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Software Engineers Are Facing an Existential Crisis As They Drown In Horrendous AI Code (tech.yahoo.com)
submitted 4 months ago by to c/technology@lemmy.world
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[–] 113 points 4 months ago (20 children)

I was doing a code review this week. There was nothing wrong with the code in terms of structure or performance, but it was doing this really weird operation with an ID after DB insert. I asked about it and the author was like "yeah, that's weird; I don't know why the AI did that. I'll remove it." My dude, I know you can write good code. Don't be lazy!

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  • [–] 47 points 4 months ago (2 children)

    i dont understand that. i use ai for help reading through old stuff or to help me remember how tondo a thing i havent done in two years but blindly copy pasting blows my mind.

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  • [–] 16 points 4 months ago (1 child)

    I suspect it's the same people that blindly copied stackoverflow code without understanding it. Which is likely where the LLMs are getting most of its answers from in the first place.

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  • [–] 3 points 4 months ago

    and these people were always the majority.

    so people saying that genai amplifies, they are correct, it amplifies the bullshit and the bad things.

    there were always more mediocre and useless people that top performers.

    it has been a miracle that anything has worked good enough so far.

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  • [–] 29 points 4 months ago

    I worked with a guy that 100% used AI to dev everything. didn't even check to see if it would work before submitting a MR.

    It got to the point that I stopped reviewing them and just rejected them outright with a simple comment, "doesn't work".

    eventually he was fired. the evidence? the four months of shitty MRs he opened. the best part was, when I said "doesn't work", I was never wrong. none of his changes worked.

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  • [–] 9 points 4 months ago (11 children)

    The lazy part is not questioning the bullshit they noticed and did nothing about - not using the tool

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  • [–] 22 points 4 months ago (9 children)

    I disagree on that; we lose the muscles we don't use and I've already seen that happening. It's also making people want to jump straight to implementation without proper design and I think that's a recipe for trouble.

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  • [–] -3 points 4 months ago* (8 children)

    Again, cowboys have been skipping steps and doing things lazily and poorly well before AI. Everyone knows people who jump straight into an IDE instead of following proper workflows. Yes, skills you don't practice take a hit. In a professional setting there is such a substantial productivity hit to avoid all AI use, compared to correct and proper use. It will soon be infeasible to take such at anti AI stance and remain in the industry

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  • [–] 8 points 4 months ago (7 children)

    cowboys have been skipping steps and doing things lazily and poorly well before AI

    Of course, but I think not understanding what they're committing is more dangerous than before (even allowing for the classic "I copied and pasted this from xxxx site"). This is also true when people are fully trusting AI to review code as well.

    We use AI for code reviews which I do find useful. It's still wrong part of the time (sometimes ridiculously so). So far, it's also failed to provide accurate documentation for various repos which seems like something rather basic. I'm not against all AI (though I do have ethical and environmental concerns with several of the commercial options). I will not have them write code for me, though.

    As for the future, we'll just have to wait and see. I've seen a lot of AI budgets exceeded and/or cut. I do think it's not there yet for a number of tasks but is suitable (again minus certain concerns) for others.

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  • [–] 7 points 4 months ago (3 children)

    Machines cannot take responsibility for problems, which is why I feel containment barriers cannot be entirely AI. AI reviews are fine (and catch a lot of wild issues humans miss) if a human genuinely reviews it too

    I've lost count of how many snippets I've reviewed that were verbatim pasted from stack overflow pre-AI lol

    My view is that humans produce a lot of garbage, and AI tooling currently amplifies your productivity. If you're careless, don't take pride and normally commit tech debt then with AI tooling that's going to be amplified 10-100x. The more careless you are the faster you can commit more garbage - especially if you're skipping on unit/integration/functional testing

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  • [–] 4 points 4 months ago (1 child)

    Machines cannot take responsibility for problems, which is why I feel containment barriers cannot be entirely AI.

    Where I work AI is being pushed hard, but the company has made it their policy that there must be a human in the loop. Ownership of the code written by AI is down to the person using the AI. "Oops, don't know why the AI wrote that!" Is not a valid answer to bugs being introduced into production.

    I'm seeing senior engineers of 15+ years no longer writing code and churning out a ton more work. They are disappointed they don't write code anymore but working with the AI is the job they have to do to be able to afford to live. They say the cognitive load has shot up for them, they are constantly spinning plates.

    To make the plate spinning job easier they have implemented guard rails to ensure the agents don't do anything stupid. I'm seeing a number of stories posted to Lemmy where the AI does dumb shit but the stories don't apply any accountability to the developers using it.

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  • [–] 2 points 4 months ago

    especially if you’re skipping on unit/integration/functional testing

    That's a career-limiting move where I work. I draw a hard line on that. You don't get many chances to blow up prod because you left out mandatory process steps. You might not get sacked the first time (though you should), but it if happens again, you'd better be contemplating your future life as a barista, or pounding farts out of shirt-tails in a steam laundry.

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  • [–] 2 points 4 months ago

    This is also true when people are fully trusting AI to review code as well.

    Holy shit.

    We use AI for code reviews which I do find useful.

    What's it going to tell you that a static analysis tool wouldn't? (And we all know what a hell of false positives you get into with those).

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  • [–] 1 point 4 months ago (1 child)

    I think not understanding what they're committing is more dangerous than before

    This kind of reasoning applies to every new tool. 20 years ago I was saying the same thing about work from co-workers who started programming on Java and didn’t understand what their beloved HashMap actually does under the hood.

    Eventually we adapt to either the new tools or to the new dangers, the ones who don’t just become fossils.

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  • [–] 1 point 4 months ago

    Eventually we adapt to either the new tools or to the new dangers

    Another option is to stop using new tools and frameworks that don't benefit us. Adoption should be based on a good cost/benefit ratio, not treated as an inevitability.

    It's also good to re-examine old choices and shitcan them when they're no longer earning their keep. We were using NiFi for something non-core that we do, and replacing it with a simple hand-coded solution gave us a massive performance bump that's more maintainable as well. Our use case was well outside NiFi's sweet spot, so we shouldn't have used it in the first place. But the person who made that decision is long gone, and it's always someone else who ends up having to clean up those messes. Here's hoping that someday I find that guy in a dark alley with no camera coverage.

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  • [–] 3 points 4 months ago

    That's one of my major beefs with AI: it worsens the signal/noise ratio throughout the dev process. The two greatest enemies of good software are complexity and its deformed cousin, extraneous crap. AI increases both, making it harder to address the real underlying problems.

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  • [–] 3 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago)

    Yeah these interaction are becoming quite fraught because there is extreme danger of AI use just shifting the burden from one person to another. That guy wrote the code super fast with AI, but you had to do an additional round trip during code review with him to eliminate that weirdness. He gets a bonus for doing twice the work in half the time, you get nothing.

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  • [–] 1 point 4 months ago

    There was nothing wrong with the code in terms of structure or performance, but it was doing this really weird operation with an ID after DB insert

    So there was plenty wrong with the code.

    And it hasn't been fixed.

    "Bro, its totally just you prompted it wrong"

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