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225

The Copilot Delusion (deplet.ing)

submitted 4 weeks ago by cabbage@piefed.social to c/technology@lemmy.world

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The thing I hate the most about AI and it's ease of access; the slow, painful death of the hacker soul—brought not by war or scarcity, but by convenience. By buttons. By bots. [...]

There was once magic here. There was once madness.

Kids would stay up all night on IRC with bloodshot eyes, trying to render a cube in OpenGL without segfaulting their future. They cared. They would install Gentoo on a toaster just to see if it’d boot. They knew the smell of burnt voltage regulators and the exact line of assembly where Doom hit 10 FPS on their calculator. These were artists. They wrote code like jazz musicians—full of rage, precision, and divine chaos.

Now? We’re building a world where that curiosity gets lobotomized at the door. Some poor bastard—born to be great—is going to get told to "review this AI-generated patchset" for eight hours a day, until all that wonder calcifies into apathy. The terminal will become a spreadsheet. The debugger a coffin.

Unusually well-written piece on the threat AI poses to programming as an art form.

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[+] Lembot_0002@lemm.ee -29 points 4 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago) (4 children)

[deleted]

[–] dataprolet@lemmy.dbzer0.com 8 points 4 weeks ago (1 children)

I'd say both is true. If I need a quick meal I'm glad I can just order something ready-made, but I also enjoy to cook an intricate meal for hours. OP is maybe worried that people forget about the latter and only prefer the ready-made solution.

[–] cabbage@piefed.social 8 points 4 weeks ago

I think chapter 2 does a good job presenting the advantages.

Maybe you inherited someone else’s codebase. A minefield of nested closures, half-commented hacks, and variable names like d and foo. A mess of complex OOPisms, where you have to traverse 18 files just to follow a single behaviour. You don’t have all day. You need a flyover—an aerial view of the warzone before you land and start disarming traps.

Ask Copilot: "What’s this code doing?" It won’t be poetry. It won’t necessarily provide a full picture. But it’ll be close enough to orient yourself before diving into the guts.

So—props where props are due. Copilot is like a greasy, high-functioning but practically poor intern:

Great with syntax

Surprisingly quick at listing out your blind spots.

Good at building scaffolding if you feed it the exact right words.

Horrible at nuance.

Useless without supervision.

Will absolutely kill you in production if left alone for 30 seconds.

[–] Olgratin_Magmatoe@slrpnk.net 8 points 4 weeks ago

Right it can totally do that safely and axcurately despite not being able to count the Rs in strawberry.

[–] kibiz0r@midwest.social 3 points 4 weeks ago

So if library users stop communicating with each other and with the library authors, how are library authors gonna know what to do next? Unless you want them to talk to AIs instead of people, too.

At some point, when we’ve disconnected every human from each other, will we wonder why? Or will we be content with the answer “efficiency”?

[–] Valmond@lemmy.world 2 points 4 weeks ago

That was why it was so entertaining, getting a lil homebrew to run on the Nintendo DS was fun.