Post #1123585

2026-04-01 09:13 UTC

You know, it isn't even that tools like this are useless. There are absolutely things they could be good at. I've personally seen Claude find stupid little bugs you'd spend an hour figuring out and hating yourself for afterwards with great efficiency. I tried the first iteration of Copilot, back when it was just an aggressive autocomplete, and while I had to stop using it because it was overconfidently trying to finish my programs for me without being asked, it was great for filling in boilerplate and maybe even a couple lines of real code for the basic stuff. We have models nowadays that are actually trained to find bugs and security issues in code rather than having the entire internets thrown at them to produce something Altman & Amodei can sell to the gullible as AGI. But there's the problem. The technology has been around for a while, we have a good idea of what it's good for and, more importantly, what it's not. "Our revolutionary expert system for finding bugs in your code" isn't nearly as marketable to the general public, and the CEO class especially, as "our revolutionary PhD level sentient AI that will solve all the world's problems if you only give us another couple trillion dollars, and also wants to be your girlfriend." And so we get Claude and ChatGPT and RAM shortages and AI psychosis and accelerated climate change instead of smaller, focused models that are actually good at their specialist subjects. Because those don't produce as much shareholder value.

Replies (10)

@ahltorp@mastodon.nu 2026-04-01 10:20

@bodil@social.treehouse.systems ”it was great for filling in boilerplate” There’s your problem right there. Computer science should work towards getting rid of the need for boilerplate, not invent ways to write more of it. Every piece of boilerplate is a failing of the language or library that you’re using, and is technical debt. Editing generated code doubly so.

Open ##1123582
@zaire@fedi.absturztau.be 2026-04-01 15:00

@bodil im convinced OP is either an april fools joke or a psyop by anthropic to make public perception of slopwranglers a little more centrist a la “it has its uses” (to which, lmfao no fuck off) and tbh im probably not gonna give you the benefit of the doubt here, so probably gonna be pathfinding to the block button now, as one does

Open ##1123586
@flaki@flaki.social 2026-04-01 09:44

@bodil I liked @mmasnick's take on how mayyyybe there's a silver lining in code-generating that it can help re-democratize personal computing in which it's not the personal computer but also the software can be customized and home-grown. I like to think that sammy boi is out there, trying to buy up the world's complete silicon wafer production because he spends his sleepless nights dreading gen AI breaking loose of his ilk's corporate capture. I'm sure many of us won't gleefully march into local-AI boosterism without addressing the (open-weight) elephant in the room, maybe one way truly open & fair models will leave the fairy realm of the Mozilla Foundation "Wouldn't It Be Cool..?!!" list. Like, waiting for the "AI bubble to pop" is like hoping for an alien invasion: all it will bring is pain and destruction with no clear "ok, what now?" that follows. I like the _hopefulness_ of his perceived trajectory and I truly hope we get there before we split the planet in half. 😶

Open ##1231983
@aurisc4@floss.social 2026-04-01 11:19

@bodil unfortunately, it seems that AGI, defined as "human level intelligence", might actually be close due to a movement in the opposite direction: humans getting dumber really fast.

Open ##1232002
@cigitalgem@sigmoid.social 2026-04-01 12:14

@bodil also see https://blog.calif.io/p/mad-bugs-claude-wrote-a-full-freebsd

Open ##1232004
@adingbatponder@fosstodon.org 2026-04-01 13:11

@bodil Excellent points. Which are the mentioned bug and security finding models you have in mind and where/how are they available?

Open ##1232005
@SkellySoft@mastodon.gamedev.place 2026-04-01 13:26

@bodil I would be at least *partially* aboard if it were more like an autosuggest that you can turn off based exclusively off things that you've written before in that project. In GDScript, for instance, I'm often writing "get_tree().get_root().get_node(GlobalVariables."). An autocomplete like that'd be a useful tool, because you can understand it's scope and it's sources, and it's very clear where the buck stops. But what do we have instead? Utter dogwater. 🙄

Open ##1232006
@jayalane@mastodon.online 2026-04-01 14:14

@bodil the problems here are capitalism not AI. In particular too much capital seeking new areas to extract unreasonable returns from. Very similar to dot com and real estate bubbles but made worse by the increased amount of capital sitting around since Covid bubble. Almost impossible for our economy to resist hype and just develop interesting new techniques for the betterment of humanity.

Open ##1232007
@thisismissem@hachyderm.io 2026-04-04 02:47

@bodil i was very pleasantly surprised the other day when I booted up claude on a codebase built with a relatively unknown framework & claude figured out everything almost to a T. Like even figured out I was using the framework's auth but backed by AT Protocol OAuth. The version of that framework has only been out ~2-3 months.

Open ##1232008
@cxj@phpc.social 2026-04-05 16:46

@bodil Exactly. And because of the vast misrepresentation to, and misunderstanding by, the public, I’m compelled to argue against it wholesale. Few people understand or are capable of the necessary nuance. I just thought of another effective use for LLMs yesterday, but it’s very niche and not massively profitable.

Open ##1232010