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- Hacker News
- > Nobody has every detail of all of them memorized.
That was never the requirement, you've made it up to avoid addressing the real argument
> So if copying a useful piece of code from Stack Overflow has always been acceptable,
Not really, the thing you partially hide in "useful" is the quality assessment. Blindly copy&pasting code was "never" "acceptable"
> why would asking a machine to produce that code be fundamentally different?
Because the previous premise is wrong, but also this one - it will be different code with different tradeoffs, at least try to make any argument why the situations are identical
by eviks - I think I do agree with the central point but a point of order is that if you tell AI to fix the bug and then tell it to fix the next error you might still be building an important skill: learning how to make the AI get good results.by zingar
- > And the consequences become particularly serious when something happens that the machine can't solve
Sadly the bot-gulled will always say "But the next model will be good enough to do that!".
by chrisjj - The author makes an important point about ownership but that got watered down to code understanding and debugging. What matter is not just ownership of the code that got written, but also ownership of the problem identification and the choice of solution. I wrote about this recently from the slightly different angle of conversational tempo [1], but the shared crux is that we want AI to act as a cognitive companion and help us understand the situation, identify the problem and make decisions -- instead of the AI running off to prematurely "solve" the problem and then put the burden on the user to figure out what the hell just happened and how it was only marginally correlated with intent.
[1] https://woventhought.substack.com/p/ai-assistants-need-adapt...
by ssivark - I fall somewhere in the middle of the spectrum of developers the author describes. I use AI daily for limited code writing and lots of debugging. I agree with the author that things go off the rails when you stop truly reviewing its output and just click accept to get the thrill of productivity. I don’t think using AI for debugging means you have to do that though, it’s still a choice. As an AI-human team I have had the experience many times now of debugging an issue in a complex system that I simply don’t think I could have done alone or in a reasonable amount of time. I don’t think this is a reflection of my low abilities - it’s because the AI brings to the table skills that I’ll never have like reading through and correlating huge amounts of logs across many runs of the same system on different compute nodes in a cluster. Once it finds a needle in the haystack I can still take the time to understand and reason about what it found though.by jebarker
- I think there is some nuisance on the redundancy required for the software.
For example I've worked in clean tech where PLC programming controls turbines, complete understanding is required here. Every bug and LOC associated a human needs to be in the loop, it's worth the time.
Alternatively I do game development, and I don't think there is value in understanding the complete debugging process. For example I accidentally bound spacebar-release to two things in multiplayer causing a co-op glitch. I do not need to search for this needle in a haystack to debug, that is a bad use of time.
>If writing code becomes cheap and accessible to everyone, then writing code stops being much of a differentiator. The developers who stand out will be the ones who understand systems.
I agree especially for limits/boundary conditions. In the game I'm working on, fundamentally understanding 500 GPU vs. CPU controlled fish on screen and their limitations is required to be a good architect, or this game will run at 10fps.
by WillEMac - > The developers who stand out will be the ones who understand the systems.
That has always been true. AI doesn't change it. It just rearranges some elements that come ahead of that understanding. The volume and velocity are challenges but the understanding and judgement is what separates the good and the great.
BTW: "systems" in my world include not just the technology components but also the humans who operate, adjust and manage all the pieces, and the processes that control it all.
- > So if copying a useful piece of code from Stack Overflow has always been acceptable
This has not "always been acceptable"; copy-pasta was a pejorative not that long ago, and people have been fired for simply copying code from SO and using it without understanding it.
by MarkusQ