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Comment by joe_mamba | Hacker News Reader

>Code is mediocre in many places.

As if code written by devs at major corporations is't mediocre at best.

Nokia's Symbian OS took days to build. Days. With a D. Not minutes, not hours but days.

One of our devs shipped code to prod with a memory leak thanks to including a library that had "do not use this library in production because it causes a memory leak" written everywhere as warning.

So I don't wanna hear about how poor AI code is when human code is shit too. Human laziness and stupidity can beat AI hallucinations.

Sure, maybe your DeepMind, OpenAI devs and your John Carmacks of the world can beat AI code 100% of the time, but most workers most companies get don't have John Carmack as candidates.

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I agree with what you’re saying but I think the difference is many managers and above think that AI is infallible or at least much less so than it actually is and that causes problems.

Everyone is aware that humans write poor code and treat the code as so. Not so with AI code. I’ve seen devs and managers cut corners in testing/reviewing code cause AI wrote it and they think it’s solid. Sure you could blame anyone cutting corners, and that would be technically correct, but the notion is so deeply embedded in many managers and higher ups that’s it’s hard to fight back. AI companies push this narrative and many individuals who do not routinely use it believe it. There is a manager at my company who loves to reference a video anthropic released last year claiming that Claude could build an app start to finish essentially unaided. He believes it’s the lack of user skill that’s the issue and not a false claim by a startup trying to make as much money as possible.

> I think the difference is many managers and above think that AI is infallible

Good for them. I hope they believe this because one of two things will happen.

Either they win on the free market because they went all in on AI and beat their competition thanks to AI productivity increases.

Or, their AI code is shit and they collapse and go bankrupt, and get beaten by the competitors using human written code so then they win on the free market proving AI is useless.

So if AI is good or bad for productivity, the free market will ultimately decide.

My take is that AI is just an amplifier of existing skill. 1x devs using AI can use it to be 10x devs, 10x devs can become 100x devs, while -1x devs will be -10x devs and so on.

Quite an extreme view. Chances are it lands someplace in the middle.

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