fosstodon.org is one of the many independent Mastodon servers you can use to participate in the fediverse.
Fosstodon is an invite only Mastodon instance that is open to those who are interested in technology; particularly free & open source software. If you wish to join, contact us for an invite.

Administered by:

Server stats:

11K
active users

@johnpettigrew ...the paradox is that AI as an assistant is very useful if(!) you are already a good coder and can quickly check outcomes.

@ErikJonker This seems to be the live question: which subset of tasks that coders do are actually made quicker or better by using LLMs, given that you have to thoroughly check every character and every step of logic in what they suggest. I know several folk who swear by it but, personally, I'm too much of a control freak to take the chance.

@johnpettigrew ...true, but there also some tasks, like analysing code (on various aspects), which have quite a lowrisk, although you can still not rely on it ofcourse

splatt9990

@ErikJonker @johnpettigrew
Actually, encouraging that use case is kind of dangerous due to the automation bias

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automati

Essentially, after a while, even a good programmer will start to become less and less critical of the LLM's output, even when they shouldn't be. This has the potential to lead to very serious bugs. You could probably catch this with a very thorough code review step but good code review is hard to do.

en.wikipedia.orgAutomation bias - Wikipedia

@splatt9990 @ErikJonker @johnpettigrew Good code review would be even harder if the "author" of the code was unable to explain it to the reviewers.

@TimWardCam @ErikJonker @johnpettigrew or worse, confidently explains their changes but is wrong (see LLM output in general...)

@splatt9990 @ErikJonker @johnpettigrew I would expect the explanation from the human who submitted the code for review. If they said "I don't know how it works, I got an AI to generate it" then for me that's a code review fail. If my employer would then tell me I've got to accept that as an explanation [my current employer wouldn't] then I wouldn't stay in that job very long.

@splatt9990 @ErikJonker @johnpettigrew Having said which ... I have myself had to give explanations along the lines of:

"The documentation of that feature of that library is crap/wrong/missing/whatever. Somebody on stack overflow said to do it like this - I searched around, and that does seem to be the general opinion, everybody says to do it this way, and it does actually work."

@TimWardCam @ErikJonker @johnpettigrew that assumes they didn't ask the AI to explain how the changes worked and then present the changes as entirely their work (humans like to lie sometimes)

@splatt9990 @ErikJonker @johnpettigrew A liar wouldn't last very long with my current employer.

@TimWardCam @ErikJonker @johnpettigrew maybe that's true for your employer but it's certainly not universally true. If a confident sounding developer came along with AI based changes and passed them off as their own, I doubt it'd be detected until it was too late. Many shops don't even do code review at all (or in name only) so something like that could easily pass through especially if the code works most of the time.