The Generative AI Con

Re:The Generative AI Con by mitthrowaway2 on Monday February 17, 2025 @11:59PM (#43086211)

LLMs are pretty good at the aspects of coding that I consider to be "the fun part". Using them has made me more productive, but also made my job less fun, because I can't justify spending time using my own brain to do "the fun part" on my employer's dime. And that was something I was particularly good at, which is why I was able to be paid well to do it.

So now my company makes more money, and the work gets done faster, but I can't say I feel appreciative. I'm sure it's great for founders though, for whom doing the work is merely an obstacle to having the finished product. For me, the work is the end goal, because I'm not hired to own the result.

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Re:The Generative AI Con by froidpink on Tuesday February 18, 2025 @05:19AM (#43088031)

It's kind of analogous to the old taxi drivers who took pride in having a sixth sense knowing which route to take you, vs uber drivers who just blindly follow their navigation

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Re:The Generative AI Con by portaouflop on Tuesday February 18, 2025 @07:34AM (#43088771)

Some of them might have had a really good mental map; but the majority would just take inefficient routes (and charge you some random price that they put into their counter) — plenty of reasons to dislike Uber but having a pre-set price, vetted/rated drivers, and clear routing for a taxi service is a massive plus in my opinion.

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Re:The Generative AI Con by stevage on Tuesday February 18, 2025 @07:35AM (#43088784)

Huh, for me it's the opposite. It does the boring bit, writing pedestrian method bodies. Writing import statements. Closing tags.

I do the fun bit: having creative ideas and trying them out.

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Re:The Generative AI Con by Piskvorrr on Tuesday February 18, 2025 @11:11AM (#43091221)

Looks like you haven't used a decent IDE: these things have been standard for decades, locally and with minimal requirements. But wait, now it happens in the Cloud (meh, that's not gonna fly anymore, too last decade)...AND requires massive amounts of power AND cooling, PLUS it's FUBAR about 50/50.

For an incremental improvement...not great, not terrible.

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Re:The Generative AI Con by habinero on Tuesday February 18, 2025 @11:44PM (#43098676)

I think LLMs are vastly overhyped and mostly useless, but I use Copilot as glorified autocomplete and like it.

It does what the other poster said: it automates the boring parts of "this db model has eight fields that are mostly what you expect" and it autocompletes them mostly accurately.

That's not something an IDE does.

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Re:The Generative AI Con by edanm on Wednesday February 19, 2025 @08:01AM (#43101639)

You're really comparing an IDE's autocomplete with something that can, at minimum, write out entire functions for you?

You're either completely misremembering what IDEs have been able to do up until 3 years ago, or completely misunderstanding what is available now. Even the very basic "autocomplete" functionality of IDEs is meaningfully better now.

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Re:The Generative AI Con by Red_Comet_88 on Tuesday February 18, 2025 @08:58AM (#43089509)

Bit of a boomer statement here but maybe this will encourage devs such as yourself to contribute more to open source passion projects that will help dethrone the monopolies. Looking at Valve's investment into Linux via Proton as a great example.

It would be so nice to have a productivity Linux OS that just works on all my devices without tinkering. I want to stop supporting the closed source monopolies, but the alternatives aren't up to par yet. I am extremely hopeful that they will be once mega corps inevitably decay and people tire of the boom-bust cycle.

As technologists, we all want beautifully designed tools, and I'm increasingly seeing that these are only created by passionate and talented people who truly care about tech, unlike megacorps that only care about enriching their board and elite shareholders.

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