I think it’s more useful to look at the tasks models haven’t gotten better at over time, and the tasks that are hard for them get better at in principle. The two best examples of these are:
- Deep familiarity with the codebase
- Technical communication
I think it’s more useful to look at the tasks models haven’t gotten better at over time, and the tasks that are hard for them get better at in principle. The two best examples of these are:
- Deep familiarity with the codebase
- Technical communication
They can be guided. For example I asked Claude to benchmark some SystemVerilog.
First it just did
time ./run.shand I was like “no, idiot. That’s going to include the compilation/startup overhead.”So then it said “I’ll just increase the simulation time to amortise the startup cost.” Again I told it that was bad and to actually measure the time in SV.
So since SV has no wall-time functions, it used
$system("date")or some bollocks like that. No! I said - use DPI-C.Finally it did the right thing. Would it have been quicker to do it myself? Absolutely not.
Current AI is at lazy junior engineer level (but sped up 10000 times). You just have to make sure they don’t make lazy dumb decisions. E.g. they’re going to do everything in Bash if give half a chance.
Tbf to AI I think they’ve learned a lot of this from humans. I bet if you searched for
$systemin SV you will find a lot of hand crafted horrors. I’ve seen human-written C code that found an ELF symbol bysystem("nm ... | grep ... | awk ..."). I shit you not.You’re just asking for more slop until the slop machine spits out slop vaguely shaped like what you want, and you attribute the machine an understanding of your instructions.
AI doesn’t learn, it doesn’t understand, it doesn’t correct, it doesn’t reply. It just spits out words in an order that maximizes your engagement.
People thinking that AIs can produce code are on the edge of AI psychosis.
Ah the classic “it’s just maths therefore it can’t really think” nonsense. You’re just dirty water so you definitely can’t think.
Ok cross the “on the edge of” AI psychosis, it’s fully qualified psychosis.
What are you talking about?
It spits out characters that match what statistically should follow. You can make the desired outcome more likely.
If you think AI isn’t useful for coding you are delusional. (Oh boy is it going to cause problems though)
Al studies that demonstrate the lack of use, and actually the negative impact of slop machines for coding are also delusional I guess.
Not delusional at all. I’d rather phrase them as describing an ill-fitting or maladapted usecase or use method. Strange how Capitalism keeps demanding we use those.
Maybe we should look into that. Or like… Ask ourselves how to hose the Capitalism off of the sometimes-useful number-cruncher. Or what literacy looks like with this tool, instead of asking it to think for us.
What are you talking about? A study showing that code made with the “help” of slop machines is worse in quality and contains more issues is unrelated to capitalism.
If anything, people defending slop coding are the ones brainwashed by capitalism, with a cult of the “faster/more efficient” that makes them believe that code produced fast is good code no matter what.
Hallucinatory slop has no place in the making of software, or anything else.
You saying “slop machine” makes you sound so smart!