Comment by az09mugen | Hacker News Reader

Comment by az09mugen | Hacker News Reader

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As you said, I think also the key differences between skilled and unskilled devs in the context of AI tooling are :

1°) Know how to diagnose and fix critical problems by themselves, because there will be bugs in production for which AI won't be any help

2°) Write maintainable code, AI doesn't care at all of maintainability of code while devs should (must imho) consider pasting AI code as a merge/pull request.

For 2°) IIRC, I read somewhere that more and more code published on i.e. github is AI-generated. While this means the quality of code is decreasing, i.e. Copilot is also trained on more and more % of AI-generated code. So the quality of AI-generated code is decreasing globally.

As time passes, I think skilled devs will become more skilled and unskilled will become more unskilled.

I think it's already happening. I've been using Claude a lot since 3.5. For a while, I barely bothered to check what it was doing because the code it generated tended to be fairly straightforward and usually worked on the first try. But in the last few weeks, I've started reading everything line by line again, because now it's not only often incorrect but also written in a goofy, convoluted way. AI-generated code being constantly fed back to it in a feedback loop would explain a lot, I think.

That's likely just you starting the read the "straightforward" code and not looking through Rose tinted glasses.

The cutoff date for Claude 3.5 is April 2024, that's currently slightly over one year ago.

There's a lot of subtle, pernicious stuff that "Sneaks In" too--not even stylistic either.

Things like a loss of context about the nature of some installed dependency or something.

You really have to know what you're doing and read carefully to avoid glossing over things that'll catch up to you later.

My experience too, in many cases, is that I already know (even if in a vague sense) how to do the thing I'm trying to coax out of the model, but a quick prompt "split this string on $CHAR" or whatever is much faster than me fiddling with forgotten bash syntax.

This approach is different than blind trust in the output from a place of ignorance.

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