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- Hacker News
- The balance sheets of the AI providers are pretty clear on this ownership thing: I shouldn't own it, NVidia should. Instead, I should pay at least once a very large amount to initially produce it. And then I should have a recurring usage-based monthly fee - for a license allowing me to say it's "my code". That's on top of hosting fees, etc.
- I'm fine with it. I'm just as liable or likely to write bugs in my own handwritten code as I am in generating code via AI, if not more likely.by nullbio
- The question of code ownership highlighted in some of the comments herein (e.g., "when you build software, you own it... "No, I specifically don’t. My company owns it...") takes me back to a paper I read years ago on password management and extrinsic risk: The basic idea was that employees have no real motivation to maintain password hygiene because they bear little to no risk of password compromise. They are asked both to be productive and to be secure, they are more likely to be sanctioned for productivity problems than security problems, so they sacrifice company security in favour of employment safety.
We've seen commentary along these lines re AI productivity gains Vs code maintenance costs and quality concerns for months/years now, but somehow, for me at least, viewing this through the lens of code ownership (literal ownership, not metaphorical/moral ownership in the 'take pride in your work and do it well, regardless' sense) makes this extrinsic risk all the more clear.
It also makes me think of the estimated billions lost to spreadsheet errors: non-programmers unaware that they were programming creating spreadsheet macros that appeared to do exactly what they wanted, but that in reality only did so most of the time, with edge cases and error handling omitted entirely, leading to significant financial losses for their employers.
In that case, the lack of sanction is far clearer: They were not programmers, they did their best, no one noticed and it wasn't their job to do so, etc.
The case of AI isn't that different, especially since it is just as available to the non-programmer as it is to the cavalier, or to the pressured junior, or to the responsible, take-ownership-and-maintain developer.
AI without governance and program management leads organizations to assume unqualified and unquantified risk with diffused responsibility; outside the small class of take-ownership-and-maintain professional, all risks are extrinsic to individuals so why should they care if it gets the job (mostly) done?
They don't and they won't.
(Reaches for popcorn to watch imminent train wrecks whilst hoping his water supply remains uncompromised.)
- we will go full circle "what software would look like if we made keeping software understandable to humans" maybe we invent a pseudo programming language so we get deterministic results ;)by delijati
- I'm not OK with it, but I have no choice besides maybe quitting my job.
I've also tried to understand the code that AI writes, but it's often insane and untangling it would slow me down so much that it would nullify the gains in speed that AI brings.
To me, either companies realize they're spending a lot more money to ship crappier code and AI becomes a niche, or we'll just stop looking at code. I don't think there's any other option because I don't see AI getting better at it. It seems to actually be getting worse and more annoying to use.
by altern8 - Interestingly enough, the question "do we want to support it" has been the main one (not "can we write it") in any sufficiently large and mature project for as long as I remember.
Now, becoming large is now a solved problem essentially, but that's still only maybe 10-20% of the software engineering work in the long run. I'm grateful I can delegate some grunt work to LLMs, but, essentially, the main reason why large projects slow down development has never been due to inability to write lots of code quickly.
by nasretdinov - > when you build software, you own it
No, I specifically don’t. My company owns it, and that bastard will lay me off without a second thought.
by phoghed - > It’s crystal clear that AI can be a complexity factory.
> I’ve been thinking a lot lately about what software would look like if we made keeping software understandable to humans a first-class design goal in the age of AI.
I agree, and I've been thinking similarly. But I don't think there's anything "new" about what understandable and well-factored code should look like. It's the same principles as ever.
A lot of agent-written code looks like what you'd get if you gave an enthusiastic human slightly too many stimulants and asked them to take the shortest path to reach the goal. Plausibly this is just a result of the LLMs not being "smart enough" to do any better, but I think there's also an incentives problem. How do you reward human-understandability in benchmarks and unsupervised training?
by Retr0id