• @9point6@lemmy.world
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    -56 days ago

    I’m saying ChatGPT is not useless.

    I’m a senior software engineer and I make use of it several times a week either directly or via things built on top of it. Yes you can’t trust it will be perfect, but I can’t trust a junior engineer to be perfect either—code review is something I’ve done long before AI and will continue to do long into the future.

    I empirically work quicker with it than without and the engineers I know who are still avoiding it work noticeably slower. If it was useless this would not be the case.

    • @faltryka@lemmy.world
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      -116 days ago

      Another professional here. Lemmy really isn’t a place where you’re going to find people listening to what you have to say and critically examining their existing positions. You’re right, and you’re going to get downvoted for it.

    • anar
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      105 days ago

      Oh my god, an actual senior softeare engineer??? Amidst all of us mortals??

    • @pipes@sh.itjust.works
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      -106 days ago

      In this and other use cases I call it a pretty effective search engine, instead of scrolling through stackexchange after clicking between google ads, you get the cleaned up example code you needed. Not a Chat with any intelligence though.

      • @froztbyte
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        246 days ago

        “despite the many people who have shown time and time and time again that it definitely does not do fine detail well and will often present shit that just 10000% was not in the source material, I still believe that it is right all the time and gives me perfectly clean code. it is them, not I, that are the rubes”

        • @pipes@sh.itjust.works
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          -66 days ago

          Ahah I’m totally with you, I just personally know people that love it because they have never learned how to use a search engine. And these generalist generative AIs are trained on gobbled up internet basically, while also generating so many dangerous mistakes, I’ve read enough horror stories.

          I’m in science and I’m not interested in ChatGPT, wouldn’t trust it with a pancake recipe. Even if it was useful to me I wouldn’t trust the vendor lock-in or enshittification that’s gonna come after I get dependent on aa tool in the cloud.

          A local LLM on cheap or widely available hardware with reproducible input / output? Then I’m interested.

        • @Soyweiser
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          156 days ago

          The problem with stuff like this is not knowing when you dont know. People who had not read the books SSC Scott was reviewing didnt know he had missed the points (or not read the book at all) till people pointed it out in the comments. But the reviews stay up.

          Anyway this stuff always feels like a huge motte bailey, where we go from ‘it has some uses’ to ‘it has some uses if you are a domain expert who checks the output diligently’ back to ‘some general use’.

          • @V0ldek
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            72 days ago

            A lot of the “I’m a senior engineer and it’s useful” people seem to just assume that they’re just so fucking good that they’ll obviously know when the machine lies to them so it’s fine. Which is one, hubris, two, why the fuck are you even using it then if you already have to be omniscient to verify the output??

            • @blakestaceyA
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              41 day ago

              “If you don’t know the subject, you can’t tell if the summary is good” is a basic lesson that so many people refuse to learn.

      • @Amoeba_Girl
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        6 days ago

        That ChatGPT can be more useful than a web search is really more indicative of how bad the web has got, and can only get worse as fake text invades it. It’s not actually better than a functional search engine and a functional web, but the companies making these things have no interest in the web being usable. Pretty depressing.

        • Sailor Sega Saturn
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          136 days ago

          Remember when you could read through all the search results on Google rather than being limited to the first hundred or so results like today? And boolean search operators actually worked and weren’t hidden away behind a “beware of leopard” sign? Pepperidge Farm remembers.

    • @froztbyte
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      6 days ago

      I’m a senior software engineer

      ah, a señor software engineer. excusé-moi monsoir, let me back up and try once more to respect your opinion

      uh, wait:

      but I can’t trust a junior engineer to be perfect either

      whoops no, sorry, can’t do it.

      jesus fuck I hope the poor bastards that are under you find some other place real soon, you sound like a godawful leader

      and the engineers I know who are still avoiding it work noticeably slower

      yep yep! as we all know, velocity is all that matters! crank that handle, produce those features! the factory must flow!!

      fucking christ almighty. step away from the keyboard. go become a logger instead. your opinions (and/or the shit you’re saying) is a big part of everything that’s wrong with industry.

        • @froztbyte
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          196 days ago

          yw

          these arseslugs are so fucking tedious, and for almost 2 decades they’ve been dragging everything and everyone around them down to their level instead of finding some spine and getting better

          • @raspberriesareyummy@lemmy.world
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            196 days ago

            word. When I hear someone say “I’m a SW developer and LLM xy helps me in my work” I always have to stop myself from being socially unacceptably open about my thoughts on their skillset.

            • @froztbyte
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              176 days ago

              and that’s the pernicious bit: it’s not just their skillset, it also goes right to their fucking respect for their team. “I don’t care about just barfing some shit into the codebase, and I don’t think my team will mind either!”

              utter goddamn clownery

      • @9point6@lemmy.world
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        -36 days ago

        let me back up and try once more to respect your opinion

        The point of me saying that was to imply I’ve been in the industry for a couple of decades, and have a good amount of experience from before all this. It wasn’t any kind of appeal to authority, but I can see how you can read it that way.

        jesus fuck I hope the poor bastards that under you find some other place real soon, you sound like a godawful leader

        I’m sorry, do you trust junior engineers blindly? That’s gonna lead to a much worse outcome than if they get feedback when they do something wrong. Frankly, I don’t trust any engineer to be perfect, we’re humans and humans make mistakes, that’s why we do code review as a fundamental skill in this industry. It’s one of the primary ways for people to develop their ability.

        yep yep! as we all know, velocity is all that matters! crank that handle, produce those features! the factory must flow!!

        In an industry where many companies are tightening the belt, yes it’s important to perform well—I kinda want to keep my job and ideally get a good bonus. It would be pretty foolish to leave free productivity on the table when the alternative is working harder to bridge the gap, where I could spend that energy doing more productive stuff.

        • @froztbyte
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          226 days ago

          I’m sorry, do you trust junior engineers blindly?

          as a starting position, fucking YES. you know why I hired that person? because I believe they can do the job and grow in it. you know what happens if they make a mistake? I give them all the goddamn backup they need to handle it and grow.

          “this is why code review is so important” jfc. you’re one of those “I’ve worked here for 4 years and I’m a senior” types, aren’t you

          • @9point6@lemmy.world
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            06 days ago

            So you don’t do code review? Something that’s pretty much industry standard?

            What on earth do you work on where it’s inconsequential to trust someone new to the industry blindly?

            If I could trust someone anything remotely close to “blindly”, they absolutely would not have been hired as a junior.

              • @FanBlade@lemmynsfw.com
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                -56 days ago

                Acting superior presses the dopamine button. Especially since the other poster keeps being mature and kind in their responses, really gets that feedback loop going.

                • David Gerard
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                  126 days ago

                  your comment history is like a tendentiousness bot

              • @khalid_salad
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                126 days ago

                it’s because he has shit for brains

            • @froztbyte
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              196 days ago

              yep yep. no code review. no version control either. that’s weak shit only babies use. over here you deploy patches by live editing app memory in production, and you update the codebase by editing the central repo using vscode remote. everyone has access to it because monorepos are what google do and so do we.

              you have a 100% correct comprehension takeaway of what I said, well done!

              jfc no wonder you’re fine with LLMs

              • @9point6@lemmy.world
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                -46 days ago

                Interesting you bring up reading comprehension because this whole thread started with me saying I would not trust a junior engineer to be perfect or trust them blindly.

                You proceed to die on the hill that you would do that for some reason, despite now implying that you do, in fact, do code reviews—which we do because people can’t be trusted to be perfect

                • @froztbyte
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                  156 days ago

                  projection belongs in cinemas and SFPs, don’t go casting your misunderstandings onto me

                  • @zbyte64
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                    96 days ago

                    Okay, I’m going to have to borrow this. Also, nice handle.

          • Warren Christmas
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            6 days ago

            @froztbyte @9point6 There’s a distinct difference between “I have twenty years of experience” and “I’ve had the same ten minutes of experience over and over again, over a twenty year period” 🤷

            • @V0ldek
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              52 days ago

              Oh jesus christ now I get it.

              Thank you. This single sentence explains to me how the fuck those people are able to exist for 20 years and still be so shit at their job.

        • @Amoeba_Girl
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          186 days ago

          I kinda want to keep my job and ideally get a good bonus.

          fuck you

          • @froztbyte
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            156 days ago

            “I just want to be a cog in the machiiiiiiine why are you bringing up these things that make me think?! ew ethics and integrity are so hard

      • @froztbyte
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        6 days ago

        and the engineers I know who are still avoiding it work noticeably slower

        yep yep! as we all know, velocity is all that matters! crank that handle, produce those features! the factory must flow!!

        and you fucking know what? it’s not even just me being a snide motherfucker, this rant is literally fucking supported by data:

        The survey found that 75.9% of respondents (of roughly 3,000* people surveyed) are relying on AI for at least part of their job responsibilities, with code writing, summarizing information, code explanation, code optimization, and documentation taking the top five types of tasks that rely on AI assistance. Furthermore, 75% of respondents reported productivity gains from using AI.

        As we just discussed in the above findings, roughly 75% of people report using AI as part of their jobs and report that AI makes them more productive.

        And yet, in this same survey we get these findings:

        if AI adoption increases by 25%, time spent doing valuable work is estimated to decrease 2.6% if AI adoption increases by 25%, estimated throughput delivery is expected to decrease by 1.5% if AI adoption increases by 25%, estimated delivery stability is expected to decrease by 7.2%

        and that’s a report sponsored and managed right from the fucking lying cloud company, no less. a report they sponsor, run, manage, and publish is openly admitting this shit. that is how much this shit doesn’t fucking work the way you sell it to be doing.

        but no, we should trust your driveby bullshit. motherfucker.

        • knightly the Sneptaur
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          -56 days ago

          Lol, using a survey to try and claim that your argument is “supported by data”.

          Of course the people who use Big Autocorrect think it’s useful, they’re still using it. You’ve produced a tautology and haven’t even noticed. XD

          • David Gerard
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            136 days ago

            christ, did someone fire up the Batpromptfondler signal

          • @froztbyte
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            166 days ago

            it may be a shock to learn this, but asking people things is how you find things out from them

            I know it requires speaking to humans, alas, c’est la vie

            • knightly the Sneptaur
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              -56 days ago

              It may be a shock to learn this, but asking people things is how you find out what they think, not what is true.

              I know proof requires more than just speaking to humans, alas, c’est la vie.

              • @froztbyte
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                126 days ago

                did you know the report also publishes the details of its analysis methodology?

                my god, where are you people coming from today

                • knightly the Sneptaur
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                  6 days ago

                  Did you know that all reputable surveys publish their methodology?

                  Did you know that, regardless of how you analyze the results, a survey is still just a survey?

                  If LLMs were worth the hype then you’d have actual proof of utility, not just sentiment.

                  • @MBM@lemmings.world
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                    136 days ago

                    This is a pretty funny interaction when you realise that you just misread the froztbyte’s self-reply (and the survey) as pro-AI, so you were just aggressively agreeing with each other all along

                  • @froztbyte
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                    126 days ago

                    If LLMs were worth the hype then you’d have actual proof of utility

                    you think I’m promptfan-posting? impressive.

      • @swlabr
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        146 days ago

        Please, señor software engineer was my father. Call me Bob.

    • Mii
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      6 days ago

      I’m a senior software engineer

      Nice, me too, and whenever some tech-brained C-suite bozo tries to mansplain to me why LLMs will make me more efficient, I smile, nod politely, and move on, because at this point I don’t think I can make the case that pasting AI slop into prod is objectively a worse idea than pasting Stack Overflow answers into prod.

      At the end of the day, if I want to insert a snippet (which I don’t have to double-check, mind you), auto-format my code, or organize my imports, which are all things I might use ChatGPT for if I didn’t mind all the other baggage that comes along with it, Emacs (or Vim, if you swing that way) does this just fine and has done so for over 20 years.

      I empirically work quicker with it than without and the engineers I know who are still avoiding it work noticeably slower.

      If LOC/min or a similar metric is used to measure efficiency at your company, I am genuinely sorry.

      • @9point6@lemmy.world
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        -46 days ago

        I agree with you on the examples listed, there are much better tools than an LLM for that. And I agree no one should be copy and pasting without consideration, that’s a misuse of these tools.

        I’d say my main uses are kicking off a new test suite (obviously you need to go and check the assertions are what you expect, but it’s usually about 95% there) which has gone from a decent percentage of the work for a feature down to an almost negligible amount of time. This one also results in me enjoying my job a bit more now too as I’ve always found writing tests a bit of a drudgery.

        The other big use for me is that my organisation is pretty big and has a hefty amount of code (a good couple of thousand repos at least), we have a tool that’s based on GPT which has processed all the code, so you can now ask queries about internal stuff that may not be well documented or particularly obvious. This one saves a load of time because I now don’t always have to do the Slack merry go round to try and find an engineer that knows about what I’m looking for—sometimes it’s still unavoidable, but they’re less frequent moments now.

        If LOC/min or a similar metric is used to measure efficiency at your company, I am genuinely sorry.

        It’s tied to OKR completion, which is generally based around delivery. If you deliver more feature work, it generally means your team’s scores will be higher and assuming your manager is aware of your contributions, that translates to a bigger bonus. It’s more of a carrot than a stick situation IMO, I could work less hard if I didn’t want the extra money.

        • @HaleHirsute@infosec.pub
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          -96 days ago

          I don’t know how or why you’re getting lambasted. You make excellent points and ever making outlandish claims, just a common sense approach.

        • @selfA
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          216 days ago

          It’s tied to OKR completion, which is generally based around delivery. If you deliver more feature work, it generally means your team’s scores will be higher and assuming your manager is aware of your contributions, that translates to a bigger bonus.

          holy fuck. you’re so FAANG-brained I’m willing to bet you dream about sending junior engineers to the fulfillment warehouse to break their backs

          motherfucking, “i unironically love OKRs and slurping raises out of management if they notice I’ve been sleeping under my desk again to get features in” do they make guys like you in a factory? does meeting fucking normal software engineers always end like it did in this thread? will you ever realize how fucking embarrassing it is to throw around your job title like this? you depressing little fucker.

          • @swlabr
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            4 days ago

            gilding the lily a bit but

        • @sinedpick
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          176 days ago

          I worked at one of the biggest AI companies and their internal AI question/answer was dogshit for anything that could be answered by someone with a single fold in their brain. Maybe your co has a much better one, but like most others, I’m gonna go with the smooth brain hypothesis here.

    • @BlueMonday1984
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      206 days ago

      I’m a senior software engineer

      Good. Thanks for telling us your opinion’s worthless.

    • Sailor Sega Saturn
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      Senior software engineer programmer here. I have had to tell coworkers “don’t trust anything chat-gpt tells you about text encoding” after it made something up about text encoding.

      • @froztbyte
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        106 days ago

        ah but did you tell them in CP437 or something fancy (like any text encoding after 1996)? 🤨🤨🥹

        • Sailor Sega Saturn
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          136 days ago

          Sadly all my best text encoding stories would make me identifiable to coworkers so I can’t share them here. Because there’s been some funny stuff over the years. Wait where did I go wrong that I have multiple text encoding stories?

          That said I mostly just deal with normal stuff like UTF-8, UTF-16, Latin1, and ASCII.

          • @flowerysong
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            85 days ago

            My favourite was a junior dev who was like, “when I read from this input file the data is weirdly mangled and unreadable so as the first processing step I’ll just remove all null bytes, which seems to leave me with ASCII text.”

            (It was UTF-16.)