• Malix ( Malix@sopuli.xyz ) 
    144·
    1 year ago

    now ask them to maintain the 250k lines, probably fine for rew more commits, but after that? Oh look, they left the company for the next ai-nonsense-startup.

  • floofloof ( floofloof@lemmy.ca ) 
    115·
    1 year ago

    Translated:

    High-schoolers are even cheaper and easier to exploit than new grads, and if I don’t care if they know nothing as long as they can prop up our crappy app just long enough for me to sell the company, pocket a bunch of cash, get them all fired, and move on to my next scam entrepreneurial venture while preaching to people about being an innovator and a job creator. Maintenance is for whichever sucker ends up holding the shit bag, but who cares? I’ve got mine.

    AI coding is just the latest spin on this age-old practice.

  • comfy ( comfy@lemmy.ml ) 
    44·
    1 year ago

    Programming is one of those skills and industries that is accessible enough that basically anyone can do it, but you will run into trouble later if you’re doing anything serious without learning how to do it well. There are hundreds or thousands of ways to make something work, but if it’s an unmaintainable mess or you don’t even understand how it works, then we end up with our financial institutions running COBOL in 2025. Good luck when regulations change. Have fun when your operating system becomes unsupported and you have to replace the underlying dependencies. Hope your boss doesn’t sue when they have to hire people to rewrite your hackjob.

    And these were all already problems before AI code came onto the scene. We had the programming equivalent of script kiddies, people who would blindly copy and paste code from web searches without even reading the date or the comments saying “this is bad and this is why”. But this probably makes it even easier to do, and possibly harder to spot. Combine this with how many universities don’t even focus on lower-level languages so you get plenty of people who can’t understand how to fix any of the trickier errors in their code. And that’s not to say everyone has to be able to, but it’s a problem when so few are able to. So these programmers are unlikely to know if the code has problems so long as it passes their tests, and unlikely to know how to fix those problems when they become clear.

    Automation tools are good ideas for assisting and detecting possible mistakes. They’re not good at generating that much code. In fact, that amount of code in that amount of time is suspicious, hinting that it’s unlikely to be well-designed, maintainable or efficient.

    • pinball_wizard ( pinball_wizard@lemmy.zip ) 
      12·
      1 year ago

      This is a great write-up. And a bit generous to the “developer” in question.

      I’m not entirely sure I’ve written 250,000 lines of code yet, in my entire decades as a professional developer. If I have, it’s a near thing.

      Not to brag, but I can reuse existing libraries and get many things done with 5 or 10 lines of code.

      It’s hard to crack 250,000 when 5-10 lines solves each of my employer’s problems.

      And this young developer supposedly solved one problem with 250,000 lines of code.

      After giving it some thought, I’m like 90% 40% (edit: okay, 40% after hearing some anecdotes, haha.) sure this is just a parody post. Even AI can’t be that bad at this, right?

      • MoonMelon ( MoonMelon@lemmy.ml ) English
        5·
        1 year ago

        This is just some library too, not their main application. I know “lines of code” is bullshit but just for reference I looked it up and apparently curl is ~180k lines of code. I can’t imagine how crufty this fucking code must be, assuming this is even real because it seems too ludicrous.

  • fckreddit ( fckreddit@lemmy.ml ) 
    39·
    1 year ago

    Typical CEO thinking number of lines of code is the same as productivity. What was the functionality of those 250k lines? Do arithmetic ops between two ints? Compute if an int is even?

    • mrgoosmoos ( mrgoosmoos@lemmy.ca ) English
      8·
      1 year ago

      I’ve been playing with cursor a bit at work (non-dev here - I’m a mechanical engineer writing custom tools for me & my team).

      it might just be the way I use it, because my AI-positive boss seems to be more successful than me, but it’s… not great. cursor itself seems to have many problems following instructions. and then the code it comes up with… I’ve seen it make a complete replica of the original code when I asked it to add another scenario to the four already there, and mixed and matched between the two copies to access functions etc so that you couldn’t just remove one.

      it’s definitely helped me a bit when I got stuck with a particular issue and didn’t know what API calls to be using, but in general… idk. I don’t have enough time with it yet, nor am I skilled enough to judge it properly, I think.

      • fckreddit ( fckreddit@lemmy.ml ) 
        2·
        1 year ago

        I can assure you LLMs are, in general, not great at extracting concepts and work upon it, like a human mind is. LLMs are statistical parrots, that have learned to associate queries with certain output patterns like code chunks, or text chunks, etc. They are not really intelligent, certainly not like a human is. They cannot follow instructions like a human does, because of this. Problem is, they seem just intelligent enough that they can fool someone wanting to believe them to be intelligent even though there is no intelligence, by any measure, behind their replies.

      • johnwicksdog ( johnwicksdog@aussie.zone ) English
        1·
        1 year ago

        I’m a dev and I think my experience is mostly similar to yours. Where AI seems to work well, is when the boundaries of the problem are very well defined. For example : “Take this C++ implementation of the LCS algorithm and convert it to JS”. That would have taken me a few hours at least, but AI appears to have nailed it. However, anything where a large amount of context is needed and it starts to fail fast, and suggest absolutely insane things. I have turned of copilot on my IDE because it slows me down, but I will still ask questions to chatgpt when I have a specific problem I think it can help me with. I also will ask pointed questions when I review other dev’s code, and my expectation is the author can explain why they wrote it.

    • Phoenixz ( phoenixz@lemmy.ca ) 
      9·
      1 year ago

      250K lines of code in a month means about 10k lines per day.

      For an 8 hour work day (since they donchild labour, it might as well be 16, but let’s keep it simple) that is about 1000 lines of code per hour, so about 20 lines of code per minute. Give or take

      Unless you trust the output of AI implicitly without checking anything, ever, there is no way on this earth this can be done by a single person.

      Then, an actual senior developer would be required to evaluate each method he wrote, but I’m sure this 10 year old child with zero experience will suffice

      So basically, this guy just uses a child to tell chatgpt similar to vomit out text that likely may not even compile, let alone do what it needs to do correctly, with the right security protocols, all with the underlying infrastructure.

      All of this is bullshit and that CEO should be arrested for child labor

  • Chaotic Entropy ( ChaoticEntropy@feddit.uk ) English
    25·
    1 year ago

    Lauri is a recent teenager-turned-CEO himself… and that “intern” is basically responsible for building Lauri’s entire codebase. The whole service his “company” offers is what that teen bodged together in a month.

  • ThePuy ( AlboTheGuy@feddit.nl ) 
    24·
    1 year ago

    The fallback is gonna be hilarious, the codebase rewrote by AI? With basically no considerations of business need and system capacity?

    I can’t wait for the humiliating rollback