AI ruined everything (asking for advice)

20 days ago by super_user_do to c/programming

Hello everyone! For many years, I have been coding every once in a while and actually learned a lot. I especially liked C and C-Like languages and building useless stuff just for fun and for the sake of the intellectual challenge that came with it, but since when AI became decent enough, it just kinda ruined the passion for programming and computers as a whole. Thing is, I am in university now and need to go back to using C and program regularly, but now that AI does everything 20000 times better than I ever will I always either cede to temptation to use it (thus nullifying learning) or just get bored so quickly I just turn off the computer to do something different.

is there a way to revive the interest for programming and building projects? I am doing my best to stop using AI but heck I really am self-indulging. please help!

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bignose 10 points 20 days ago

@super_user_do@fedd.it, don't fall for the (insanely voluminous) hype around LLM capabilities.

LLMs aren't better than you even today. They will extrude mediocre code, far too verbosely, and inevitably lose track of what they are supposed to be doing. When asked to make a change, they will frequently change far too much. They will make a mess that no one understands, least of all the LLM.

You can do better than them, today and in the future, by being curious, reading to understand, intending what you write, and improving from mistakes. LLMs can do none of this, their design does not allow them to.

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Lux18 5 points 20 days ago

I honestly feel like I'm going crazy. Everybody is constantly telling me that LLMs are so good and capable, and a lot of people even consider them superior and talk about that like it's a known fact. But I just don't see it.

I tried to use them lot of times, but the results were simply not good and I always end up just wasting my time. And everybody is always like "well you have to write the right prompts, they have to be like this and this" or "well it might be that you're not using the right model, try this and this model" or whatever.

One guy even suggested that I might not be advanced enough to recognize it as good code, because again, LLMs are just so good and that's a fact. Which, to be fair, I fully admit to not being advanced or very experienced, especially in C++ which I am currently using and trying to learn. So I'm not rejecting this notion outright, it might actually be true. Although, I am experienced and I'd even say advanced in Python, and there I can say for sure that the code written by LLMs is just bad, convoluted, and unmaintainable.

A lot of times that I talk to people about this and explain my experience, and manage to convince them that I tried different prompts, models and everything, they always land on the same conclusion - that the code doesn't actually have to be readable and maintainable. LLMs are a new interface for coding, thus the code only has to be good enough for the LLM to be able to work with it.

And I honestly can't even say that this is such a ridiculous idea. That may very well be the path we're headed towards. And if that is the case, then my insisting on not using LLMs just puts me at a disadvantage since I'm much less productive (assuming that people who use LLMs are actually more productive - which I haven't seen conclusive studies about). I've read a little about this topic on reddit and stuff, and a lot of people really do agree with this - if you don't use LLMs, you're just too slow and it will only get worse. And this is coming from people who are (claiming to be) experienced software devs.

My situation is a little bit different though - I'm writing research code and I definitely DO have to be able to read and debug the code. If I don't, my results might be completely false and come from bugs or wrong functionalities. So I strongly reject using LLMs in my code, at least in the 95% of the code that actually implements my methodology.

But even still, I haven't had success with getting good code out of LLMs for the 5% that doesn't deal with the research, so what the hell is going on? I seriously feel like I'm going crazy since it seems to me like I'm the only one who isn't satisfied with the "capabilities" of LLMs. I can admit that my prompting needs work and that I don't exactly put much effort into it, but at some point, where do you draw the line? How many paragraphs do I have to write to ensure that the LLM does exactly what I want, before it becomes more work than actually doing it myself? I swear, some of the tips I get from people on prompting are crazy - writing .md files with instructions, writing out every single detail, explaining exactly how to do it and on and on and on. Its honestly easier and quicker just doing it myself.

And another thing - when did it happen that people stopped being embarrassed about heavily using LLMs to code?? Like this just flipped at some point and now people proudly talk about not having written a single line of code in a project (and I mean this literally, I've had multiple people tell me this). I cringe so hard every time in these conversations.

So I really have no idea what to think anymore. In any case, I won't be using LLMs in my research because the main goal is for me to actually learn something, as well as to produce reliable code and results. I'm still early in my research, so there's no problem with me doing that right now. But there will probably come a time where I will have learned enough about the topic to allow for "blackbox" code because I will be able to verify the functionalities and results, and I certainly expect higher pressure to use LLMs then. I have no idea what I'll do then.

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bignose 1 point 14 days ago

I seriously feel like I’m going crazy since it seems to me like I’m the only one who isn’t satisfied with the “capabilities” of LLMs.

This is an unsurprising impression to form. But it's false.

You are seeing a lot of people boosting the LLM's capabilities, for many reasons.

Some of them are sincere, to a degree: they feel like they are doing more, because they're churning out code so much faster! But they're discounting or ignoring the downsides: They have far less comprehension of that code, they can't possibly review it effectively, they don't perceive the lost time trying to work the extruded output into something they can use; etc.

Some of them are insincere, because they're grifting: hoping to hype others into committing more to this technology and to their apparent experience, for clout or money. Those people can die in a hole.

A lot of them are insincere, because they perceive it will hurt their short-term career to not spout enthusiastically about using LLMs for coding. Their bosses demand it be used, measure its use and rank employees based on token burn, and job adverts overwhelmingly seem to require use of LLMs. People pretend to love this stuff just to stay employed.

Don't believe it just because people say it. Believe your own experience: you have seen how godawful is the code extruded from these slop machines. You have seen how voluminous and ignorant of context it all is, making it worse than useless to try integrating into an existing project. You have seen how the LLM can't effectively maintain its own code medium-, let along long-term. It's all and a colossal waste of effort and resources, a dead end.

Let people use the LLM for their own code if it makes them happy. But don't accept it into your project if you don't want it; and definitely don't trust their self-reported productivity unless they bring the code, and you independently assess it. You'll find very few claimed successes survive that simple scrutiny.

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super_user_do 2 points 16 days ago

Thank you bro. Reading through all those comments made me realize that it wasn't AI to have killed my will to learn, but the strict university deadlines, peer pressure and the fact that I have turned a hobby into something I am not doing for pleasure anymore

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bignose 1 point 14 days ago

Thanks for coming back to report this. I'm sure others here were, like me, hoping we could reach you with positive messages and give you the confidence in yourself you deserve.

Stay strong and find your way. Write more articles here if you like. We're wishing you well.

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