this post was submitted on 17 Dec 2024
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[–] [email protected] 15 points 5 months ago (14 children)

I'm saying ChatGPT is not useless.

I'm a senior software engineer and I make use of it several times a week either directly or via things built on top of it. Yes you can't trust it will be perfect, but I can't trust a junior engineer to be perfect either—code review is something I've done long before AI and will continue to do long into the future.

I empirically work quicker with it than without and the engineers I know who are still avoiding it work noticeably slower. If it was useless this would not be the case.

[–] [email protected] 45 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (4 children)

I’m a senior software engineer

ah, a señor software engineer. excusé-moi monsoir, let me back up and try once more to respect your opinion

uh, wait:

but I can’t trust a junior engineer to be perfect either

whoops no, sorry, can't do it.

jesus fuck I hope the poor bastards that are under you find some other place real soon, you sound like a godawful leader

and the engineers I know who are still avoiding it work noticeably slower

yep yep! as we all know, velocity is all that matters! crank that handle, produce those features! the factory must flow!!

fucking christ almighty. step away from the keyboard. go become a logger instead. your opinions (and/or the shit you're saying) is a big part of everything that's wrong with industry.

[–] [email protected] 25 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (1 children)

and the engineers I know who are still avoiding it work noticeably slower

yep yep! as we all know, velocity is all that matters! crank that handle, produce those features! the factory must flow!!

and you fucking know what? it's not even just me being a snide motherfucker, this rant is literally fucking supported by data:

The survey found that 75.9% of respondents (of roughly 3,000* people surveyed) are relying on AI for at least part of their job responsibilities, with code writing, summarizing information, code explanation, code optimization, and documentation taking the top five types of tasks that rely on AI assistance. Furthermore, 75% of respondents reported productivity gains from using AI.

...

As we just discussed in the above findings, roughly 75% of people report using AI as part of their jobs and report that AI makes them more productive.

And yet, in this same survey we get these findings:

if AI adoption increases by 25%, time spent doing valuable work is estimated to decrease 2.6% if AI adoption increases by 25%, estimated throughput delivery is expected to decrease by 1.5% if AI adoption increases by 25%, estimated delivery stability is expected to decrease by 7.2%

and that's a report sponsored and managed right from the fucking lying cloud company, no less. a report they sponsor, run, manage, and publish is openly admitting this shit. that is how much this shit doesn't fucking work the way you sell it to be doing.

but no, we should trust your driveby bullshit. motherfucker.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 5 months ago (2 children)

Lol, using a survey to try and claim that your argument is "supported by data".

Of course the people who use Big Autocorrect think it's useful, they're still using it. You've produced a tautology and haven't even noticed. XD

[–] [email protected] 17 points 5 months ago (1 children)

it may be a shock to learn this, but asking people things is how you find things out from them

I know it requires speaking to humans, alas, c’est la vie

[–] [email protected] 7 points 5 months ago (1 children)

It may be a shock to learn this, but asking people things is how you find out what they think, not what is true.

I know proof requires more than just speaking to humans, alas, c'est la vie.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 5 months ago (4 children)

did you know the report also publishes the details of its analysis methodology?

my god, where are you people coming from today

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[–] [email protected] 14 points 5 months ago

christ, did someone fire up the Batpromptfondler signal

[–] [email protected] 18 points 5 months ago (1 children)

Thank you for saving me the breath to shit on that person's attitude :)

[–] [email protected] 20 points 5 months ago (1 children)

yw

these arseslugs are so fucking tedious, and for almost 2 decades they've been dragging everything and everyone around them down to their level instead of finding some spine and getting better

[–] [email protected] 20 points 5 months ago (1 children)

word. When I hear someone say "I'm a SW developer and LLM xy helps me in my work" I always have to stop myself from being socially unacceptably open about my thoughts on their skillset.

[–] [email protected] 18 points 5 months ago

and that’s the pernicious bit: it’s not just their skillset, it also goes right to their fucking respect for their team. “I don’t care about just barfing some shit into the codebase, and I don’t think my team will mind either!”

utter goddamn clownery

[–] [email protected] 15 points 5 months ago (1 children)

Please, señor software engineer was my father. Call me Bob.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 5 months ago (2 children)

let me back up and try once more to respect your opinion

The point of me saying that was to imply I've been in the industry for a couple of decades, and have a good amount of experience from before all this. It wasn't any kind of appeal to authority, but I can see how you can read it that way.

jesus fuck I hope the poor bastards that under you find some other place real soon, you sound like a godawful leader

I'm sorry, do you trust junior engineers blindly? That's gonna lead to a much worse outcome than if they get feedback when they do something wrong. Frankly, I don't trust any engineer to be perfect, we're humans and humans make mistakes, that's why we do code review as a fundamental skill in this industry. It's one of the primary ways for people to develop their ability.

yep yep! as we all know, velocity is all that matters! crank that handle, produce those features! the factory must flow!!

In an industry where many companies are tightening the belt, yes it's important to perform well—I kinda want to keep my job and ideally get a good bonus. It would be pretty foolish to leave free productivity on the table when the alternative is working harder to bridge the gap, where I could spend that energy doing more productive stuff.

[–] [email protected] 23 points 5 months ago (2 children)

I’m sorry, do you trust junior engineers blindly?

as a starting position, fucking YES. you know why I hired that person? because I believe they can do the job and grow in it. you know what happens if they make a mistake? I give them all the goddamn backup they need to handle it and grow.

"this is why code review is so important" jfc. you're one of those "I've worked here for 4 years and I'm a senior" types, aren't you

[–] [email protected] 20 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (2 children)

@froztbyte @9point6 There's a distinct difference between "I have twenty years of experience" and "I've had the same ten minutes of experience over and over again, over a twenty year period" 🤷

[–] [email protected] 17 points 5 months ago

yep. on topic of which, this excellent post

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[–] [email protected] 10 points 5 months ago (2 children)

So you don't do code review? Something that's pretty much industry standard?

What on earth do you work on where it's inconsequential to trust someone new to the industry blindly?

If I could trust someone anything remotely close to "blindly", they absolutely would not have been hired as a junior.

[–] [email protected] 20 points 5 months ago (5 children)

yep yep. no code review. no version control either. that’s weak shit only babies use. over here you deploy patches by live editing app memory in production, and you update the codebase by editing the central repo using vscode remote. everyone has access to it because monorepos are what google do and so do we.

you have a 100% correct comprehension takeaway of what I said, well done!

jfc no wonder you’re fine with LLMs

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[–] [email protected] 14 points 5 months ago (6 children)

I, for one, am not in the industry and can’t figure out why people are coming at you with guns blazing. 🙄

[–] [email protected] 13 points 5 months ago

it's because he has shit for brains

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[–] [email protected] 18 points 5 months ago (1 children)

I kinda want to keep my job and ideally get a good bonus.

fuck you

[–] [email protected] 16 points 5 months ago

"I just want to be a cog in the machiiiiiiine why are you bringing up these things that make me think?! ew ethics and integrity are so hard"

[–] [email protected] 28 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (5 children)

I’m a senior software engineer

Nice, me too, and whenever some tech-brained C-suite bozo tries to mansplain to me why LLMs will make me more efficient, I smile, nod politely, and move on, because at this point I don't think I can make the case that pasting AI slop into prod is objectively a worse idea than pasting Stack Overflow answers into prod.

At the end of the day, if I want to insert a snippet (which I don't have to double-check, mind you), auto-format my code, or organize my imports, which are all things I might use ChatGPT for if I didn't mind all the other baggage that comes along with it, Emacs (or Vim, if you swing that way) does this just fine and has done so for over 20 years.

I empirically work quicker with it than without and the engineers I know who are still avoiding it work noticeably slower.

If LOC/min or a similar metric is used to measure efficiency at your company, I am genuinely sorry.

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[–] [email protected] 21 points 5 months ago

I’m a senior software engineer

Good. Thanks for telling us your opinion's worthless.

[–] [email protected] 20 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (1 children)

~~Senior software engineer~~ programmer here. I have had to tell coworkers "don't trust anything chat-gpt tells you about text encoding" after it made something up about text encoding.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 5 months ago (1 children)

ah but did you tell them in CP437 or something fancy (like any text encoding after 1996)? 🤨🤨🥹

[–] [email protected] 14 points 5 months ago (2 children)

Sadly all my best text encoding stories would make me identifiable to coworkers so I can't share them here. Because there's been some funny stuff over the years. Wait where did I go wrong that I have multiple text encoding stories?

That said I mostly just deal with normal stuff like UTF-8, UTF-16, Latin1, and ASCII.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 5 months ago

My favourite was a junior dev who was like, "when I read from this input file the data is weirdly mangled and unreadable so as the first processing step I'll just remove all null bytes, which seems to leave me with ASCII text."

(It was UTF-16.)

[–] [email protected] 7 points 5 months ago

You've got to make sure you're not over-specializing. I'd recommend trying to roll your own time zone library next.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 5 months ago

Oh my god, an actual senior softeare engineer????? Amidst all of us mortals??

[–] [email protected] 6 points 5 months ago

Another professional here. Lemmy really isn’t a place where you’re going to find people listening to what you have to say and critically examining their existing positions. You’re right, and you’re going to get downvoted for it.

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