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MangoCats

@ MangoCats @feddit.it

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  • 80% of developers find AI coding more addictive than helpful

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  • even has those lyrics recorded in a regular database anywhere.

    Is that required?

    Do you have those lyrics recorded in a regular database in your head?

    Of course, LLMs are more "human" if they occasionally mis-remember the lyrics...

  • 80% of developers find AI coding more addictive than helpful

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  • It doesn’t learn and it can’t truly remember things. Every time you start a session it is brand new.

    Eternal sunshine of the spotless mind... it has its advantages.

    I have mine develop and maintain a set of documentation to introduce fresh agents to the project efficiently and correctly.

  • 80% of developers find AI coding more addictive than helpful

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  • or to contextualize a scenario where that might be wrong.

    Actually, the many dimensions of the vector field are exactly where and how they do this.

    Google Gemini prompt: "List common situatuions where 2 would not be expected to folow 1"

    Here are common situations where the number 2 would not be expected to follow the number 1:

    🔢 Alternative Number Systems

    • Binary code: Counts 0, 1, 10, 11 (2 does not exist).
    • Odd numbers: Sequential listing skips even numbers (1, 3, 5, 7).
    • Prime numbers: Starting a list of odd primes skips 2 (3, 5, 7).
    • Fibonacci sequence: The sequence begins 0, 1, 1, 2 (1 follows 1).

    🏷️ Identifiers and Classifications

    • Software versioning: A patch update moves from version 1.1 to 1.1.1 or 1.2.
    • Sports jersey numbers: Roster listings sort by position or last name, not sequence.
    • Product models: iPhone models skipped from 8 to X (10), and later from 11 to 12.
    • Street addresses: Odd and even numbers sit on opposite sides of the road.

    🕒 Time and Measurements

    • Military time: The hour 01:00 moves to 02:00, but minutes go from 01 to 02 up to 59.
    • Calendar dates: January 1st is followed by January 2nd, but February 1st follows January 31st.

    🃏 Games and Sports

    • Playing cards: An Ace (1) can be followed by a King in a high-low wrap sequence.
    • Leaderboards: Tie scores result in two players holding 1st place, skipping 2nd place entirely.
    • Dice rolls: Independent probability means a roll of 1 has no bearing on the next number.

    🗣️ Linguistics and Formats

    • Alphabetical order: When sorting numbers as text, 1 is followed by 10, 100, and 11.
    • Roman numerals: The value I is followed by II, but formatting rules change at IV (4).

    To help me narrow down what you are looking for, could you tell me if you need this for a mathematical logic puzzle, a programming algorithm, or a creative writing project?

    Those context questions it asked at the end are a prompt to you to feed it dimensional guidance into its vector fields for more specifically applicable responses to your vague and open ended example.

  • 80% of developers find AI coding more addictive than helpful

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  • I'm Buzz Lightyear, I'm always SURE!

  • 80% of developers find AI coding more addictive than helpful

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  • I've had them do this for various things, nowhere near the 20% of the time they've called "the hallucination rate" but definitely once in a while if it doesn't know it will guess.

    Which, to be fair, is what I've been doing for 40+ years in computer programming. When you have the ability to check if you've guessed right or wrong in a couple of seconds or even minutes, but researching it to "be sure" (and sometimes still get it wrong) before trying might take hours it's only natural / efficient to guess a few times before giving up and RTFM.

  • 80% of developers find AI coding more addictive than helpful

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  • I've written the fucking code myself for 30+ years. With AI, doing it right, fully understanding what it's doing, it's still 5x faster than doing it myself.

  • 80% of developers find AI coding more addictive than helpful

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  • I see a lot of "human type mistakes" in my LLM agent sessions. If you manage these human like mistakes with the same procedures that keep them under control in real humans, the LLMs become much more useful.

  • 80% of developers find AI coding more addictive than helpful

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  • Claude read an error message that’s benign and now the customer is demanding fixes for something that is not and never has been a problem and won’t actually solve the root issue.

    When we started cooperating with a team in India, we had to clean up our logs to reclassify those "errors that are not a problem" because we end up endlessly re-explaining to every new engineer they hire how "ERROR doesn't indicate a problem in this situation." No, writing docs explaining that and assigning said docs as required training ALSO did not help.

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  • I have had a fair amount of success in fixing these kinds of configurations with LLMs when the LLM also has access to independent verification (logs, system info utility output, etc.) that its changes / coding has worked as intended.

    When you just give it a job and no way to check its own work, it's a lot like people: it rarely gets it right the first try.

  • 80% of developers find AI coding more addictive than helpful

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  • Ah, but if you agree with the results you probably care much less about bad science than making AI users look bad.

  • 80% of developers find AI coding more addictive than helpful

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  • Not if you don't scroll tiktok reels while your agent is coding for you.

  • 80% of developers find AI coding more addictive than helpful

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  • I got a job once at a video processing software company, camera streams etc. The tasks there involved a lot of reverse engineering of under or undocumented things, very slow - I felt like I was getting 2-3 hours of "accomplishment" accomplished on a typical week there, very demoralizing, but they swore that's how it always is there and I'm actually unusually quick at getting things done... IDK, I got a better offer and was out of there to a more productive job fairly quickly.

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  • Don't get too bent about the environmental costs... the (US) AI data centers pollute about the same as 11 million office commuters. So, the great corporate leaders who are trying to mandate 30 million work-from-home workers back to the office are advocating for 3X as much pollution increase as the current crop of AI data centers emit.

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  • it feels good and weird and phoney at the same time.

    I feel like: we've been developing these "best practices" of documented traceable requirements and design specs, repository storage of the whole change history, trace matrices showing test coverage / validation of all requirements and specs, code reviews, etc. etc. etc. and... for the most part... if you've got exclusively good responsible programmers on your team, most of that is a waste of time. But, when you have personnel turnover, people with ... marginal skills, etc. those practices become much more important, even if they more than qunintuple the time required to do a thing, they enable projects to grow and be maintainable at much larger scale than if you don't do them.

    And along comes LLM agents, who strongly resemble those fresh hire colleagues of marginal skills, and they don't complain about these "best practices" wasting time, and they're so wicked fast that they can cut through the process that used to take 500% as long in 20% of the time instead... No, they're not the greatest at getting things right on the first try, but they have been getting good at catching and correcting their own mistakes. And I can type messages like this one while they work on things that don't need my attention...

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  • Some colleagues are showing off 20k+ line change commits with no review.

    Our primary use of the Cursor LLM agent is: code review. Refinement of the review to clear out the misconceptions - improvement of the pull request documentation to make intent more clear for everyone - not just the LLM agents.

    We also have come (lately) to rely on it for writing unit tests. A year ago the LLM written tests tended to be ineffective, just "whitewash" coverage that didn't really check the important aspects of the requirements. Today, they're probably better than our Sr Sw Eng written unit tests, and you can crank the coverage arbitrarily high with very little effort.

    Whilst I’m at most doing 100 lines, usually 10 or less.

    One of my big criticisms of the .NET toolchain is that even simple changes can touch 47+ files, thousands of lines of code, and take hours just to have eyes on everything that changed, whereas a similar change in my Qt/C++ might be one line, or up to a dozen here a dozen there in maybe 6 files, but never the mess I've been seeing come out of .NET/WPF and friends for the past 20 years.

  • Microsoft totally breaks Windows Defender virus scans in trying to fix a 0-day flaw

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  • Nah, man, nobody needs more than Win98SE /s

  • Error by AI scribe during medical appointment leaves patient devastated

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  • I work in the digital handling of PHI (HIPAA regulated) it's pretty insane what is considered HIPAA protected in that world.

    In practice, yeah, real people can't just be all "oh, that's a national secret, I can't tell you anything about my work or the weird worms people had in weirder places...

  • Error by AI scribe during medical appointment leaves patient devastated

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  • She'd tell stories (without the names)- many of her colleagues would get deep into the personal details...

  • Error by AI scribe during medical appointment leaves patient devastated

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  • Clue: Medical transcription has been done by "AI" for the past 20 years. Source: sister in law was a medical transcriptionist making $80K per year, until Dragon Naturally Speaking and friends decimated her job market.