Comment on Coinbase CEO explains why he fired engineers who didn’t try AI immediately

• Quibblekrust@thelemmy.club ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  It was just a contrived example for the purpose of the comment, and I admit it wasn’t a good one.

  How about turning a directory tree of dozens of .url files (Windows web shortcut files) into an HTML file? Directory names as section headings, and nested bulleted lists of hrefs using the .url file names as the link text, minus the “.url”. Can you do that on the CLI? Sure, but it would be a hell of a hack. It would be a disgusting blob of awk code, probably. You’re much better off writing it in something like Python.

  It’s not hard stuff. It’s simple directory recursion, string building, and file writing. It’s just so mind-numbingly boring to write, and it takes time. Instead, Copilot made that for me in 10 seconds. As fast as I could articulate the need in text. No debugging needed. Worked the first time. All I had to ask for in a second pass was more indenting of each nested list, and I could have just added that myself.

  I would argue that I can probably do it faster by hand than you can prompt your LLM and debug the slop it hands you back.

  It’s funny that you’re not even sure you can do that extremely simple thing in my original comment faster than I could prompt an LLM. And your prejudice is showing by assuming I had to even debug it, or that the code was slop. The code looked great. It was perfect Python.

  I wish all of you people would stop knocking what you’ve never even tried. Because it just makes you sound bigoted, using words like “slop” and making assumptions about the quality of the output while never having tried it yourself. Prejudice is never a good thing.

  I’ve written a fair amount of advanced command line stuff using grep and sed and whatever else. Anything non-trivial takes just as much debugging as Python code, and it’s harder to read and debug. And when it’s boring, one-off code, why would you even want to do it yourself?

  I’ll never understand the LLM hate on lemmy. Feel free to hate on capitalism, or on using fossil fuels to power LLMs, or on having no social safety net when LLMs displace jobs, or any number of other things, but to be prejudiced and assume it’s always slop when you’ve never even tried it just makes no sense to me. It’s a revolutionary tool in its infancy, and it’s already very useful on certain tasks.

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  • Senal@programming.dev ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    It’s a revolutionary tool in its infancy, and it’s already very useful on certain tasks.

    That’s a bold and premature statement IMO, how many AI winters have there been before this one ?

    I’m not even saying you’re wrong, but to assert it with such confidence sounds like crypto bro-nanigans.

    i would argue that it’s evolutionary rather than revolutionary, but that’s subjective i suppose.

    I’ll never understand the LLM hate on lemmy.

    Speaking for me personally i don’t hate LLM’s i dislike the confidence with which they are being pushed and the lack of acknowledgement of their limitations.

    You get statements like

    “And most devs I know use it everyday”

    Without context, and that feeds into the general propaganda feel of the sentiment, because people who don’t actually use them or don’t understand the implied context hear “LLM’s can do all the things, all the professional devs are using it all day”.

    I understand it’s not on you to police peoples impressions, but trying to add actual context to those statements isn’t hate, it’s prudence.

    Then again, that’s subjective too.

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