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Software developers are not okay (www.baldurbjarnason.com)
submitted 5 days ago by to c/programming@programming.dev
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[–] 29 points 5 days ago* (15 children)

If you ask an LLM for Pong, it will give you Pong, or rather a Pong, a simulacrum average of all the Pongs in its training corpus. But it won't be your Pong. You will not have decided the color, shape, and size of the paddles, or the background color, or speed of the ball, or the language it's written in, or the way to architect the code, or any of the other aspects, so many that they can't be enumerated. It's not possible to describe exactly what you want to the LLM because that would be the code itself. Anything short of that and you will have omitted something, forcing the LLM to make a choice all on its own. Write your own damned Pong.

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  • [+] -9 points 5 days ago (13 children)

    the more detail you give, the more detail you’ll get.

    The only difference is that unspecified things will be filled in by random selection of ideas around the average.

    Devs now have ability to go high level when safe, and go detailed when needed. So much about pong is easy and obvious so the llm can just do that for you and speed things up.

    This is a tool for going faster, especially over the trivial stuff. The code didn’t go away, you can still edit it.

    but it won’t be your pong

    Yes, yes it will. I can change it to do whatever. My tool wrote the code based on my guidance.

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  • [–] 18 points 5 days ago (11 children)

    If some stuff is trivial, then it is fast to do. If it's not trivial, time needs to be spent on it.

    The amount of delusions that vibecoders need to ingest constantly to keep their beliefs is crazy.

    Also, why the fuck do you need your pong project to be done so fast? If you're doing it as part of your job, just do your fucking job, and if it's as a hobby, then do it instead of playing with a garbage generator to try to make it do it for you.

    Also, no, it won't be your pong because it will be built on stolen code. If you copy paste the code of someone else and say you made it because you changed the name, you didn't make a pong, you're just a piece of shit that lies about it.

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  • [–] 2 points 4 days ago (3 children)

    If some stuff is trivial, then it is fast to do.

    Unfortunately this is not true. That is why the word "boilerplate" exists.

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  • [–] 2 points 4 days ago (2 children)

    That's what deterministic code generators are there for. Or macros/metaprogramming.

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  • [+] -12 points 5 days ago* (6 children)
    [deleted]
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  • [–] 14 points 5 days ago (5 children)

    Code under a license that you appropriate to yourself is stolen, yes, don't play stupid.

    The typical slopbro defense of "no but it was shit ten minutes ago but now it's amazing and perfect" is bullshit, everyone knows it, and it's just a hypocritical loophole used to block every critic. Most of the critics on LLMs from months and years ago are still very valid, and while I try to be charitable I cannot find a scenario where this argument would be used in good faith.

    As I said, if your pong is for work, you should do your fucking work without contaminating it with slop, and if it's not for work there's no speed requirement. "If it works, it works" is such an absurdly moronic argument, I don't even know where to start. Experimenting on humans is horrible, but brings advances to medicine, and "if it works, it works". Planting evidence on someone you believe is guilty is illegal, but they end up in jail so " if it work, it works".

    I'm done, there's no way I can delude myself any longer into thinking that slop users do it innocently, when you have such obviously shitty and worthless arguments, there's no way you could be dumb enough to believe them. This is obviously a bunch of bad faith arguments and nothing more.

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  • [+] -7 points 4 days ago* (4 children)
    [deleted]
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  • [–] 5 points 4 days ago (3 children)

    Because it is made through stolen data, while destroying the environment and basically the world.

    "What is the difference between a synthetic diamond and a blood diamond, if they are chemically and structurally identical in the end?"

    As I said, these arguments are so unbelievably stupid that they cannot be said in good faith, and each reply has been proving it.

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  • [+] -3 points 4 days ago (2 children)
    [deleted]
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  • [–] 3 points 4 days ago (1 child)

    When shit goes wrong you use ai again to band-aid and repeat and repeat until you're at the point when you cross your fingers.

    People use ai because they don't know how to get there which means they usually don't really know what's going on under the hood even if they think they understand what's going on over the surface which means you just have slop. And then BOOM!

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  • [–] 11 points 5 days ago

    What is the actual percentage of people make their own changes after generating a project with an LLM? Most people give the wheel to the LLM and prompt their way out of the resulting mess.

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