this post was submitted on 17 Mar 2025
1375 points (99.8% liked)

Programmer Humor

34535 readers
256 users here now

Post funny things about programming here! (Or just rant about your favourite programming language.)

Rules:

founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] daniskarma@lemmy.dbzer0.com 0 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (1 children)

You can actually apply those tools and procedures to automatically generated code, exactly the same as in any other piece of code. I don't see the impediment here....

You must be able to understand that searching by name is not the same as searching by definition, nothing more to add here...

Why would you care of the shit code submitted to you is bad because it was generated with AI, because it was copied from SO, or if it's brand new shit code written by someone. If it's bad is bad. And bad code have existed since forever. Once again, I don't see the impact of AI here. If someone is unable to find that a particular generated piece of code have issues, I don't see how magically is going to be able to see the issue in copypasted code or in code written by themselves. If they don't notice they don't, no matter the source.

I will go back to the Turing test. If you don't even know if the bad code was generated, copied or just written by hand, how are you even able to tell that AI is the issue?

[–] Nalivai@lemmy.world 1 points 5 hours ago (1 children)

The things I am talking about are applied to the development process before you start writing code. Rules from NASA's the power of 10, MISRA, ISO-26262, DO-178C, and so on, as well as the general experience and understanding of the data flow or memory management. Stuff like that you fundamentally can't apply to a system that takes random pieces of text from the Internet and puts it into a string until it looks like something.

There is an enormous gray zone between so called good code (which might actually not exist), and bad code that doesn't work and has obvious problems from the beginning. That's the most dangerous part of it, when your code looks like something that can pass your "Turing test", that's where the most insidious parts get introduced, and since you completely removed that planning part and all the written in blood rules it introduced, and you eliminated experience element, you basically have to treat all the code as the most malicious parts of it, and since it's impossible, you just dropped your standards to the ground.

It's like pouring sugar into concrete. When there is a lot of it, it's obvious and concrete will never set. When there is just enough of it, it will, but structurally it will be undetectably weaker, and you have no idea when it will crack.

[–] daniskarma@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 points 4 hours ago* (last edited 4 hours ago)

Not every program is written for spacecraft, and does not net the critique level of safety and efficiency as the code for the Apollo program.

I don't even know. If memory issues are your issue then using any program with safe memory embedded into it is the way to go. As most things are actually made right now. Unless you are working in legacy applications most programmers would never actually run into that many memory issues nowadays. Not that most programmers would even properly understand memory. Do you think the typical JavaScript bootcamp rookie can even differentiate when something is stored in the stack or the heap?

You are talking like every human made code have Linux Kernel levels of quality, and that's not the case, not by far.

And it doesn't need to. Not all computer programs are critically important, people be coding in lua for pico-8 in a gamejam, what's the issue for them to use AI tools for assistance?

And AI have not existed before a couple of years and our critically important programs are everywhere. Written by smart humans who are making mistakes all the time. I still do not see the anti-AI point here.

Also programming is not concrete, and AI is not sugar. If you use AI to create a fast tree structure and it works fine, it's not going to poison anything. It's probably be just the same function that the programmer would have written, just faster.

Also, not addressing the fact thar if AI is bad because it's just copying, then it's the same as the most common programming texhnique, copying code from Stack Overflow.

I have a genuine question, how many programmers do you think that code in the way you just described?