this post was submitted on 13 Apr 2025
264 points (99.6% liked)
Technology
69449 readers
4319 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related news or articles.
- Be excellent to each other!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
- Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.
Approved Bots
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
I occasionally check what various code generators will do if I don't immediately know the answer is almost always wrong, but recently it might have been correct, but surprisingly convoluted. It had it broken down into about 6 functions iterating through many steps to walk it through various intermediate forms. It seemed odd to me that such a likely operation was quite so involved, so I did a quick Internet search, ignored the AI generated result and saw the core language built-in designed to handle my use case directly. There was one detail that was not clear in the documentation, so I went back to the LLM to ask that question and it gave the exact wrong answer.
I am willing to buy that with IDE integration or can probably have much richer function completion for small easy stuff I know to do and save some time, but I just haven't gotten used to the idea of asking for help on things I already know how to do.
I've found the same thing.
Whenever I ask an LLM for a pointer, I end up spending just as long (if not longer) refining the question than just figuring it out myself it's doing a search on SO it in other online resources.
But even the IDE integration is getting annoying. I write a class with some functionality baked in, and the whole time it's promoting me with a shit load of irrelevant suggested code. I get the class done, then I go to spin up a unit test. It knows which class I'm trying to create a unit test for, which is cool. But then the suggested code is usually completely wrong or it's much more convoluted than it needs to be. In the latter case, the first several characters of the suggested code is good, but then there's several lines after it of shite. And hitting tab injects all of it in, which then requires me to delete it all. So almost every time I end up hitting escape anyway.
I've heard a few people rave about 'vibe coding' - usually people with no or little programming experience. I have to assume that generated code was either for very simple atomic actions and/or it's spaghettified, inefficient garbage.
I find chat gpt to be useful for deciphering error messages, generally noticing things I missed. It’s also helpful for boilerplate code, essentially a customized form of stack overflow. Beyond that it really has trouble knowing what it’s doing. I can’t imagine trusting it for completing a large project. Helpful for minor optimizations though.