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258 points signa11 | 2 comments | | HN request time: 0.001s | source
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kirubakaran ◴[] No.42732804[source]
> A major project will discover that it has merged a lot of AI-generated code

My friend works at a well-known tech company in San Francisco. He was reviewing his junior team member's pull request. When asked what a chunk of code did, the team member matter-of-factly replied "I don't know, chatgpt wrote that"

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alisonatwork ◴[] No.42734461[source]
I have heard the same response from junior devs and external contractors for years, either because they copied something from StackOverflow, or because they copied something from a former client/employer (popular one in China), or even because they just uncritically copied something from another piece of code in the same project.

From the point of view of these sorts of developers they are being paid to make the tests go green or to make some button appear on a page that kindasorta does something in the vague direction of what was in the spec, and that's the end of their responsibility. Unused variables? Doesn't matter. Unreachable code blocks? Doesn't matter. Comments and naming that have nothing to do with the actual business case the code is supposed to be addressing? Doesn't matter.

I have spent a lot of time trying to mentor these sorts of devs and help them to understand why just doing the bare minimum isn't really a good investment in their own career not to mention it's disrespectful of their colleagues who now need to waste time puzzling through their nonsense and eventually (inevitably) fixing their bugs... Seems to get through about 20% of the time. Most of the rest of the time these folks just smile and nod and continue not caring, and companies can't afford the hassle of firing them, then you open LinkedIn years later and turns out somehow they've failed up to manager, architect or executive while you're still struggling along as a code peasant who happens to take pride in their work.

Sorry, got a little carried away. Anywho, the point is LLMs are just another tool for these folks. It's not new, it's just worse now because of the mixed messaging where executives are hyping the tech as a magical solution that will allow them to ship more features for less cost.

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1. quietbritishjim ◴[] No.42736401[source]
It's definitely worse for LLMs than for StackOverflow. You don't need to fully understand a StackOverflow answer, but you at least need to recognise if the question could be applicable. With LLMs, it makes the decisions completely for you, and if it doesn't work you can even get it to figure out why for you.

I think young people today are at severe risk of building up what I call learning debt. This is like technical debt (or indeed real financial debt). They're getting further and further, through university assignments and junior dev roles, without doing the learning that we previously needed to. That's certainly what I've seen. But, at some point, even LLMs won't cut it for the problem they're faced with and suddenly they'll need to do those years of learning all at once (i.e. the debt becomes due). Of course, that's not possible and they'll be screwed.

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2. ben_w ◴[] No.42736953[source]
> With LLMs, it makes the decisions completely for you, and if it doesn't work you can even get it to figure out why for you.

To an extent. The failure modes are still weird, I've tried this kind of automation loop manually to see how good it is, and while it can as you say produce functional mediocre code*… it can also get stuck in stupid loops.

* I ran this until I got bored; it is mediocre code, but ChatGPT did keep improving the code as I wanted it to, right up to the point of boredom: https://github.com/BenWheatley/JSPaint