I find it strange to see people writing articles like this as if everyone has used AI for decades. I've programmed for decades. I thought I retired three years ago but got an offer I couldn't refuse. Already there were little things I'd forgotten how to use.
Over the past six months I tried using Claude, chatgpt, Grok and Gemini. At best I got reminders of how things worked. People online say they use them to write their code. The code they supplied to me has NEVER worked or was so convoluted that I threw it away and did it myself.
At most, I use these tools as search engines. Even then some references are poor.
I'm starting to think this is becoming a sad, sad world and AI is just the new TV of the programming world.
I find LLMs are a hit&miss. Can be great at rewriting a function from lang A to lang B. Fails completely at a refactor. Great at coming up with a bunch of networking hosts/IPs to test a particular func. Fails when doing simple validation. Great for prototyping an alternative UI but not even remotely production ready. Always confident regardless of whether the result is correct or false. Run it three times with same query get 3 different results etc. Plenty of claims online how people have become a 1000x developer but 0 actual examples of working code in production. Given they're stochastic by design all of this makes sense in a way.
There's no clear path moving forward. Overreliance on LLMs means your knowledge will exponentially decay and you will absolutely crash any future tech interviews becoming unemployable. Not using it for some quick wins feels wasteful. Finding balance between the two extremes in addition to all existing software development woes is really hard.
assimpleaspossi · · focus · HN ↗
Over the past six months I tried using Claude, chatgpt, Grok and Gemini. At best I got reminders of how things worked. People online say they use them to write their code. The code they supplied to me has NEVER worked or was so convoluted that I threw it away and did it myself.
At most, I use these tools as search engines. Even then some references are poor.
I'm starting to think this is becoming a sad, sad world and AI is just the new TV of the programming world.
crnkofe · · focus · HN ↗
There's no clear path moving forward. Overreliance on LLMs means your knowledge will exponentially decay and you will absolutely crash any future tech interviews becoming unemployable. Not using it for some quick wins feels wasteful. Finding balance between the two extremes in addition to all existing software development woes is really hard.