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Generative AI Is an Engineering Disaster. A shockingly inefficient trillion-dollar project.
(www.theatlantic.com)
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
But it’s so good at programming if you already know how to program! Surely that’s worth burning the planet and crashing the world economy??
Actually, it's better at programming if you don't know how to program.
For example, someone who didn't know how to program sent me a patch to my code to 'fix' a problem they encountered. It was changed to silently swallow the error that really really would have needed to be fixed, but they were so enthusiastic that the problem looked to go away that they wouldn't let me know actually actionable debug information and just whined that I wouldn't take Claude's perfectly good fix for it. It is much better at satisfying folks that don't know how to look for better.
To satisfy my standards, I would have had to extract more debugging info, probably construct a test case tickling that exact situation making an expected error to ensure it won't just throw it away, and add it to the suite and then ask it to spin until the test case passed.
But alas, I'm neck deep in merge requests from folks that were formerly intimidated by coding and are now complaining that I'm not accepting more of their changes and more quickly because "all" I have to do is review the code which is obviously so much easier than writing it... It's like the "I have an app idea, all I need is for you to do it", but on steriods....