- cross-posted to:
- fuck_ai@lemmy.world
- cross-posted to:
- fuck_ai@lemmy.world
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Had to click through to change my downvote to an upvote, lol.
Non of those examples are relevant.
Those examples are specific tools or specific implementation pattern, AI in development is a tool.
It doesn’t dictate how to write software or what the written code will look like, it’s a tool that speeds up your code wiring. It catches typos and silly bugs that take hours to debug, it’s able to generate useful unit tests, it can clean up and apply my code style way better than codemaid or resharper ever code, it’s taken care of so much tedious shit and made software development fun again.
Vibe coding is not the future of development. If you aren’t learning to use AI as a tool in development, you are going to be left behind.
It’s more apt to compare it to IDEs. Sure, you can still write you entire app in vim and compile it in the terminal, but you would have been very foolish to deny the future of development was in IDEs.
You’re describing exactly how all these web tools worked. “HTML, CSS, and JS are too hard to do manually. Here’s a shiny new tool that abstracts all that away and lets you get right to making your site!” Except they all added additional headaches, security concerns, and failed to fill in edge cases, so you still need to know how to do all that HTML, CSS, and JS anyway. That’s exactly how LLM generated code works now. It’ll be useful and common for a while and then the technical debt will pile up and pile up and eventually everyone will look around and think “what the hell were we thinking” and tear it all down.
None of those examples are relevant.
They seem pretty relevant. Those things didn’t go away, but they also didn’t remove the need for programmers (the way their sales people said they would).
It is always hilarious and strange to see the buy-in on these things. We have a single coder in his late 60s that has bought in hard to spicy autocorrect. Meanwhile, the youngest on our team (like 22) won’t touch it with a 10 ft pole.
The other issue is just the morality of it. Do I know people that got rich on Bitcoin? Yes. Do I feel like they’re participating in a pyramid scheme still? Also yes. And with spicy autocorrect, where they got their training data for any and all of these models is so freaking morally bankrupt, and they’re desperate to paper over that and make it “ok” for businesses to use it.
(let me preach a little, I have to listen to my boss gushing about AI every meeting)
Compare AI tools: now vs 3 years ago. All those 2022 “Prompt engineer” courses are totally useless in 2025.
Extrapolate into the future and realize, that you’re not losing anything valuable by not learning AI tools today. The whole point of them is they don’t require any proficiency. It “just works”.
Instead focus on what makes you a good developer: understanding how things work, which solution is good for what problem, centering your divs.
Key skill is to be able to communicate your problem and requirements which turns out to be really hard.
As an old fart you can’t imagine how often I heard or read that.
You should click the link.
Hehe. Damn, absolutely fell for it. Nice 😂
Remember when “The Cloud” was going to put everyone in IT out of a job?
Naming it “The Cloud” and not “Someone else’s old computer running in their basement” was a smart move though.
It just sounds better.
Many of our customers store their backups in our “cloud storage solution”.
I think they’d be rather less impressed to see the cloud is in fact a jumble of PCs scattered all around our office.
This technology solves every development problem we have had. I can teach you how with my $5000 course.
Yes, I would like to book the $5000 Silverlight course, please.
I’m not defending AI here, but “people have been wrong about other things in the past” is a completely worthless argument in any circumstance. See: Heuristics that Almost Always Work.
Interesting article, but you have to be aware of the flipside: “people said flight was impossible”, “people said the earth didn’t revolve around the sun”, “people said the internet was a fad, and now people think AI is a fad”.
It’s cherry-picking. They’re taking the relatively rare examples of transformative technology and projecting that level of impact and prestige onto their new favoured fad.
And here’s the thing, the “information superhighway” was a fad that also happened to be an important technology.
Also the rock argument vanishes the moment anyone arrives with actual reasoning that goes beyond the heuristic. So here’s some actual reasoning:
GenAI is interesting, but it has zero fidelity. Information without fidelity is just noise, so a system that can’t solve the fidelity problem can’t do information work. Information work requires fidelity.
And “fidelity” is just a fancy way of saying “truth”, or maybe “meaning”. Even as conscious beings we haven’t really cracked that issue, and I don’t think you can make a machine that understands meaning without creating AGI.
Saying we can solve the fidelity problem is like Jules Verne in 1867 saying we could get to the moon with a cannon because of “what progress artillery science has made during the last few years”. We’re just not there yet, and until we are, the cannon might have some uses, but it’s not space technology.
Interestingly, artillery science had its role in getting us to the moon, but that was because it gave us the rotating workpiece lathe for making smooth bore holes, which gave us efficient steam engines, which gave us the industrial revolution. Verne didn’t know it, but that critical development had already happened nearly a century prior.
Cannons weren’t really a factor in space beyond that.Edit: actually metallurgy and solid fuel propellants were crucial for space too, and cannons had a lot to do with that as well. This is all beside the point.
Saying we can solve the fidelity problem is like Jules Verne in 1867 saying we could get to the moon with a cannon because of “what progress artillery science has made during the last few years”.
Do rockets count as artillery science? The first rockets basically served the same purpose as artillery, and were operated by the same army groups. The innovation was to attach the propellant to the explosive charge and have it explode gradually rather than suddenly. Even the shape of a rocket is a refinement of the shape of an artillery shell.
Verne wasn’t able to imagine artillery without the cannon barrel, but I’d argue he was right. It was basically “artillery science” that got humankind to the moon. The first “rocket artillery” were the V1 and V2 bombs. You could probably argue that the V1 wasn’t really artillery, and that’s fair, but also it wasn’t what the moon missions were based on. The moon missions were a refinement of the V2, which was a warhead delivered by launching something on a ballistic path.
As for generative AI, it doesn’t have zero fidelity, it just has relatively low fidelity. What makes that worse is that it’s trained to sound extremely confident, so people trust it when they shouldn’t.
Personally, I think it will take a very long time, if ever, before we get to the stage where “vibe coding” actually works well. OTOH, a more reasonable goal is a GenAI tool that you basically treat as an intern. You don’t trust it, you expect it to do bone-headed things frequently, but sometimes it can do grunt work for you. As long as you carefully check over its work, it might save you some time/effort. But, I’m not sure if that can be done at a price that makes sense. So far the GenAI companies are setting fire to money in the hope that there will eventually be a workable business model.
I feel this also misses something rather big. I find there’s a huge negative value of people I have to help through doing a task - I can usually just get it done at least 2x if not 5x or more faster and move on with life. At least with a good intern I can hope they’ll learn and eventually actually be able to be assigned tasks and I can ignore those most of the time. Current AI can’t learn that way for various reasons, some I think technical, some business model driven, whatever. It’s like always having the first day on the job intern to “help”.
The other problem is - unless I have 0 data security rules, there’s just so much the AI cannot know. Like I thought today I’d have Claude 3.7 thinking write me a bash script. I wanted it to query a system group and make sure the members of that group are in the current users .k5login. (Now, part of this is me not knowing how to prompt, but it’s also stuff a decent intern ought to be able to figure out.) One, it’s done a lot of code to work out what the realm is - this is useful generically, but is just code that could contain bugs when we know the realm and there’s only one it’ll ever operate in.
I also had to re-prompt because I realized it misunderstood me the first time, whereas I think an intern would have access to the e-mail context so would have known what I meant.
Though I will say it’s better than most scripters in that it actually does a lot of “safety” stuff we would find tedious and usually have to have something go wrong to add in, so … swings and roundabouts? It did save me time, assuming we all think it’s method is good enough - but this is also such a simple task that I think in some ways it’s barely above filling out a lot of boilerplate. It’s exactly the sort of thing I would have expected to see on stack overflow back in the day.
EDIT: I actually had a task that felt 100% AI could have done… if there was any way for it to know lots and lots of context. I had to basically fill out a long docx file with often AI like text describing local IT security standards, processes, responsibilities and delegations. Probably over 60% I had to “just make up” cause I didn’t have the context - for higher ups to eventually massage into a final form. But I literally cannot even upload the confidential blank form, forget about have some magic way for AI to get a brain dump from me about the last 10ish years of spoken knowledge and restricted wiki pages. Anything it could have made up mostly would have “been done” by the time I made a functional prompt.
I don’t think we solve this till we can run frontier models locally at prices less than a human salary, with integrations into everything a human in that position could access.
He proposed a moon cannon. The moon cannon was wrong, as wrong as thinking an LLM can have any fidelity whatsoever. That’s all that’s needed for my analogy to make the point I want to make. Whether rockets count as artillery or not really doesn’t change that.
Cannons are not rockets. LLMs are not thinking machines.
Being occasionally right like a stopped clock is not what “fidelity” means in this context. Fidelity implies some level of adherence to a model of the world, but the LLM simply has no model, so it has zero fidelity.
Is it worthless to say “(the current iteration of) AI won’t be a huge revolution”. For sure, it might be, the next decade will determine that.
Is it worhtless to say that many companies are throwing massive amounts of money at it, and taking huge risks on it, while it clearly won’t deliver for them? I would say no, that is useful.
And in the end, that’s what this complaint seems like for me. The issue isn’t “AI might be the next big thing”, but “We need to do everything with AI right now”, and then in a couple of years when they see how bad the results are, and how it negatively impacted them, noone will have seen it coming…
Thanks for summing it up so succinctly. As an aging dev, I’ve seen quite a lot of tech come and go. I wish more people interested in technology would spend more time learning the basics and the history of things.
I’m skeptical of author’s credibility and vision of the future, if he has not even reached blink tag technology in his progress.
<blink>How dare they!</blink>
The future of web development is Angelfire.
No one can predict the future. One way or the other.
The best way to not be let behind is to be flexible about whatever may come.
Can’t predict the future, but I can see the past. Specifically the part of the past that used standards based implementations and boring technology. Love that I can pull up html with elements using ALL CAPs and table aligned content. It looks like a hot mess but it still works, even on mobile. Plain text keeps trucking along. Sqlite will outlive me. Exciting things are exciting but the world is made of boring.
10/10. No notes.
If you’re not using Notepad, I don’t even know what to tell you.
JEdit 4 life!
What the fuck is Silverlight
Microsoft Flash. Netflix used it for a while. I don’t remember anything else using it.
The League of Legends launcher used it at one point. Not sure if it still does.
EA Tiburon in Orlando used flash for a while to do the menus in Madden and other sports games.
I left 10 years ago, web development is shit.
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I don’t remember progressive web apps having anywhere near the level of fanfare as the other things on this list, and as someone that has built several pwas I feel their usefulness is undervalued.
More apps in the app store should be pwas instead.
Otherwise this list is great and I love it.
