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Comment by hungryhobbit | Hacker News Reader

I strongly disagree. There's always been two camps ... on everything!

Emacs vs. vi. Command-line editor vs. IDE. IntelliJ vs. VS Code. I could do like twenty more of these: dev teams have always split on technology choices.

But, all of those were rational separations. Emacs and vi, IntelliJ and VS Code ... they're all viable options, so they boil down to subjective preference. By definition, anything subjective will vary between different humans.

What makes AI different to me is the fear. Nobody decided not to use emacs because they were afraid it was going to take their job ... but a huge portion of the anti-AI crowd is motivated by irrational fear, related to that concern.

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For the sake of argument let's assume we have a common goal: produce a software product that does its job and is maintainable (emphasis on the latter).

Now given that LLMs are known to not produce 100% correct code you should review every single line. Now the production rate of LLMs is so high that it becomes very hard to really read and understand every line of the output. While at the same time you are gradually losing the ability to understand everything because you stopped actively coding. And at the same time there are others in your team who aren't that diligent adding more to the crufty code base.

What is this if not a recipe for disaster?

I think differences in the business determine whether the maintenance/understanding aspect is important. If developing an MVP for a pitch or testing markets then any negatives aren't much of a consideration.. if working in a mature competitive or highly regulated domain then yeah, it's important

A huge portion of the pro-AI crowd is motivated by irrational hype and delusion.

LLMs are not a tool like an editor or an IDE, they make up code in an unpredictable way; I can't see how anyone who enjoyed software development could like that.

Pretty much anyone who's not you, will make code in an unpredictable way. I review other people's code and I go 'really, you decided to do it that way?' quite often, especially with coders with less years of experience than me.

That's kind of how this is starting to feel to me, like I'm turning more into a project manager that has to review code from a team of juniors, when it comes to A.I. Although those juniors are now starting to show that they're more capable than even I am, especially when it comes to speed.

Certainly those of us who maintain and administer it don't like that

what about the fear is irrational?

It doesn’t help that the CEOs of these companies are hyping up the fear. It’s no wonder people are afraid when the people making the products are spouting prophecies of doom.

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