Opinion: As software power tools, AI agents may make people busier than ever before.
  • footfaults@lemmygrad.ml
    English
    5·
    1 hour ago

    This guy just vibe coded a bunch of slop, based on high quality training data (everyone’s code on GitHub, including probably lots of unity projects, godot, etc). It’s sort of disgusting to me.

  • pageflight@piefed.socialEnglish
    151·
    4 hours ago

    Since 1990, I’ve programmed in BASIC, C, Visual Basic, PHP, ASP, Perl, Python, Ruby, MUSHcode, and some others. I am not an expert in any of these languages—I learned just enough to get the job done. I have developed my own hobby games over the years using BASIC, Torque Game Engine, and Godot,

    I think this is where AI unquestionably shines: switching languages/projects frequently, on personal projects.

    so I have some idea of what makes a good architecture for a modular program that can be expanded over time.

    But I actually draw the opposite conclusion. The architecture and maintainability needs are where AI is pretty poor, and they’re vastly different and more important in a 100-1000 person 10 year production system.

    • DacoTaco@lemmy.world
      2·
      1 hour ago

      Agreed. As an ex-technical lead and co-architect i also agree that what ai does is often very poor architectural design and i wouldnt want it to touch that, ever.

  • codeinabox@programming.devOPEnglish
    13·
    4 hours ago

    I think the most interesting, and also concerning, point is the eighth point, that people may become busier than ever.

    After guiding way too many hobby projects through Claude Code over the past two months, I’m starting to think that most people won’t become unemployed due to AI—they will become busier than ever. Power tools allow more work to be done in less time, and the economy will demand more productivity to match.

    Consider the advent of the steam shovel, which allowed humans to dig holes faster than a team using hand shovels. It made existing projects faster and new projects possible. But think about the human operator of the steam shovel. Suddenly, we had a tireless tool that could work 24 hours a day if fueled up and maintained properly, while the human piloting it would need to eat, sleep, and rest.

    In fact, we may end up needing new protections for human knowledge workers using these tireless information engines to implement their ideas, much as unions rose as a response to industrial production lines over 100 years ago. Humans need rest, even when machines don’t.

    This does sound very much like what Cory Doctorow refers to as a reverse-centaur, where the developer’s responsibility becomes overseeing the AI tool.