Programmer Humor

chatgpt is worse among biggest chatbots with writing codes. From my experience Deepseek > Perplexity > Gemini > Claude.

That’s exactly what most junior devs do when stuck. They rehash the same solution over and over and it almost seems like that llms trained on code bases infer that behavior from commit histories etc.

It almost feels like on of those “we taught him these tasks incorrectly as a joke” scenarios

The latter is what I tried, and also kinda wanted ChatGPT to do, which it refused

Sorta kinda. It depends on where you put that line. I think because online drama is fun when we got to the "vibe coding" name we moved to the assumption that all AI assistance is vibe coding, but in practice there's the percentage of what you do that you know how to do, the percentage you vibe code because you can't figure it out yourself off the top of your head and the percentage you just can't do without researching because the LLM can't do it effectively or the stuff it can do is too crappy to use as part of something else.

I think if the assumption is you should just "git gud" and not take advantage of that grey zone where you can sooort of figure it out by asking an AI instead of going down a Google rabbit hole then the performative AI hate is setting itself up for defeat, because there's a whole bunch of skill ranges where that is actually helpful for some stuff.

If you want to deny that there's a difference between that and just making code soup by asking a language model to build you entire pieces of software... well, then you're going to be obviously wrong and a bunch of AI bros are going to point at the obvious way you're wrong and use that to pretend you're wrong about the whole thing.

This is basic online disinformation playbook stuff and I may suck at coding, but I know a thing or two about that. People with progressive ideas should get good at beating those one of these days, because that's a bad outcome.

Fully agreed. Everybody is betting it'll get there eventually and trying to jockey for position being ahead of the pack, but at the moment there isn't any guarantee that it'll get to where the corpos are assuming it already is.

Which is not the same as not having better autocomplete/spellcheck/"hey, how do I format this specific thing" tools.

Yeah, the AI corpos are putting a lot of effort into parsing big contexts right now. I suspect because they think (probably correctly) that coding is one of the few areas where they could get paid if their AIs didn't have the memory of a goldfish.

And absolutely agreed that making sure the FOSS alternatives keep pace is going to be important. I'm less concerned about hating the entire concept than I am about making sure they don't figure out a way to keep every marginally useful application behind a corporate ecosystem walled garden exclusively.

We've been relatively lucky in that the combination of PR brownie points and general crappiness of the commercial products has kept an incentive to provide a degree of access, but I have zero question that the moment one of these things actually makes money they'll enshittify the freely available alternatives they control and clamp down as much as possible.

I searched this issue and didn't find anything very helpful. The new config format can be done many slightly different ways and there are a lot of variables in how your plugins and presets can be. It made perfect sense to me that the LLM couldn't do this upgrade for op. Since one tiny mistake and it won't work at all and usually gives a weird error.

With all due respect, how can you weigh in on programming so confidently when you admit to not being a programmer?

People tend to despise or evangelize LLMs. To me, github copilot has a decent amount of utility. I only use the auto-complete feature which does things like save me from typing 2-5 predictable lines of code that devs tend to type all the time. Instead of typing it all, I press tab. It's just a time saver. I have never used it like "write me a script or a function that does x" like some people do. I am not interested in that as it seems like a sad crutch that I'd need to customize so much anyway that I may as well skip that step.

Having said that, I'm noticing the copilot autocomplete seems to be getting worst over time. I'm not sure why it worsening, but if it ever feels not worth it anymore I'll drop it, no harm no foul. The binary thinkers tend to think you're either a good dev who despises all forms of AI or you're an idiot who tries to have a robot write all your code for you. As a dev for the past 20 years, I see no reason to choose between those two opposites. It can be useful in some contexts.

PS. did you try the eslint 8 -> 9 migration tool? If your config was simple enough for it, it likely would've done all or almost all the work for you... It fully didn't work for me. I had to resolve several errors, because I tend to add several custom plugins, presets, and rules that differ across projects.