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I've seen AI work well as a sort of auto-complete in places where you're basically copying and pasting boilerplate; it's pretty good at figuring out via context what boilerplate you need, and suggesting it for you.  When I'm writing unit tests is mostly when I've found it somewhat useful.  It's still only right about 80% of the time, though, which makes it useful only insofar as I already knew what I wanted it to type and it's just saving me the keystrokes.

Is obscene. Copilot and ChatGPT used to generate boilerplate, when once upon a time the whole purpose of higher level languages was to eliminate boilerplate, and silently "auto-generate" it in lower level machine code.

Can be useful, but you have to know what you're looking at.

Your "it works as an autocomplete" is the entirety of what it actually IS. It is just a fancy auto-complete with the added benefit (for the oil companies) that it burns a barrel of oil for every query.

I've seen AI work well as a sort of auto-complete in places where you're basically copying and pasting boilerplate; it's pretty good at figuring out via context what boilerplate you need, and suggesting it for you.  When I'm writing unit tests is mostly when I've found it somewhat useful.  It's still only right about 80% of the time, though, which makes it useful only insofar as I already knew what I wanted it to type and it's just saving me the keystrokes.

It's just one step further down the ladder from outsourcing engineering work to Eastern Europe and/or India.  Companies that lean heavily on that stuff eventually find out that they get what they pay for.  (Which gets back to my personal lesson being to just avoid startups, because the key word there is "eventually" and any company that's focused entirely on the short term will absolutely do all that stupid shit.)

The AI coding is just really an insane thing, IMO. Granted, I think most of these GenAI/LLM's are utter useless trash, but for coding, it's probably even more so. These AI chatbot things are using next word prediction to try to sound like a human, right? Coders should instantly see the problem - code does not sound like human speech or language. It's full of very domain specific phrasings, definitions, shorthand, and contextual cues. While a GenAI bot whose data was very specifically culled, curated, and built using very domain specific training data COULD be very useful, that's not what these shitboxes are. Also, that kind of domain specific products aren't sexy enough to get the venture capital to be built in the first place, because their potential is not a hypergrowth market.

Also, the execs are going to use the GenAI as an excuse to hire either less engineers, or cheaper ones right out of college. They won't give a shit that the work product is trash, just that it costs less to build.

Anyway, just finished day one at the new job.  So far so good.

Narrator: it would only go downhill from there.   

I'm just too old for this startup shit, man.  It's not even like the old days where maybe there was stress and drama but also it was exciting and people had good scotch at their desks and the parties were legendary.  With the new generation it seems like it's even more stress but also zero fun -- worst of both worlds!  Like, case in point: a couple of weeks ago I thought "be the change you want to see in your lame-ass office culture" and offered to buy a round for my team at a nearby bar at 5pm (the company is way too cheap to ever sponsor something as frivolous as "teambuilding"), and had zero takers because nobody felt comfortable leaving their desk that "early".

I also had the eye-opening experience just yesterday of watching another engineer on my team (this is his first job out of college) work on fixing a bug -- he was typing out a description of what he was trying to do, and at first I thought it was a comment or commit message, but no, it was an AI prompt.  The AI authored some code, he ran it without looking at it, and the thing he was trying to fix was still broken, so he tried another prompt, and after three iterations of that he gave up and I said he could reassign the bug to me. 

When AI code generation started to become a thing I was worried that new grads would be frozen out of the market by execs hiring fewer junior engineers, and that would screw them out of being able to acquire the experience to become senior engineers; now I realize that the junior engineers are going to fuck themselves over by using AI as a crutch and never developing the skills that would allow them to surpass it (because I do believe there's a pretty firm ceiling on what these AI models can do, and just because they can outperform a mediocre intern now doesn't mean they're going to outperform an actual engineer five or ten or even twenty years from now).

Anyway, I'm back on the job hunt again, having learned a new round of lessons (namely: no more fucking startups, ever), and after a couple of months of submitting applications I finally have some actual interviews at a couple of places, so here's hoping.

Played BG1 at release when I was in my early 20s.  Back at it, playing whatever the latest greatest version of it is, and BG1 still delivers.  Looking forward to next playing BG2 as I never did play it.  By the time BG2 rolled out I had discovered MMOs and that was all she wrote for a bit.

cheers

New Lucas Pope game just dropped (like, an hour ago).  https://dukope.itch.io/moida-mansion

Squadron 42 still another two years away.

In perpetuity.

Squadron 42 still another two years away.

And the 1 hour PROLOGUE which consists of unskippable cutscenes, some turret shooting and some walking on rails.


And 6 or so baddies to run straight towards you and take one clip each to kill.

Squadron 42 still another two years away.