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this post was submitted on 17 Dec 2024
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TechTakes
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Big brain tech dude got yet another clueless take over at HackerNews etc? Here's the place to vent. Orange site, VC foolishness, all welcome.
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I'm saying ChatGPT is not useless.
I'm a senior software engineer and I make use of it several times a week either directly or via things built on top of it. Yes you can't trust it will be perfect, but I can't trust a junior engineer to be perfect either—code review is something I've done long before AI and will continue to do long into the future.
I empirically work quicker with it than without and the engineers I know who are still avoiding it work noticeably slower. If it was useless this would not be the case.
~~Senior software engineer~~ programmer here. I have had to tell coworkers "don't trust anything chat-gpt tells you about text encoding" after it made something up about text encoding.
ah but did you tell them in CP437 or something fancy (like any text encoding after 1996)? 🤨🤨🥹
Sadly all my best text encoding stories would make me identifiable to coworkers so I can't share them here. Because there's been some funny stuff over the years. Wait where did I go wrong that I have multiple text encoding stories?
That said I mostly just deal with normal stuff like UTF-8, UTF-16, Latin1, and ASCII.
My favourite was a junior dev who was like, "when I read from this input file the data is weirdly mangled and unreadable so as the first processing step I'll just remove all null bytes, which seems to leave me with ASCII text."
(It was UTF-16.)
You've got to make sure you're not over-specializing. I'd recommend trying to roll your own time zone library next.
Oh my god, an actual senior softeare engineer????? Amidst all of us mortals??
ah, a señor software engineer. excusé-moi monsoir, let me back up and try once more to respect your opinion
uh, wait:
whoops no, sorry, can't do it.
jesus fuck I hope the poor bastards that are under you find some other place real soon, you sound like a godawful leader
yep yep! as we all know, velocity is all that matters! crank that handle, produce those features! the factory must flow!!
fucking christ almighty. step away from the keyboard. go become a logger instead. your opinions (and/or the shit you're saying) is a big part of everything that's wrong with industry.
Please, señor software engineer was my father. Call me Bob.
snrk
and you fucking know what? it's not even just me being a snide motherfucker, this rant is literally fucking supported by data:
and that's a report sponsored and managed right from the fucking lying cloud company, no less. a report they sponsor, run, manage, and publish is openly admitting this shit. that is how much this shit doesn't fucking work the way you sell it to be doing.
but no, we should trust your driveby bullshit. motherfucker.
Thank you for saving me the breath to shit on that person's attitude :)
yw
these arseslugs are so fucking tedious, and for almost 2 decades they've been dragging everything and everyone around them down to their level instead of finding some spine and getting better
word. When I hear someone say "I'm a SW developer and LLM xy helps me in my work" I always have to stop myself from being socially unacceptably open about my thoughts on their skillset.
and that’s the pernicious bit: it’s not just their skillset, it also goes right to their fucking respect for their team. “I don’t care about just barfing some shit into the codebase, and I don’t think my team will mind either!”
utter goddamn clownery
The point of me saying that was to imply I've been in the industry for a couple of decades, and have a good amount of experience from before all this. It wasn't any kind of appeal to authority, but I can see how you can read it that way.
I'm sorry, do you trust junior engineers blindly? That's gonna lead to a much worse outcome than if they get feedback when they do something wrong. Frankly, I don't trust any engineer to be perfect, we're humans and humans make mistakes, that's why we do code review as a fundamental skill in this industry. It's one of the primary ways for people to develop their ability.
In an industry where many companies are tightening the belt, yes it's important to perform well—I kinda want to keep my job and ideally get a good bonus. It would be pretty foolish to leave free productivity on the table when the alternative is working harder to bridge the gap, where I could spend that energy doing more productive stuff.
fuck you
"I just want to be a cog in the machiiiiiiine why are you bringing up these things that make me think?! ew ethics and integrity are so hard"
as a starting position, fucking YES. you know why I hired that person? because I believe they can do the job and grow in it. you know what happens if they make a mistake? I give them all the goddamn backup they need to handle it and grow.
"this is why code review is so important" jfc. you're one of those "I've worked here for 4 years and I'm a senior" types, aren't you
@froztbyte @9point6 There's a distinct difference between "I have twenty years of experience" and "I've had the same ten minutes of experience over and over again, over a twenty year period" 🤷
Oh jesus christ now I get it.
Thank you. This single sentence explains to me how the fuck those people are able to exist for 20 years and still be so shit at their job.
yep. on topic of which, this excellent post
Nice, me too, and whenever some tech-brained C-suite bozo tries to mansplain to me why LLMs will make me more efficient, I smile, nod politely, and move on, because at this point I don't think I can make the case that pasting AI slop into prod is objectively a worse idea than pasting Stack Overflow answers into prod.
At the end of the day, if I want to insert a snippet (which I don't have to double-check, mind you), auto-format my code, or organize my imports, which are all things I might use ChatGPT for if I didn't mind all the other baggage that comes along with it, Emacs (or Vim, if you swing that way) does this just fine and has done so for over 20 years.
If LOC/min or a similar metric is used to measure efficiency at your company, I am genuinely sorry.
Good. Thanks for telling us your opinion's worthless.