Post #3753167

Speaking of AI, this blog post came up while I was catching up on the timeline, and it does a great job of articulating my thoughts on AI right now: https://mikezornek.com/posts/2026/5/moral-struggles-of-ai-coding/ There's a lot of ethical issues, and they make me uncomfortable. I take particular issue with the effects heavy AI use are having on the environment (power and water use, community displacement from datacenter construction) and the greater impact on society caused by the ease of generating misinformation and pushing propaganda. But nonetheless, I'm using it now. At work I use it primarily for writing unit tests, and for analyzing parts of codebases that are deeply complex or that I'm unfamiliar with. It mostly works - it's like having a very eager junior developer at your beck and call. But just like with a real junior developer, you need to give clear and concise instructions, and carefully review their output - sometimes they will be wrong, or build something you didn't ask for. Maybe the requirements are unclear, and they'll make the wrong assumptions when building it. While I generally agree with the thoughts in the blog post, there is one data point I disagree with based on my own experience, and that is having AI do automated code review. Now maybe I'm using it wrong here, but I've found that this is where the most hallucinations occur. When I ask it to do a review of code I’m working on, it seems to be so eager to find issues that it just starts making them up, or it plays up minor stylistic or syntactical issues to be much bigger deals than they actually are. The signal to noise ratio doesn't work for me. Anyway, what really resonated with me was this bit: "I find it impossible to imagine staying in this career and having an absolutist refusal to use AI. Any company looking for my work will have a baseline level of AI-use expectations.” Yeah. My boss's boss gets a weekly report that says how many tokens everyone on the team is using, and I've already been asked to start using more. I had lunch recently with a couple of colleagues from previous jobs who have said the same thing - AI is Your Job Now. So be it.