alt Hacker NewsThe process of writing code is the process of clarifying your own thought and being forced to answer questions that may not have been obvious before. To the extent that AI makes assumptions, it introduces bugs and incorrect code, maybe not from the perspective of the code in isolation, but from the broader context it lives in. To the extent it doesn't make assumptions and asks you, well that assumes it knows what should and shouldn't be assumed and that's not necessarily something AI can know a priori.
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$DAYJOB recently introduced a AI writing policy because people were sending each other mountains of slop back and forth enough that it became a huge time suck. The policy is basically: don't, with the justification being "writing is thinking". It's like they're so close to getting it.
"AI can explain it to you but cannot understand it for you". Code is just a side-effect of reaching clarity. The reason these LLMs can emit any code at all is because they're not bound by the constraints of a compiler. That's until we create a feedback loop and force them to keep trying until syntax errors are gone. The next gate is tests. Loop till tests pass (including cheating of course, gotta keep your eyes open). Then there are the runtime errors, and then after all of that the developer gets to test the results and further refine what the specs missed or confused the model. A couple of days building can really save us from a couple of hours of thinking.