AI this, AI that - you can't go anywhere without something trying to force AI on you. Usually a company trying to get you to buy into what they've wasted billions on. So indie devs have begun fighting back with their No Gen AI Seal.
I empathize with that frustration. The process of thinking you’re right, learning you’re wrong, and figuring out why is very fundamentally what coding is. You’re taking an idea in one form (the thing you want to happen in your mind) and encoding it into another, very different form, a series of instructions to be executed by a computer, and your first try is almost always slightly wrong. Humans aren’t naturally well-adapted to this task because we’re optimized for instructing other humans, who will usually do what they think you mean and not always what you actually said, can gloss over or correct small mistakes or inconsistencies, and will act in their own self-interest when it makes sense, but a computer won’t behave that way, it requires you to bend completely to how it works. It probably makes me a weirdo, but I actually like that process, it’s a puzzle-solving game for me, even when it’s frustrating.
I do think asking an AI for help with something is a useful way to use it, that really isn’t all that different from checking a forum (in fact, those forums are probably what it’s drawing from in the first place), and hallucinations aren’t too damaging because you’ll be checking the AI’s answer when you try what it says and see if it works. It’s more the blindly accepting code that it produces that I think is harmful (and you aren’t doing that, it sounds like.) In an IDE it’s really easy to quickly make pages of code without engaging the brain, and it works well enough to be very tempting, but not, as I’m sure you know, well enough to do the whole thing.
I empathize with that frustration. The process of thinking you’re right, learning you’re wrong, and figuring out why is very fundamentally what coding is. You’re taking an idea in one form (the thing you want to happen in your mind) and encoding it into another, very different form, a series of instructions to be executed by a computer, and your first try is almost always slightly wrong. Humans aren’t naturally well-adapted to this task because we’re optimized for instructing other humans, who will usually do what they think you mean and not always what you actually said, can gloss over or correct small mistakes or inconsistencies, and will act in their own self-interest when it makes sense, but a computer won’t behave that way, it requires you to bend completely to how it works. It probably makes me a weirdo, but I actually like that process, it’s a puzzle-solving game for me, even when it’s frustrating.
I do think asking an AI for help with something is a useful way to use it, that really isn’t all that different from checking a forum (in fact, those forums are probably what it’s drawing from in the first place), and hallucinations aren’t too damaging because you’ll be checking the AI’s answer when you try what it says and see if it works. It’s more the blindly accepting code that it produces that I think is harmful (and you aren’t doing that, it sounds like.) In an IDE it’s really easy to quickly make pages of code without engaging the brain, and it works well enough to be very tempting, but not, as I’m sure you know, well enough to do the whole thing.