this post was submitted on 13 May 2025
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Big brain tech dude got yet another clueless take over at HackerNews etc? Here's the place to vent. Orange site, VC foolishness, all welcome.
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I treat AI as a new intern that doesn't know how to code well. You need to code review everything, but it's good for fast generation. Just don't trust more than a couple of lines at a time.
This statement makes absolutely zero sense to me. The purpose of having a new intern and reviewing their code is for them to learn and become a valuable member of the team, right? Like we don't give them coding tasks just for shits and giggles to correct later. You can't turn an AI into a senior dev by mentoring it, however the fuck you'd imagine that process?
Never said any of this.
You can tell AI commands like "this is fine, but X is flawed. Use this page to read how the spec works." And it'll respond with the corrections. Or you can say "this would leak memory here". And it'll note it and make corrections. After about 4 to 5 checks you'll actually have usable code.
But what's the point of having that if it doesn't result in improvement on the other side? Like you're doing hard work to correct code and respond with feedback but you're putting that into the void to no one's benefit.
Hiring an intern makes sense. It's an investment. Hiring an AI at the same skill level makes negative sense.
Not all projects needs VC money to get off the ground. I'm not going to hire somebody for a pet project because CMake's syntax is foreign to me, or a pain in the ass to write. Or I'm not interested in spending 2 hours clicking through their documentation.
Or if you ever used DirectX the insane "code by committee" way it works. Documentation is ass and at best you need code samples. Hell, I had to ask CoPilot to tell me how something in DXCompiler worked and it told me it worked because the 5000 line cpp file had it somewhere in there. It was right, and to this day, I have no idea how it came up with the correct answer.
There is no money in most FOSS. Maybe you'll find somebody who's interested in your project, but it's extremely rare somebody latches on. At best, you both have your own unique, personal projects and they overlap. But sitting and waiting for somebody come along and having your project grind to halt is just not a thing if an AI can help write the stuff you're not familiar with.
I know "AI bad" and I agree with the sentiment most of the time. But I'm personally okay with the contract of, I feed GitHub my FOSS code and GitHub will host my repo, run my actions, and host my content. I get the AI assistance to write more code. Repeat.
What does this have to do with literally anything I said about comparing AI with interns
If I ever meet an intern for a FOSS project, I’ll buy a lottery ticket
The first sentence of my comment?