This seems to not coincide with the reality of some very skilled programmers saying exactly the opposite.

Just to quote the latest one, here's Linus Torvalds, who I think we can agree is a good programmer:

> AI is a tool, just like other tools we use. And it's clearly a useful one.

> It may not have been that "clearly" even just a year ago, but it's no longer in question today.

> There are other questions around AI (like what the economy of it will actually look like in the end), but "is it useful" is no longer one of those questions. Anybody who doubts that clearly hasn't actually used it.

How much of the source code of the compiler you use did you read? How much of the source code of the standard library of your chosen language did you read? What about the dependencies?

How much of the source code of a huge codebase does the average developer read? I don't think any human alive has read the majority of code in huge codebases like Word, Windows, Linux, etc.

For almost every developer, the majority of the code you use every day, whether in software you use or actual code you're shipping, is not code you've ever read. And no one seems to have a problem with it, because we've built lots of processes around this. It's only when the code is written by an AI and not a coworker or random library author that people seem to have a problem.

And I get it! AI wasn't very good at writing code two years ago. Maybe even a year ago. I think it's good now, but maybe you don't - ok, that's fine, maybe it'll only live up to your standards in a year or two or ten. But that doesn't seem to be what people are arguing, it's not "AI isn't good enough", it's "how can we possibly ship code we never read", and my point is that we've all been doing this for our entire careers.

And as a bonus reference - this all reminds me a lot of the book "There Is No Antimemetics Division".

I really like everyone's idea of finding some way of letting the player play all 18 words. Either count up time, and use total time as the score (while allowing pausing). Or else just count the total score at the end, and if someone fails a word it's reduced from the score. So you got 16/18 word or something.

This is wrong in multiple ways.

For one thing, lots of people enjoy pain and discomfort caused by exercise. Some people even enjoy pain directly! There's ample evidence of this. You're painting with way too broad a brush given that there's enormous variance between people.

Secondly, there's clear evidence that many people do enjoy exercising, because gyms/parks/basketball courts/whateverl are often very busy. Are all these people just waiting for it to end? They're there voluntarily.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48692886

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Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48630705

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I wish it were clearer in these kinds of posts how "I use AI code I don't understand" is so different from "I use libraries written by other people I don't understand", or "I work in a large codebase which was 99% written by other people, and I haven't seen all of it", or even "I use software written by other people I don't understand".

Note that this is not really true of this problem in particular.

Reductio ad absurdum is a technique to prove something.

Developers often depend on external libraries like things for Image processing, Numpy, etc. Do they have to "own" the code in those external libraries and review them, in the same way people sometimes insist you have to review all AI-generated code? Do developers have to be able to recreate Numpy by themselves, even if their field isn't necessarily numerical optimization etc?

Those seem like very high and unreasonable bars.

In any case, I'm pretty sure it's just a coincidence, I don't think it's a stylistic thing, unless I'm missing something.