One of many problems the article points out - they don’t invent anything, it’s all just regurgitations of past work. This is the path of stagnation, not innovation.

      source

      • -> View More Comments
• reiterationstation@lemm.ee ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  Article was ai written. Like all of it. ChatGPT speaks a way and this is it.

  source

  • cabbage@piefed.social ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    This is just obviously not the case to anyone who bothers reading it. It's an original piece of writing.

    The only thing that could hint at AI here is the use of em-dashes, which is a bullshit tell—I use them all the time myself as well. They're right there for anyone with a compose key on Linux.

    source

    • PlantJam@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      I’ve noticed people cite em-dashes as concrete proof that something is ai generated, but I’ve them be inserted/auto corrected by word plenty of times.

      source

      • -> View More Comments
• Regenschauer@lemm.ee ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  That rather sounds like it was written by an ai?

  source

  • explodicle@sh.itjust.works ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    You’re the only human Lemmy user.

    source
• Fedditor385@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  You can use the same argument for just about everything. “In the past it was better”. Remember when kids new how to actually write with pens, and had to send a letter and wait a few weeks until it even arrived? The damn telephone and internet ‘ruined’ it with their ease of access and convenience.

  source

  • debil@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    Did you read the article? Because there certainly is no such argument in there.

    source
• corsicanguppy@lemmy.ca ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  it’s ease

  well-written

  You sure? We do not applaud the tenor who cannot clear his throat.

  source

  • cabbage@piefed.social ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    I'm sure you could have a fruitful conversation with the crowd insisting it was written by AI. :)

    source
• ShortFuse@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  This is a trash take.

  I just wrote the ability to take a DX9 game, stealthy convert it to DX9Ex, remap all the incompatibility commands so it works, proxy the swapchain texture, setup a shared handle for that proxy texture, create a DX11 swapchain, read that proxy into DX11, and output it in true, native HDR.

  All with the assistance of CoPilot chat to help make sense of the documentation and CoPilot generation and autocomplete to help setup the code.

  All in one day.

  Image

  source

  • kcweller@feddit.nl ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    And you used all that water and power just to make dark “ahit”.

    🥲

    source

    • ShortFuse@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      The point is to show it’s uncapped, since SDR is just up to 200 not. It’s not tonemapped in the image.

      But, please, continue to argue in bad faith and complete ignorance.

      source
• Quacksalber@sh.itjust.works ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  That will happen to most “artforms” or jobs that require research. I notice that on myself as well. I now ask an AI for regex stringsor when I want to implement a function I’m unsure about, I ask an AI to see what they are doing first. Critical thinking is still involved, but less than it used to.

  source

  • supersquirrel@sopuli.xyz ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    Critical thinking is still involved, but less than it used to.

    Well at least you are honest about it lol

    source
• lka1988@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  Hi, we still exist. I still build old shit to do things it’s not supposed to do. We’re not going away.

  source
• Lembot_0002@lemm.ee ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  AI is the best thing that happened to us for ages: now we can do whatever we do without the pain and humiliation of spending enormous amount of time seeking through some shitty documentation or, in too many cases, straightforwardly bruteforcing the libs by guessing what the fuck parameters this or that function needs.

  Now I can just ask an AI if there is a method in this class that does something I need and receive a useful answer, not a RTFM like in the times you’re so fond of.

  source

  • Kyrgizion@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    Yes, as long as the information you get from the AI is correct. Which we know is absolutely not the case. That is the issue. If AI’s output could be trusted 100% things would be wildly different.

    source

    • jyl@sopuli.xyz ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      Unlike vibe coding, asking an LLM how to access some specific thing in a library when you’re not even sure what to look for is a legitimate use case.

      source

      • -> View More Comments
  • Olgratin_Magmatoe@slrpnk.net ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    Right it can totally do that safely and axcurately despite not being able to count the Rs in strawberry.

    source
  • dataprolet@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    I’d say both is true. If I need a quick meal I’m glad I can just order something ready-made, but I also enjoy to cook an intricate meal for hours. OP is maybe worried that people forget about the latter and only prefer the ready-made solution.

    source

    • cabbage@piefed.social ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      I think chapter 2 does a good job presenting the advantages.

      Maybe you inherited someone else’s codebase. A minefield of nested closures, half-commented hacks, and variable names like d and foo. A mess of complex OOPisms, where you have to traverse 18 files just to follow a single behaviour. You don’t have all day. You need a flyover—an aerial view of the warzone before you land and start disarming traps.

      Ask Copilot: "What’s this code doing?"
      It won’t be poetry. It won’t necessarily provide a full picture. But it’ll be close enough to orient yourself before diving into the guts.

      So—props where props are due. Copilot is like a greasy, high-functioning but practically poor intern:

      • Great with syntax
      • Surprisingly quick at listing out your blind spots.
      • Good at building scaffolding if you feed it the exact right words.
      • Horrible at nuance.
      • Useless without supervision.
      • Will absolutely kill you in production if left alone for 30 seconds.

      source
  • kibiz0r@midwest.social ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    So if library users stop communicating with each other and with the library authors, how are library authors gonna know what to do next? Unless you want them to talk to AIs instead of people, too.

    At some point, when we’ve disconnected every human from each other, will we wonder why? Or will we be content with the answer “efficiency”?

    source
  • Valmond@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    That was why it was so entertaining, getting a lil homebrew to run on the Nintendo DS was fun.

    source