Yes, yes they are! HN is now inundated with examples and the situation is only going to get worse. People with zero understanding of code, who take hours to convert a single line from one language to another (and even then don’t care to understand the result) are shipping and selling software.
¹ Last paragraph: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35133929
Crucially, those have context around them. And as you navigate them more and more you develop an intuitive sense for what is trustworthy or not. Perhaps you even find a particularly good blog which you reference first every time you want to learn something from a particular language. Or in the case of Stack Overflow, your trust in an answer is enhanced by the discussion around it: the larger the conversation, the more confident you can be of its merits and limitations.
When you get all your information from the same source and have no idea what it referenced, you lose the all the other cues regarding the validity, veracity, or usefulness of the information.
Often incorrect context, incredibly biased context (no you don't know what you want, here's a complete misdirection), or just plain outdated. So basically the same thing as ChatGPT.
People who blindly copy and paste and ship are always going to do that. Everyone else isn't. It's really that simple.
And as you learn more from different sources, you get better at identifying them.
> or just plain outdated
Which you can plainly see by looking at the date of publication. In the case of Stack Overflow, it is common that popular questions have newer answers which invalidate old ones and replace them at the top.
> People who blindly copy and paste and ship are always going to do that.
Yes, they will. You seem to agree that is bad. So wouldn’t it follow that it is also bad that the pool of people doing that is now increasing at a much larger rate?
Without a solution we're just whining about bad actors existing.
Of course they do.
Ship fast, break things, look cool, cash out, leave someone else to fix the mess you have created, it's the new black.
Even if they're not, I find "scouring code I didn't write for potential errors of any magnitude" to be much harder than "writing code". I admit there's a sweet spot where errors would be easy to spot or where the AI is getting you unstuck, but it's not trustworthy enough at the moment for me to take the risk.
The process goes;
1. Write some code
2. Get AI assistance with some part
3. Check it's right, make changes
4. Write tests
5. Put up for code review
6. CI runs checks
7. Release Candidate
8. Release Testing
There are many, many chances to catch errors. If you don't have the above in place, i'd focus on that first before using AI assistance tools.