"We did it, Patrick! We made a technological breakthrough!"
A place for all those who loathe AI to discuss things, post articles, and ridicule the AI hype. Proud supporter of working people. And proud booer of SXSW 2024.
It's exactly the opposite of teaching a man to fish, this is telling that man to depend on whatever floats down the river and just pick whatever seems edible, if the man gets enough or poisons himself nobody will know, because the skill to fish would have been lost.
Like people who only had a smartphone for everything, they'll never know the advantages of an actual computer and will struggle with it when they need to use one.
I'll go against the grain here: I'm not worried. If you actually care about what you do, even vibe coding can teach you something, it could be a starting point. The internet is not going away, and just looking up this or that thing the AI spit out will help you learn what you're working with.
Is it the same as an uni CS course? No of course, but how many of us got our start just tinkering with stuff we didn't understand?
The internet is not going away, and just looking up this or that thing the AI spit out will help you learn what you’re working with.
I think you mean "sifting through several pages of worthless search results while looking for something the AI spit out"
The internet is worse and it can still get worse.
Bad search results and Bad documentation specifically are a different problem tho
While I agree with you, the unfortunate trend of common folks is to take the easiest path to accomplish their goal.
If that means using a tool they don't understand to achieve a solution instead of being forced to learn from tinkering, I think most people will opt for that route.
They won't take that extra step to comprehend what the AI spits out.
Those kind of people would have behaved the same anyway, copy pasting from the internet or wasting others' time some different way.
I guess we could argue whether giving them AI will act as a multiplier for their damage output or will reduce it because the AI will be savvier than them, but personally I don't see things changing much.
I still think that local models in places without internet are better then offline documentation.
I have no idea what vibe coding is, can someone ELI5 it to me?
I have tried AI to get some rough C# for my hobby game but even that was unusable.
‘Vibe coding’ is where you code only with prompts and never look at the generated code.
Seems like a great way to create insecure unmaintainable code if you ask me.
Also I just dont get why you would ever generate code
Like, you have no idea how to code something? Sure, just ask it about methods how to do it. But generating code too? Cant you RTFM?
I think you're severely underestimating how lazy some people are, lol. I totally get what you're saying, and from a logical perspective it makes sense. It's just that if you survey enough people, i really think you'd be surprised at how little effort some are willing to put forth for just about anything
Isn't the reason obvious? To save time? I'm not saying it's a good thing but it seems prettyyyy obvious why people are doing it.
But it's going to take hours of debugging every time. If you actually learn how to write code, you'll get better at it over time and reuse common functions. It'll take less time as you get better.
Save Time where? If you want to code more than snake, you need to have a basic knowledge of coding anyway, and once you know how to code, you will want to code in your own style. And if you just want to make basic programs, just fork someones github project and change a few lines.
You're saying this with your understanding of the field. The people pushing this are either untrained (and thus don't know what's going wrong) or are trying to milk money out of the former.
Vibe coding is basically having no idea about coding and using the AI to make snippets of Code for you
Like if you want to programm snake, you would prompt it:
then it would tell you like:
so you tell it like:
and so forth, then you just paste everything into a txt and ask the AI to debug it for you and hope it works
The people who need vibe coding shouldn’t be using it. And the people who can use it, don’t need it.
This sounds terrible, lol! Are there any examples that can be pointed to? I'd love to see one of these constructs.
On tilvids.com some dude called picopixl is doing tutorials about this
https://tilvids.com/w/oyddhsnfHUFToBEmpEZpEg
And yeah, its pretty great what it could do, but for someone who (is his own words) can tweak the code so it works, it tool longer to make a Prompt than just coding the Game yourself
Also, Tetris in JS is like Babys first JS project, so even if you really wanted to just get Tetris from somewhere, you could have just git pulled any github project
TBH I always felt the same way with "Blueprint" programming where you plug nodes into nodes.
To this day never once used them.
It's basically the same as programming, just very indirect and slow- but it still requires you to fundamentally understand the concepts of the 'modules' you are using. Vibe coding has borderline random elements.
Are there seriously scientists who think AI assistants are good enough for the job?
As someone who can't code, I spent some time vibe coding a python bot that would take screenshots of a webpage and post them to Discord, but after an hour of creating more errors with each iteration, I gave up. I rather just get someone skilled and pay them for it as opposed to wasting time with something that thinks it's always right
If it's for personal use and hobby stuff, you could try to learn and code it yourself!
Knowing how to make scripts yourself for specific small tasks is a useful skill, and since it's for yourself you don't need to stress about getting too deep into it :)
If you are an absolute beginner I can recommend "Python 4 everybody".
Edit: added a link incase someone is interested.
This also applies to writing emails. Some folks were bad enough at it before. Now, they'll never learn, and can't even proof read what the AI wrote....so their emails aren't any better now, than they were before.
I struggle so much with this. People were already bad at reading emails and following instructions (e.g. ask them to answer 4 questions which I have helpfully listed below, in bold, and they answer the first one and call it a day) but now they just let the a.i. handle it. So instead of not getting answers, I get incorrect and unreviewed answers that just sound like they might be right.
Then of course when I do the work, and it turns out to be completely useless because it was based on bad information, and it needs to be completely redone. That means wasted hours of time and productivity for me with nothing to show for it. All because someone else wanted to save 5 minutes.
A friend of mine wanted to make an incremental game. I told them "hey that's a pretty good project to learn programming with" but they insisted on using an LLM. Then they proudly showed me what they got so far, it was a decent looking singular html page, but without any game logic whatsoever. Most of the code was just stylesheets - and even those had some questionable things going on lol
It took me way too long to get what deskilling means
my best of is: Desk-illing, des-killing, or deskil-ling