Post #123887
2026-01-08 11:43 UTC
Replies (24)
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@nekayee@furry.engineer 2026-01-08 12:14
@Purple You are absolutely right. Lots of people are blindly trusting AI tools and completely bypass their critical thinking braincells. I am glad to be the only engineer in my team and thus do not have to deal with people like that. Even though i have access to a few AI tools, i will never have them make engineering decisions for me.
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@halfy@mastodon.half-shot.uk 2026-01-08 11:48
@Purple I was about to toot on my timeline, but actually this is a good springboard. I've reviewed like 3 or 4 community PRs this week and the common thread is that you get very verbose explanations for what the PR does at first, but the followup is weak. Also, these code changes always seem to contain a whole load of extra code that didn't need to exist, almost like the AI didn't quite understand what was going on..
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@swift@merveilles.town 2026-01-08 11:52
@Purple I struggle to even ask about work with my ex colleagues because they all seem to have bought into the company's two feet all in dive into AI, and it feels like we're living in separate realities.
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@karpour@mstdn.social 2026-01-08 11:56
@Purple working together with people who actually enjoy programming is a luxury :/
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@kitcat@wolvesare.sexy 2026-01-08 12:04
@Purple One of the biggest things the AI stuff has taught me is that so many programmers just... don't actually want to program. I never would have expected that, but it's like the whole game industry here (for example) just doesn't actually want to make games. They want to HAVE MADE games, but absolutely despise the process. And I just don't get it. I LOVE the process of making things!
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@maruno@bark.lgbt 2026-01-08 12:10
@Purple Yeah, sounds familiar sadly. One day one of my colleagues can write perfect high quality code and the next day I am looking at a PR and the WTF/min is incredibly high and I know what happened... When confronted in the way if "I am not really sure why you wrote it like this, normally you have a very different style" they admit they used AI that day cause they were lazy... And it's often very obviously weird stuff... Like for example we always program Python with typing and suddenly there is no typing anywhere to be found. Recently I even got a PR where >everythingshould< be something you almost never need to use and wonder when reading even once. I really like my colleagues and normally they can make wonderful stuff, but when things like this happen... I don't know, they just given up or something? 😅
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@crypticcelery@chaos.social 2026-01-08 12:25
@Purple I was lucky to be in a project where this effect was somewhat subdued. Outside of that context: I just got started scrolling through the docs to configure something specific, only for someone else to pose a question to a chatbot, which of course made something up. A senior colleague was trying to get a camera drone to launch, I open the manual online, he started talking into his phone (guess who got the right answer, though the LLM nonsense was tried first). There’s more.
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@pounce@nyan.network 2026-01-08 13:03
@Purple it's also happening to senior academics! :acat_suffering:
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@arjan@todon.nl 2026-01-08 13:34
@Purple yes and I got fired shortly after probably because I was not "productive" enough compared to them
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@river@creature.place 2026-01-08 13:34
@Purple at large, i see this as capitalism digging its own grave, unfortunately at the expense of individuals. what's a good argument against "we all should use ai to solve problems of a business faster" given that garbage throwaway code has silently been acceptaed across the board?
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@byte@awawa.club 2026-01-08 14:45
@Purple yea i know a teamlead who just had to fire one guy like that, who wouldn't stop trying to push broken ai slop despite it being very obvious. it's legit a cult that breaks people's brains
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@Intaglio_Dragon@furry.engineer 2026-01-08 15:08
@Purple As someone who basically refuses to use AI for anything, it's likely I'm unaware of just how much the use of it has pervaded people's working behaviors. My understanding is that AI and LLM's are meant to be a tool. As with any tool, if used properly, it can be helpful and effective in completing a task. But there's a reason that people are educated on how to do things manually before they're allowed to use tools: there needs to be that sense of intuition that informs a person whether something seems correct or doesn't. What you're describing, seems to be an outsourcing of critical thinking to these tools. It's like putting someone in the driver's seat of a self-driving car and now they're panicking when they have to take manual control.
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@geichel@mastodon.ie 2026-01-08 15:50
@Purple using AI is just like managing a fairly incompetent Junior. Welcome to management. This is the fear and dread and uncertainty that you feel for the first couple of years after somebody has put you in charge of a software team. Where productivity can't be managed, and the results are not really within your control. How long do you wait to fire your AI assistance and go looking for another?
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@yon@sakurajima.moe 2026-01-08 15:53
@Purple I think it’s more exposing than changing. AI coding won’t make you able to do something you can’t do, it can give you code you must understand and verify. It can’t replace someone with knowledge, but it can, if used sensibly, augment some parts. Like boring refactoring and generating some simple boring stuff.
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@rune@social.sound-city.dk 2026-01-08 16:07
@Purple my colleague wrote a question in one of our threads the other day and then not 10 seconds later wrote "wait, that was a really lazy question... I can figure that out myself" :BlobCatGooglyTrash: He uses chatbots a lot and I think he basically hit a question that intersected "company specific knowledge a chatbot doesn't know" and "question he would usually ask a chatbot out of laziness". I had already answered because I had the thread open when he asked, and knew the answer off hand, but I saved him maybe 1 minute of work so it was indeed rather overkill to disturb someone else for that.
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@quincy@chaos.social 2026-01-08 16:13
@Purple same here, and I hate it so much, it's beyond words
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@mahryekuh@hachyderm.io 2026-01-08 16:15
@Purple I haven't seen it at these extremes in AI yet (with seniors). What I have seen is that someone pushed a huge upgrade out in record time, one that would normally require careful consideration and planning. Turned out they instructed an LLM to do the upgrade and not much else, because I later spotted some pitfalls mentioned in the upgrade guide (and not a long one, either). To me, LLMs are tools; you can use them, but they do not absolve you of your responsibility to at least try to do your due diligence as a programmer (which goes beyond writing code and shipping it).
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@rootwyrm@weird.autos 2026-01-08 16:21
@Purple it is not just you. My former threw fits when I spelled out very clearly that it did not work, would not work, would cost the company hundreds of thousands of dollars they insisted we didn't have, and not only that, but every one of the problems from the junior was because they didn't listen, just plugged shit into ChatGPT, and the others were too lazy to actually review it.
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@fluffy@plush.city 2026-01-08 16:30
@Purple I’ve been feeling like the whole industry has been going crazy for years, now, and the AI step is just the latest of many bananapants steps towards oblivion. But it’s certainly a big one. Like, for ages the software industry has been high on its own farts about self-importance and trying to justify itself as the source of its self-made problems and a sinkhole of outsized valuation. And all for what?
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@enjarai@evy.pet 2026-01-08 16:51
@Purple@woof.tech oh yea this has definitely happened to me. i feel like its most prominent in people who also overestimate their own abilities, which is also surprisingly common in this industry
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@kirakira@furry.engineer 2026-01-08 16:59
@Purple me, an unhired watching all the experienced people melt their brains: :blobfox:
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@miles@snug.moe 2026-01-08 17:01
@Purple to a much lesser degree, it happens to me too
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@becomethewaifu@tech.lgbt 2026-01-08 17:05
@Purple One of my coworkers (very much not a senior though) is in a particularly dangerous spot for how he uses it, as he frequently doesn't have the foundational knowledge to understand how the output is only convincing-sounding bullshit, and he's leaning on it so hard I'm not sure if he's actually learning those foundations... Meanwhile I'm the resident stick-in-the-mud who knows how the damned things actually work under the hood, trying to temper the marketing-wank everyone's blindly repeating... My boss is appreciative though, as he understands that it's coming more from simple pragmatism about the environment the tech exists in than "fear of change" (even if it did actually work, (which it usually doesn't) VCs are currently shoveling money into a furnace to subsidize it, and when that money dries up it's going to skyrocket in price to the point it's likely not cost-effective)
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@Archivist@social.linux.pizza 2026-01-08 17:12
@Purple I was asked today why I don't want to teach juniors and beginners how to use AI to write code. This. This is why