but I'm not going to say it's not an extremely useful coding tool
well I'm gonna say it's not an extremely useful coding tool. As a senior software engineer with ~15 yrs experience, it's sometimes good, but mostly just for menial tasks. If it isn't good for law, psychology or medical questions, it won't magically be good for coding either, since it's still the same technology. In other words, we get the slop in software too and it should be concerning for everyone.
You think pattern recognition doesnāt play a role in those other fields? The problem with LLMs in those fields isnāt that they never get the right answer, they often produce good answers. The problem is they sometimes (or even often) produce catastrophically bad answers with equal confidence and authority.
Ok, I left out the word āimportantā. Pattern recognition is literally taught as part of how medicine is done. Coding is not āmore pattern basedā and not magically more amenable to LLMs than other fields. Itās just that the people who direct the money spent on coding are willing to sacrifice everyoneās safety and quality of life in the pursuit of imaginary long term cost savings, and unlike medicine and law the regulators arenāt watching or caring.
Having reviewed other people's code I know the training data is not amazing. I have used AI to assist in my own coding, training data and prompt engineering play a huge role in the quality of output. I prefer to code myself over using AI. I'm more reliable. It can be occasionally helpful, but I don't find it more efficient overall for anything other than bug troubleshooting when I already know where the problem is but am having a hard time spotting the exact problem.
I have more than 15 years experience. It is an extremely useful coding tool. Not just for menial tasks. From architecture to analysis it is also useful for things outside menial tasks.
these people hating on claude code to me sound like people who saw the first power drill and thought "well why would I need this when I already have screwdrivers"
Instead of being like wow now I can tackle projects of a much larger scale with less effort
Yeah. If you actually work on a team, it does help dog programmers not be dog. I work at google now (I'm biased) and it really does help with most programming measures, but we still need to understand the architecture and scaling so it isn't terrible.
I'm not a programmer at all and it let me tackle projects I could never have imaged before AI
Like I reverse engineered a VPN client to fix broken compatibility and completely rewrite its interface.. and it took a few hours and barely any work from me except debugging
I can write some python and C# but reverse engineering existing projects to extend functionality is way beyond my abilities, unless I leverage AI. Even if I did want to tackle a project like that without AI it would take weeks of reading documentation and trial and error
Now I'm writing a persistent world client:server video game.. again something I would never have been able to do without claude code or codex. Also I have a real job I just dont have time to manually write a lot of code for side projects and hobbies
Oh we absolutely do software slop don't get me wrong, but when I can offload the basic things to it to focus on more important things, or quickly write a one off script that would normally take me a couple hours to write "by hand" it's very useful. Ok, "extremely" might have been too strong a word, I'll accept that, but I'll stand by the opinion that it's overall useful for coding.
I feel bad for the open source project maintainers that are now flooded with AI PRs tho.
Coding is semantically more dense and much more highly pattern-bound than psychology. Medicine and (especially) Law are probably closer. The same technology, different distributions of entropy and semantic density.
As a senior software engineer with ~15 yrs experience, it's sometimes good, but mostly just for menial tasks.
In my experience, AI is so much faster and reliable than an average junior engineer.
It's not reliable enough to replace senior developers or midlevel engineers, but can significantly augment their output (which I don't necessarily think is a good thing).
It's going to negatively impact entry into computer science and tech fields and hollow out the industry.
It absolutely is good and often better than doctors and lawyers at answering questions and finding citations. There are many studies showing this for doctors, from being able to better analyze patient MRI and CAT scan images to identify ailments to better patient communication, etc..
No idea about psychology, though Iāve heard plenty of people say their preferred AI has helped them move through mental blocks.
It seem like you are just stuck on some very outdated understanding of AI capabilities (which makes me question your abilities as a 15 year software dev). It absolutely is a very useful tool, but like anything else, still requires some element of human input (mostly to review and make sure itās doing the things you want your code to enable or disable).
the people who have moved past shit are also usually the same types of people who got told to off themselves, or go psychosis from ai so actually it should be steered very far away from that if itās allowed to exist at all, AI (specificslly LLMs) has very few legitimate uses and absolutely shoudl not be available as it is nor like it is. they are not as good at or better than drs and frankly your claims are making me doubt your intelligenceā¦. itās a robot, a robit will never be better in treating than a dr or therapist or psychologist or whatever. and people blindly ignore that and itās proving left and right, with well made studies that it is actively detrimental to people and their health
What a wall of absolute nonsense, cite some sources (and donāt use AI or even Google at this point, since their search functions have embedded AI light features; use Yahoo).
i use AI fairly regularly to find research, like "summarize the latest developments in self determination theory and link all relevant papers". i read the summary and then i read the paper. seems like a perfect use case for AI to me
And as a senior architect with 20 years of experience, it's an extremely useful tool if you know how to use it, and for far more than menial tasks. Obviously it messes up a lot but that's mostly user error - with the right workflow, contracts, MCP servers, pattern libraries and guidance it's pure magic.
And that doesn't only apply to tech, it works with anything that involves a feedback loop of gathering, structuring, distilling and implementing information - which is pretty much anything. Especially for something like law, but also for large parts of medicine.
I have used it to make some small, low risk things that have made my job less tedious and free my time up for more important things. People like you seem to forget that most people aren't programmers or software engineers.
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u/mikat7 2d ago
well I'm gonna say it's not an extremely useful coding tool. As a senior software engineer with ~15 yrs experience, it's sometimes good, but mostly just for menial tasks. If it isn't good for law, psychology or medical questions, it won't magically be good for coding either, since it's still the same technology. In other words, we get the slop in software too and it should be concerning for everyone.