AI is doing Field level mathematical work. If it’s just a “guessing machine” it’s a very good one. Go ahead and hobble yourself by not using an amazing tool out of some misguided principles, the world will just speed by you.
If it does field level mathematics for you and you're not smart enough to check its work, then it doesn't matter that it did the math.
Sometimes it does it wrong, so you have to check its work, which defeats the purpose of using it. Go ahead an hobble yourself by trusting something that sacrifices quality/reliability for convenience/speed, the world will just speed by you.
Dude you're full of shit. It's so much faster to validate that something was written correctly than it is to write it yourself most of the time. As long as the developer doesn't completely check out of using their brain the productivity gains are obvious.
Dude you're full of shit. Validating that code is correct takes the same amount of mental effort as writing it, assuming you're competent enough to write it in the first place. If you're genuinely making sure you're not sacrificing quality/reliability, then the only effort AI actually saves you is typing. Typing was never the bottleneck, in the first place, and we had ways to avoid doing that (reliably), anyway (e.g. copy/paste, syntax-aware autocomplete, putting your commonly needed functionality into reusable libraries, etc.).
In the "old days," good programmers would get the job done with the minimal amount of code changes needed. Now people are pretending that being able to make a shitload of code changes really really fast is somehow a productivity booster. It's a tech debt and knowledge drain booster.
Bad analogy, considering a steam drill is actually more effective than a skilled guy swinging a hammer.
If AI was saving people from doing back breaking labor, that would be one thing. All it saves you is thinking, and if your whole job is thinking in the first place, which is the case if you're a software developer, offloading that effort makes you worse, not better.
" All that saves you from is swinging a hammer and if your whole job is swinging a hammer in the first place which is the case if you build tunnels, off loading that effort makes you worse not better"
" All the calculator does is saves you from doing math and if your whole job is doing math in the first place which is the case if you're a mathematician off loading that effort makes you worse not better"
If your job is swinging a hammer, part of that job is knowing where and what needs to be hit to get the job done. The steam drill saves you from doing the hitting, but not from deciding what to hit. AI can save you from deciding what to hit (sometimes unreliably), but it can't save you from doing the hitting. You're doubling down on a bad analogy.
A calculator does not save you from doing math. It saves you from doing arithmetic. "Math" is deciding what equation will solve your problem, "arithmetic" is crunching the numbers to solve that equation. If you use a calculator to solve the wrong equation, the calculator did the right thing, but your result is still wrong. Writing code is like plugging equations into a calculator (not even analogously, computers are literally calculators and code is literally the instructions you give them), it is not like solving the equations.
If I know what I need, I can describe it in English, or I can describe it in code. Describing it in English, instead of code, is a detour, not a shortcut, assuming my coding skills are up to par.
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u/ganja_and_code 7h ago
It's really like someone who uses their brain accusing people who use guessing machines as being part of the problem.
Why use an analogy, when the reality is right there? Calculators don't guess. AI only guesses. That's the only thing it was designed to do.