Any programmer who worked with legacy code knows a situation where something was written by a former employee or a contractor without much comments or documentation, making it difficult to modify (because of complexity or readability) or replace (because of non-existing business documentation and/or peculiar bugs and features)
AI accelerates these situations, but the person does not even exist. Which, IMO is the main thing that needs to be called out.
Yeah I’ve been trying to call this out at my company. Junior programmers, especially , do t seem to know how to turn ai responses into maintainable code
I find it ironic since ive mostly been on the QA side of dev. I’ve spent decades pointing out the stats that code is much more expensive to maintain than it is to write the first time, so now AI puts us in a position of writing something the first time a little faster, but that’s even more expensive to maintain. Does not compute
Not if you use it correctly. You don’t write code with AI, you get inspiration to get over sticking points. You pick out the relevant bits, make certain you understand how they work, save hours of banging your head.
The issue still stands: what few seniors you still have at the shop who can tell people WHY something is a bad idea, are now distracted with juniors submitting absolute shit code for review and needing to be taught why that structure is a bad idea.
“Well everyone else is doing it” was a bad rebuttal when you wanted to go to Chuck’s party and Mom said no. Laundering “this is what everyone else writes” through an Ai concentrator when 2 generations of coders are self-taught and unmentored after the great post-y2k purge of mentors and writers, isn’t a better situation.
Well, yeah. Saying you should be competent at your job isn’t “elitism”. It’s like how someone can write some code by copy pasting from stack exchange, but not know how or why it works and it might not be well written. That’s no different to using AI and not knowing how or why it works and it might not be well written.
AI is a tool. The AI haters like yourself need to understand this, instead of thinking it’s a person.
AI is a tech debt generator.
Any programmer who worked with legacy code knows a situation where something was written by a former employee or a contractor without much comments or documentation, making it difficult to modify (because of complexity or readability) or replace (because of non-existing business documentation and/or peculiar bugs and features)
AI accelerates these situations, but the person does not even exist. Which, IMO is the main thing that needs to be called out.
Yeah I’ve been trying to call this out at my company. Junior programmers, especially , do t seem to know how to turn ai responses into maintainable code
I find it ironic since ive mostly been on the QA side of dev. I’ve spent decades pointing out the stats that code is much more expensive to maintain than it is to write the first time, so now AI puts us in a position of writing something the first time a little faster, but that’s even more expensive to maintain. Does not compute
Not if you use it correctly. You don’t write code with AI, you get inspiration to get over sticking points. You pick out the relevant bits, make certain you understand how they work, save hours of banging your head.
Ah! “Git gud” elitism to paper over the risk.
The issue still stands: what few seniors you still have at the shop who can tell people WHY something is a bad idea, are now distracted with juniors submitting absolute shit code for review and needing to be taught why that structure is a bad idea.
“Well everyone else is doing it” was a bad rebuttal when you wanted to go to Chuck’s party and Mom said no. Laundering “this is what everyone else writes” through an Ai concentrator when 2 generations of coders are self-taught and unmentored after the great post-y2k purge of mentors and writers, isn’t a better situation.
Well, yeah. Saying you should be competent at your job isn’t “elitism”. It’s like how someone can write some code by copy pasting from stack exchange, but not know how or why it works and it might not be well written. That’s no different to using AI and not knowing how or why it works and it might not be well written.
AI is a tool. The AI haters like yourself need to understand this, instead of thinking it’s a person.
AI for the win in figuring out how to use code libraries with minimal to non-existent documentation scattered accross the entire web.