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Comment by ozymandias1337 | Hacker News Reader

AI is NOT a toy it is an Abomination.

I haven't had this much fun programming since I was a kid. The speed with which I'm able to pick up new concepts and execute my toy ideas and experiments is just crazy. The last year has been an absolute joy being able to cut through debugging new things and jump over brick walls.

It's not going anywhere and is only going to get better, learn to leverage it.

Are you actually learning the concepts though? I'm not trying to be inflammatory but a lot of people I see using LLM use them as a replacement for StackOverFlow. They aren't learning anything they just need it to spit out code that works.

Yes, absolutely. AI has been an amazing learning tool for me as I transitioned into gamedev working at a Unity studio. What used to take upwards of hours to research or debug can now be solved in minutes by asking AI about solutions, best practices, and feedback on code.

I am constantly using AI to learn more every day -- and learning at a faster rate than I was just pouring through the internet for those same answers.

Absolutely, and I get the sentiment.

I'm not just using it to generate code, but asking specific questions. Even really basic stuff like, write me a Fibonacci number generator in X language. Helps me understand the syntax immediately. I can start from a place of familiarity. A lot of times when picking up a new language, the hello world stuff is kind of drawn out. Give me a program in Rust that generates 50 random numbers and sort it from smallest to biggest. Give me the basic framework for a Flask app, etc etc.

Or, I have an app that scrapes a website. What is the best architecture to put this into a database to reduce scraping the same thing multiple times?

I use it like a project manager/software architect/tutor in that order I think.

It massively reduces the friction to just getting things going.

Do you need to really learn if it works and ships?

This isn't a commentary on AI, but specifically the idea that all you need to achieve is "it works". That's based on the fallacious premise that a human can reasonably bucket a program (especially one as complex as an end-user application) into "working" and "not working". You don't know it's "not working" until you know, which may in some cases be never.

As for AI specifically, robust testing is already difficult with human-curated logic. It's potentially more likely to miss failing cases, or non-binaries (e.g. performance, security), when testing genAI. More subjectively, your conjecture represents a mindset that is demotivating to people with certain flavors of creativity/passion. Also, overreliance on AI may blunt skills that may remain useful, and even important - i.e. it may exacerbate an expertise scarcity.

(this may make me sound more negative on AI that I am - remember that I'm commenting in the context of the post you're replying to)

AutoComplete and Machine Learning are tools.

They are not the same as the Abomination parading as Intelligence called "AGI".

I really struggle to know what to say to people with this attitude other than "Ok, well, we will keep progressing while you pout about it. Come back when you're ready to be a big boy."

Who gives a shit about the terminology? It's crazy useful. Would you be happier if everyone called it "Poopy Dumb AI"? I doubt it.

Idk if it's just ludditism, or fear of replacement, or jealousy or what, but I just can't understand it.

I know how to leverage it, I’m just eye-rollingly tired absolute bottom-barrel quality AI images, and AI generated content. Every time I see AI generated content, including header images and logos, it’s become a marker for “too lazy to put in effort, so why should I”.

I bought a midjourney subscription for a while, and had fun playing with it, for like, 2 weeks and then that was kind of it? Like, yep, you give it some text, you get some image. Ok. None of it brings me joy like actual art or photography does.

No snark intended but I think image generation is probably the least interesting thing AI is doing these days. It's a tutor in a box.

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