linuxmemes

Not a programmer either but I'll throw in my anecdotes:

• I was writing a "cog" for pycord (Python Discord bot framework). I wanted a slash command to hit an API for some reason or another. Whatever AI I was using hallucinated a non-existent endpoint to achieve that so, of course, it didn't work. I wasted a half hour reading past and upcoming specs of the API to find that endpoint never existed and wasn't going to exist in the next release. The code was structurally sound, pretty much identical to other functions I'd written by hand, but it reached out to something that does not exist. It did this with a popular, well-documented piece of software.
• Speaking of structurally sound, there's no real time save if I have to double back to make sure it filled in all the blanks correctly. If the AI can fuck up with an API that it should "know," it's a guarantee that will be necessary to correct everything when an AI has no knowledge of it whatsoever. So now time is spent making sure it isn't referencing variables it failed to define, pointing to API endpoints that aren't there, etc. I can define boilerplates and snippets in any decent text editor. An autocomplete plugin will fill out the entire structure of a function being defined the second I type def and leave me to fill in the blanks - all without deferring to a water and energy sucking, data mining, douchebag of a company. What's being gained that isn't costing me privacy, depriving myself the use of my own cognitive abilities, and ultimately making the world a little worse off?
• Last one, I wrote a bash script years ago using exiv2 to pull the EXIF data and sort unsorted photos into ../YYYY/MM/DD/. directories. When the AI hype started gaining traction I tasked one with doing the same to see what it would do differently. Aside from some capitalization and variable names, it was identical. Now it's not exactly a complicated task but my takeaway was either I'm a better programmer/scripter than I thought (not likely) or AI is just as bad (or worse) of a programmer as me. I'm leaning towards worse, considering I manage to actually know if an endpoint or variable exists before referencing it.

Anyway, the only conclusion I can draw is those "programmers" are developing unmaintainable blackboxes out of twigs and playing cards. If some big bad wolf by the name of "Intellectual Debt" doesn't inevitably come along to huff and puff, they'll just end up collapsing under their own weight.