It seems I’m the only software engineer on Lemmy who loves having AI. It’s not perfect, but it’s so much better than doing everything from scratch and it’s far more reliable for solving obscure runtime errors than chasing down all the typically dead-end results on a search engine for the stack trace. Or maybe I’m just the only one willing to endure the down votes. Either way, AI has been an exceptional boon in my daily workload.
But more importantly, it’s not going away. You can hate it until the sun explodes but this technology exists now and the world isn’t just going to forget about it. Your best bet is to figure out how to use it efficiently so that you don’t end up the guy that pushes shitty AI code and instead the guy who was able to get a lot done by using AI in a meaningful way and produce good work
I see an LLM as my good-but-not-perfect assistant, there to code up boring bits “loop thru this data and extract…”, “improve this bit of code please”, and to help with errors “why does this code give that error”.
I never let it do big slabs of code, and always run and check its code incrementally.
It is my code and the LLM just makes it easier to do. Thanks LLM.
This is probably a fine and responsible way of using LLM, but sadly the loudest voices are those crowing about coding being a “solved” problem and bragging about being 10x more productive by doing very little and certainly not reviewing refactoring and understanding the generated code.
Only gotcha for this is LLM is being offered well below cost, will you still want yo use it at 5x or 10x the cost?
No. I stopped using Copilot after the price increase. Now I do everything locally using Qwen. There’s a significant decrease in quality, not because Qwen is inherently worse, but because I only have 12GB of VRAM, but at least it’s affordable, and still better than no AI.
I tried using LocalAI to get some kind of agent not being used to entrench fascism and destroy the environment and consume irreplaceable clean water and haven’t had much luck. Even on a beefy machine with a chonky graphics card, it’s slow. That was after trying it on my laptop and damn near burning my legs off with the graphics card going nuts and the fans spinning up like jet turbines.
I did an experiment where I tried to get it to write some code that I had already written myself, just as a test case. Even when I found a model that worked more quickly, the code it produced didn’t do the thing I had told it to do. I had to tell the LLM that, contrary to its “thinking,” inline HTML does, in fact, make for valid Markdown, and that it could actually do the thing I had already explicitly told it to do.
The second iteration worked, but the code was far from ideal. If I had been in a professional situation where i would have been putting that up for review, it would have taken me even longer to make the code presentable and up to my standard. In the end, the code I wrote was better by a mile and I wrote it maybe twice as fast as the LLM.
I’m sure this is faster if I use Claude or something and engage the Torment Nexus, but that’s kind of my point. It takes so much juice to make these things viable, and the hardware you need at home to replicate that usefulness is expensive and becoming less available. And removing the energy cost from the user’s machine (where you can literally hear and feel the energy consumption) to some bank of servers you’ll never see in person does a lot to distance a user from the effects of their usage of the tool. Running a local agent only made my view on AI lower than it already was.
I did not try the Qwen model, though I suppose I ought to since I’ve now seen you claim success with it a few times on here. Will I finally be impressed? Man, I doubt it, but I’ll give it a go.
I agree, but that’s a result of fascism, not technology. How it’s being utilized should be the target of ire, not the technology itself. The benefits of AI should be shared by all of society, but instead it’s being used to create even more wealth disparity. That actress should have access to Universal Basic Income and be able to do the work she feels passionate about, no matter what it is. Instead we have oligarchs extracting ever more from a suffering populace.
It seems I’m the only software engineer on Lemmy who loves having AI. It’s not perfect, but it’s so much better than doing everything from scratch and it’s far more reliable for solving obscure runtime errors than chasing down all the typically dead-end results on a search engine for the stack trace. Or maybe I’m just the only one willing to endure the down votes. Either way, AI has been an exceptional boon in my daily workload.
It’s a great tool… and it’s only getting better.
But more importantly, it’s not going away. You can hate it until the sun explodes but this technology exists now and the world isn’t just going to forget about it. Your best bet is to figure out how to use it efficiently so that you don’t end up the guy that pushes shitty AI code and instead the guy who was able to get a lot done by using AI in a meaningful way and produce good work
Amen!
I see an LLM as my good-but-not-perfect assistant, there to code up boring bits “loop thru this data and extract…”, “improve this bit of code please”, and to help with errors “why does this code give that error”.
I never let it do big slabs of code, and always run and check its code incrementally.
It is my code and the LLM just makes it easier to do. Thanks LLM.
This is probably a fine and responsible way of using LLM, but sadly the loudest voices are those crowing about coding being a “solved” problem and bragging about being 10x more productive by doing very little and certainly not reviewing refactoring and understanding the generated code.
Only gotcha for this is LLM is being offered well below cost, will you still want yo use it at 5x or 10x the cost?
No. I stopped using Copilot after the price increase. Now I do everything locally using Qwen. There’s a significant decrease in quality, not because Qwen is inherently worse, but because I only have 12GB of VRAM, but at least it’s affordable, and still better than no AI.
I tried using LocalAI to get some kind of agent not being used to entrench fascism and destroy the environment and consume irreplaceable clean water and haven’t had much luck. Even on a beefy machine with a chonky graphics card, it’s slow. That was after trying it on my laptop and damn near burning my legs off with the graphics card going nuts and the fans spinning up like jet turbines.
I did an experiment where I tried to get it to write some code that I had already written myself, just as a test case. Even when I found a model that worked more quickly, the code it produced didn’t do the thing I had told it to do. I had to tell the LLM that, contrary to its “thinking,” inline HTML does, in fact, make for valid Markdown, and that it could actually do the thing I had already explicitly told it to do.
The second iteration worked, but the code was far from ideal. If I had been in a professional situation where i would have been putting that up for review, it would have taken me even longer to make the code presentable and up to my standard. In the end, the code I wrote was better by a mile and I wrote it maybe twice as fast as the LLM.
I’m sure this is faster if I use Claude or something and engage the Torment Nexus, but that’s kind of my point. It takes so much juice to make these things viable, and the hardware you need at home to replicate that usefulness is expensive and becoming less available. And removing the energy cost from the user’s machine (where you can literally hear and feel the energy consumption) to some bank of servers you’ll never see in person does a lot to distance a user from the effects of their usage of the tool. Running a local agent only made my view on AI lower than it already was.
I did not try the Qwen model, though I suppose I ought to since I’ve now seen you claim success with it a few times on here. Will I finally be impressed? Man, I doubt it, but I’ll give it a go.
There’s a lot of existential dread out there… try talking with an out of work actress about AI and find out how she really feels…
I agree, but that’s a result of fascism, not technology. How it’s being utilized should be the target of ire, not the technology itself. The benefits of AI should be shared by all of society, but instead it’s being used to create even more wealth disparity. That actress should have access to Universal Basic Income and be able to do the work she feels passionate about, no matter what it is. Instead we have oligarchs extracting ever more from a suffering populace.
try talking with an out of work actress about how it’s being utilized, their only answer is to ban it all.
As should we all have had for the past 25 years… keep wishing.
I know, it’s irrational anger and misplaced.
Agreed. And since the alternative is giving up hope,I will indeed keep wishing 🤞