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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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KronisLV ◴[] No.42735105[source]
> 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.

For them, this clearly sound like personal success.

There's also a lot of folks who view programming just as a stepping stone in the path to becoming well paid managers and couldn't care any less about all of the stuff the nerds speak about.

Kind of unfortunate, but oh well. I also remember helping out someone with their code back in my university days and none of it was indented, things that probably shouldn't be on the same line were and their answer was that they don't care in the slightest about how it works, they just want it to work. Same reasoning.

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anal_reactor ◴[] No.42735397[source]
I used to be fascinated about computers, but then I understood that being a professional meeting attender pays more for less effort.
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KronisLV ◴[] No.42735469{3}[source]
I still like it, I just acknowledge that being passionate isn't compatible with the corpo culture.

Reminds me of this: https://www.stilldrinking.org/programming-sucks

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1. epiccoleman ◴[] No.42738057{4}[source]
That is an all time favorite that I've come back to many times over the years. It's hard to choose just one quote, but this one always hits for me:

> You are an expert in all these technologies, and that’s a good thing, because that expertise let you spend only six hours figuring out what went wrong, as opposed to losing your job.