Programming

I assume the term is referring to the person knowing only the vibes of the program they want to code rather than comprehending the details of what it needs to do.

Zoning out to coding I sometimes refer to as zen-coding, I love it just cuz it feels darn great. Until my body hurts from sitting/standing too long

I'll be forever salty it's come to mean that when it sounds like it should mean when you're getting really in the zone and finding inner peace coding straight from the heart.

This is giving me hope that I might actually be fine and succeed in interviews lol. On the other hand maaan I really don't wanna maintain code written by AI-andys...

Should ask them to make an if loop and see what happens

As a senior programmer I can't write a for loop without the internet.
I can't remember the last time I saw a job listing that didn't expect me to be an expert in at least 5 languages. The best part is that halfway through the interview you learn that they are no longer using half the languages listed, and are "transitioning" towards 2 others that aren't even listed. You want me to whip out examples written in Fortran, C++, Rust, JS, and some random word you claim is a language in 2 hrs without the internet? removed, I don't even think I could get prewritten "Hello World" examples compiled in 5 different languages in 2 hrs, much less on machine that I have never seen before.

As a software engineer who was introduced to the field in high school, over two decades ago: it’s real. People are doing it. I’ve met people doing this at my job, and directed focused scorn at them. You know the idiom of “knowing just enough to be dangerous”? Like, you’re learning C and you’re just playing around and you discover pointers, and you’re like “oh this is interesting”, but you haven’t learned or internalized that it is real easy to Fuck Things Up if you don’t use them very carefully (there’s a ton of stuff like this)? LLM codegen being used by novices is an absolute shitshow because the codegen will often create nonsense, broken, logically flawed, or deprecated code, and the novice user is just going to accept it at face value instead of understanding that it’s subtly wrong.

My org is encouraging it...

Is CW in the room with us now?

I swear, I wholeheartedly agree. By the time I get even something slightly like what I want I could have wrote it myself so I ended up saving zero time; there are instances where I actually save time, but it’s about tedious and simple tasks (I had to search a K-tree) or to refactor certain parts that are more or less the same. All the other times either the code sucks so much I end up writing the whole thing myself, or i know the steps myself so what’s the point of detailing a prompt that will require my intervention instead of just writing the code? Line completion is the other good thing about this wave of AI at least

I only use it when I know exactly the code I'm trying to produce, but just saving time if it can write it for me. Somewhere I saw this described as 'toil' vs. 'domain knowledge', and it definitely reduces toil even if I have to correct it. Anywhere that I wouldn't know how to correct it, I don't trust it.

I only used LLM-generated code once. I tested and made modifications to see if it was I want. It worked out.

Probably because they're not good enough to know any better.

It's definitely improving. I thought the same as you but I looked through my recent ChatGPT prompts and it's actually decent now, at least at simple/throwaway tasks. It doesn't stand a chance at the niche domains of my actual job.

I use it to generically explain things to me. I give it limited things and ask it to break it down or give me alternatives.

No different than googling skills, how I ask gets different results, and sometimes it's far faster than digging and digging through forum posts or textbook style documentation. Other times it's a waste of my time and I quickly move on.

I've heard someone comparing it to the famous rubber duck.

Yeah I agree. It's often easier to start from something that's wrong than a blank page.

I often refer to ai as an index for human knowledge. It’s pretty good at expanding on the context around what you ask it. It’s great for getting started or to help point you in other directions

This... Is actually unironically the best argument I've heard in favor of AIs so far, that I haven't thought about.

Still - the thing you'd be doing instead is feeding money and attentention to AI bros, and that's probably even worse than any job you could be micro sabotaging.