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EldritchSpellingbee t1_j9vgqyy wrote

Reply to comment by UntiedStatMarinCrops in DeepMind created an AI system that writes computer programs at a competitive level by inaLilah

I’ve had this mindset for most of my career and even my earlier days of learning about software engineering.

People lean on easy ways out far too much and never understand the underlying information. I deeply dislike that modern development has basically become “OK so import these 20 libraries, most of which are supported by 1 or 2 people, instead of understanding the deeper logic.”

Helpful with strict deadlines, sure. But it reminds me of how much Core.js is used and yet it is a one man operation and he was in Russian prison (and thus unable to maintain a very active user base) for 8 months and it didn’t phase people.

Or people just blindly accept the competence of strangers and implement without even glancing at the code.

That’s how I expect “Ai” development tools to go: a lot of people taking short cuts with the tools regardless of the consequences. We already see people doing it with chat GPT and of course copilot.

It is nearly a meme at this point that Gen Z and Alpha are essentially computer illiterate. That’s how I imagine a significant number of the developers of the future will go if we don’t break this “take the easy way out” mindset.

Alright, old man is done ranting now.

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3rdDegreeBurn t1_j9y01hm wrote

We do this because the opportunity cost overwhelmingly supports taking the easy route.

If the time I’m saving by taking shortcuts is greater than the time spent fixing fuckups it’s a no brainer.

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turinglurker t1_j9zdawa wrote

As a novice developer, I definitely get where you're coming from. I remember I was doing authentication in a personal project and used passport.js for it. I was pretty surprised when I saw it was maintained by 1 guy. In fact, I had some pretty unique errors dealing with it due to what version of node was installed on my computer, which caused an annoying bug that required me to do a lot of searching through SO (no, chatgpt did not tell me the cause of this error, lol). It got me thinking though... how many NPM packages are people using that are not maintained, or will suffer from maintenance issues or a lack of compatibility in the future?

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