Re:Cory Doctorow: What Kind of Bubble Is AI?
by PaulHoule on Wednesday December 20, 2023 @02:37PM
(#38712661)
A.I. has got something special to it because of its special talent at bullshitting.
Last week I tried really seriously to use JetBrain's A.I. assistant at work.
It could answer questions about my code sometimes, it could figure out what my database schema was by looking at the stubs JooQ built out of the tables.
which is a little tricky to express in JooQ because you run into one of those "need to access the definition before it is defined" problems that they invented the Y combinator to deal with... Most people just hand-code the table reference in the join like is done here
The assistant tried to write the query numerous times, it got the basic idea right but could never quite figure out how to close the loop on the recursion. It exhausting to keep cutting and pasting code from it and then hitting alt+ENTER to bring in imports and finding sometimes I got the wrong imports (java.lang.Record vs jooq.Record), etc.
It would often say things that were totally wrong such as needing JooQ 3.15 to write CTEs because it misread the documentation.
Now my experience is that many ignorant programmers are also belligerent and the assistant is always polite and actually will change it's opinion if you show it evidence to the contrary... But maybe that makes it more dangerous because the better it gets socially, the better it gets at keeping you in a tarpit.
Last week I tried really seriously to use JetBrain's A.I. assistant at work.
It could answer questions about my code sometimes, it could figure out what my database schema was by looking at the stubs JooQ built out of the tables.
I was working on a recursive CTE for postgres
https://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/queries-with.html#QU...
which is a little tricky to express in JooQ because you run into one of those "need to access the definition before it is defined" problems that they invented the Y combinator to deal with... Most people just hand-code the table reference in the join like is done here
https://www.jooq.org/doc/latest/manual/sql-building/sql-stat...
The assistant tried to write the query numerous times, it got the basic idea right but could never quite figure out how to close the loop on the recursion. It exhausting to keep cutting and pasting code from it and then hitting alt+ENTER to bring in imports and finding sometimes I got the wrong imports (java.lang.Record vs jooq.Record), etc.
It would often say things that were totally wrong such as needing JooQ 3.15 to write CTEs because it misread the documentation.
Now my experience is that many ignorant programmers are also belligerent and the assistant is always polite and actually will change it's opinion if you show it evidence to the contrary... But maybe that makes it more dangerous because the better it gets socially, the better it gets at keeping you in a tarpit.