To be fair, the entire history of humanity is full of exactly that. These are mostly just aimed at and recognized by the US. Same as Russia currently renaming occupied villages. Nobody else recognizes those, it’s just not that special or important at this point, with all of the other shit going on.

Ultimately, the names of places change. All the time. And will continue to change. It’s just what we do as humans. Somebody uses force and swings their dick around and locally others have to either accept it, silently or whining, or punch the fucker. Elsewhere people fight similar fights and care very little about the other dickswingers far away.

That 20% is just way too optimistic for anything more serious so as it would normally prompt hiring of software engineers.

If the project currently requires human developers as paid employees, it will continue to require that. So in introducing today’s ai, you either pay for the employees and the language model expenses, or you pay reduced employee expenses and the language model expenses, and then figure out a way to fund a complete, unavoidable refactor/rewrite down the line and how to adapt the business model back to sustaining employing the original amount of engineers on top of that lump sum.

If the project never was going to employ anyone, then yeah, using a language model can be more productive. It’s never going to require the amount of stability and cohesiveness a serious application doing serious things would require.

Otherwise, it’s just going to add work and require effort in an amount of multiples that scales with the complexity and seriousness of the application.

And while it does this, it consumes ridiculous amounts of more energy and resources than a human person would. Especially those that are not sustainable, that humans do not generally require in such immense amounts.

It’s going to be a net negative for a good while. If we ever survive the burning of our resources with these current models, maybe we get to something actually serious and usable, but I doubt those two can ever work together.

It also has potential to decrease the quality.

I think the main pivot point is whether it replaces human engineers or complements them.

I’ve seen people with no software engineering experience or education, or even no programming experience at all in any form, create working apps with AI.

I’ve also seen such code in multiple instances and have to wonder how any of it makes sense at all to anyone. There are no best practices seen, just a confusing set of barely working disconnected snippets of code that very rudimentarily work together to do what the creator wanted in a very approximate, inefficient and unpredictable way, while also lacking any benefits of such disconnect such as encapsulation or any real domain-separated design.

Extending and maintaining that app? Absolutely not possible without either a massive refactoring resembling a complete rewrite, or, you know, just a honest rewrite.

The problem is, someone who doesn’t know what they are doing, doesn’t know what to ask the language model to do. And the model is happy to just provide what is asked of it.

Even when provided proper, informed prompts, the disability to use the entire codebase as the context causes a lot of manual intervention and requires bespoke design in the code base to work with that.

It absolutely takes many more times more work to make it all work for ML in a proper, actually maintainable and workable way, and even then requires constant intervention, to the point that you end up doing the work you’d do manually, but in at least triple the amount of effort.

It can enhance some aspects, of which one worth a special mention is actually the commenting and automatic, basic documentation skeletons to work up from, but it certainly will not, for some while, replace anyone. Not unless the app really only has to work, maybe, sometimes, and stay as-is without any augmentations, be they maintenance or extending or whatever.

But yeah, it sort of makes sense. It’s a language model. Not a logical model or one that is capable of understanding given context, and being able to get even close to enough context, and maintain or even properly understand the architecture it works with.

It can mimic code, as it is a language model after all. It can get the syntax right, sure, and sometimes, in small applications, it works well enough. It can be useful to those who would not employ engineers in the first place, and it can be amazing for those cases, really, good for them! But anything that requires understanding of anything? Yeah, that’s going to do nothing other than confuse and trip everyone in the long run, requiring multiples of work to do in comparison to just doing it with actual people who can actually understand shit and retain tens of years worth of accumulated extremely complex and large context and experience applying it in practice.

But, again, for documentation, I think it is a perfect fit. It needs not any deeper context, and it can put into general language what it sees as code, and sometimes it even gets it right and requires minimal input from people.

So, it can increase quality in some sense, but we have to be really conscious of what that sense is, and how limited its usefulness ultimately is.

Maybe in due time, we’ll get there. But we are not even close to anything groundbreaking yet in this realm.

I don’t think we’ll ever get there, because we are very likely going to overextend our usage of natural resources and burn out the planet before we get there. Unless a miracle happens, such as stable fusion energy or something as yet inconceivable.

Awesome, what a coincidence! I still run dfcaverns on my mcl-based server to this day, I thought the name seemed familiar 😁 my stepchild loves taking dwarven syrup baths!

But sorry for jumping in suddenly like this, just thought I’d ask and share my appreciation. You’ve brought a dash of joy to our lives, and I thought we don’t get to tell that enough to all the amazing creators out there

This is probably a long shot, but you wouldn’t happen to be the same FaceDeer who does the cool luanti mods?