this post was submitted on 24 Sep 2026
88 points (100.0% liked)
technology
24511 readers
57 users here now
On the road to fully automated luxury gay space communism.
Spreading Linux propaganda since 2020
- Ways to run Microsoft/Adobe and more on Linux
- The Ultimate FOSS Guide For Android
- Great libre software on Windows
- Hey you, the lib still using Chrome. Read this post!
Rules:
- 1. Obviously abide by the sitewide code of conduct. Bigotry will be met with an immediate ban
- 2. This community is about technology. Offtopic is permitted as long as it is kept in the comment sections
- 3. Although this is not /c/libre, FOSS related posting is tolerated, and even welcome in the case of effort posts
- 4. We believe technology should be liberating. As such, avoid promoting proprietary and/or bourgeois technology
- 5. Explanatory posts to correct the potential mistakes a comrade made in a post of their own are allowed, as long as they remain respectful
- 6. No crypto (Bitcoin, NFT, etc.) speculation, unless it is purely informative and not too cringe
- 7. Absolutely no tech bro shit. If you have a good opinion of Silicon Valley billionaires please manifest yourself so we can ban you.
founded 6 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
I had a conversation with a long time developer today about this. He basically said his job has moved from "write reviewable code so it is easy to understand and maintain" to "spend all day reading a novel of code that technically works but would be completely unmaintainable if a human had to."
Like technically the code works and so the "writing the code" part goes faster but then it takes the same amount of time to review, cleanup, refactor, fix, etc as it would have to just write the code right in the first place.
It's basically shifting the problem space. The machine can solve the problem for you well enough but it takes a real expert to understand what it did and if it solved the problem well enough within the context of everything else going on too.
So it's not really saving time, and therefore probably isn't saving money in the long run.
Once the real costs of these machines starts coming down the pipe, I think most teams will realize that at least for doing complex tasks like writing code, it's cheaper to just have a person do it.
Don't get me wrong the machines can often write really impressive and correct code, but they are only doing it "faster" if you ignore the context and they're only doing it cheaper because they're being subsidized to do it cheaper. Once that subsidy goes away I think we'll see a lot less of this stuff.
I do think it's never going away though, I just don't see a continued world where "just use AI" continues to be the solution to every problem. Especially not complex ones.
Wall Street opened a gigantic credit account for US companies to take on massive technical debt
This has been my experience as well.
Charitably, there have been moments where I have used an LLM to help debug a problem. I was using Zig and trying to decompress and deflate a ZIP archive in memory and the documentation for the APIs in Zig leaves much to be desired. I was able to post a stack trace of the crash and slowly determine a solution but at no point was it where I just let the LLM write the code. It was much more "look at the generated code, determine the change that needs to be made, and try that" with some instances being where the suggestion was completely wrong. BUT, I eventually came to the solution. I would not have been able to figure it out on my own, but it absolutely was not the case where it's letting the LLM do it and I just review the code.
A similar issue I had was with a crash with mariadb. New version of mariadb gets released and suddenly in development we are getting crashes right at the start of our test runs. I copy out the stack trace from mariadb and paste it into Copilot, and get a search result with some prodding, back to a bug when grant tables are disabled. It was very helpful to understand why, and our fix was to pin our mariadb version at a previous stable version
So, really it's only useful as a search engine. I would not use it to just generate code.