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marginalia_nutoday at 3:16 AM2 repliesview on HN

My sense is that the code generation is fast, but then you always need to spend several hours making sure the implementation is appropriate, correct, well tested, based on correct assumptions, and doesn't introduce technical debt.

You need to do this when coding manually as well, but the speed at which AI tools can output bad code means it's so much more important.


Replies

ehntotoday at 4:15 AM

Well when you write it manually you are doing the review and sanity checking in real time. For some tasks, not all but definitely difficult tasks, the sanity checking is actually the whole task. The code was never the hard part, so I am much more interested in the evolving of AIs real world problem solving skills over code problems.

I think programming is giving people a false impression on how intelligent the models are, programmers are meant to be smart right so being able to code means the AI must be super smart. But programmers also put a huge amount of their output online for free, unlike most disciplines, and it's all text based. When it comes to problem solving I still see them regularly confused by simple stuff, having to reset context to try and straighten it out. It's not a general purpose human replacement just yet.

LPisGoodtoday at 4:03 AM

And it’s slower to review because you didn’t do the hard part of understanding the code as it was being written.

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