logoalt Hacker News

joe_mambatoday at 7:03 PM1 replyview on HN

>Code is mediocre in many places.

As if code written by devs at major corporations is't mediocre at best.

Nokia's Symbian OS took days to build. Days. With a D. Not minutes, not hours but days.

One of our devs shipped code to prod with a memory leak thanks to including a library that had "do not use this library in production because it causes a memory leak" written everywhere as warning.

So I don't wanna hear about how poor AI code is when human code is shit too. Human laziness and stupidity can beat AI hallucinations.

Sure, maybe your DeepMind, OpenAI devs and your John Carmacks of the world can beat AI code 100% of the time, but most workers most companies get don't have John Carmack as candidates.


Replies

tquinn35today at 7:36 PM

I agree with what you’re saying but I think the difference is many managers and above think that AI is infallible or at least much less so than it actually is and that causes problems.

Everyone is aware that humans write poor code and treat the code as so. Not so with AI code. I’ve seen devs and managers cut corners in testing/reviewing code cause AI wrote it and they think it’s solid. Sure you could blame anyone cutting corners, and that would be technically correct, but the notion is so deeply embedded in many managers and higher ups that’s it’s hard to fight back. AI companies push this narrative and many individuals who do not routinely use it believe it. There is a manager at my company who loves to reference a video anthropic released last year claiming that Claude could build an app start to finish essentially unaided. He believes it’s the lack of user skill that’s the issue and not a false claim by a startup trying to make as much money as possible.

show 1 reply