I’ve seen a few articles saying that instead of hating AI, the real quiet programmers young and old are loving it and have a renewed sense of purpose coding with llm helpers (this article was also hating on ed zitiron, which makes sense why it would).

Is this total bullshit? I have to admit, even though it makes me ill, I’ve used llms a few times to help me learn simple code syntax quickly (im and absolute noob who’s wanted my whole life to learn code but cant grasp it very well). But yes, a lot of time its wrong.

  • kewjo@lemmy.world
    14·
    2 days ago

    the 1000x before bit has quite a few sideffects to it as well.

    • lesser used languages suffer because there’s not enough training data. this gets annoying quickly when it overrides your static tools and suggests nonsense.
    • larger training sets contain more vulnerabilities as most code is pretty terrible and may just be snippets that someone used once and threw away. owasp has a top 10 for a reason. take input validation for example, if I’m working on parsing a string there’s usually context such as is this trusted data or untrusted? if i don’t have that mental model where I’m thinking about the data i might see generated code and think it looks correct but in reality its extremely nefarious.
    • mesa@piefed.socialEnglish
      13·
      2 days ago

      Its also trained on old stuff.

      And because its old, you get some very strange side effects and less maintainability.

    • MagicShel@lemmy.zipEnglish
      71·
      2 days ago

      It’s decent at reviewing its own code, especially if you give it different lenses to look though.

      “Analyze this code and look for security vulnerabilities.” “Analyze this code and look for ways to reduce complexity.”

      And then… think about the response like it’s a random dude online reviewing your code. Lots of times it raises good issues but sometimes it tries too hard to find little shit that is at best a sidegrade.