Ruby on Rails Creator Says AI Coding Tools Still Can't Match Most Junior Programmers (youtube.com)
- Reference: 0180600466
- News link: https://developers.slashdot.org/story/26/01/16/166254/ruby-on-rails-creator-says-ai-coding-tools-still-cant-match-most-junior-programmers
- Source link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uWqno4HM4xA
At his company, humans wrote 95% of the code for Fizzy, 37 Signals' Kanban-inspired organization product, he said. The team experimented with AI-powered features, but those ended up on the cutting room floor. "I'm not feeling that we're falling behind at 37 Signals in terms of our ability to produce, in terms of our ability to launch things or improve the products," Hansson said.
Hansson said he remains skeptical of claims that businesses can fire half their programmers and still move faster. Despite his measured skepticism, Hansson said he marvels at the scale of bets the U.S. economy is placing on AI reaching AGI. "The entire American economy right now is one big bet that that's going to happen," he said.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uWqno4HM4xA
"American economy" (Score:2)
"The entire American economy right now is one big bet that that's going to happen,"
So what was "the entire American economy" before "AI" started to happen? Is that just all gone now? So the American economy is based now on nothing more than "AI"? This entire line of thinking is ridiculous. No the "entire American economy" is not based on "AI". There's far more to an economy than the latest tech buzzword.
Yeah! But -- when I use them .. (Score:2)
Of course they can't. They can't make decent decisions about how to put the blocks of code together that is cohesive, maintainable, and understandable. They WRITE code. They don't make it work. But in my hands... I can get weeks' worth of work done in days, and days' worth of work in hours. So you are missing the pont.
Re: (Score:2)
You make a good point: AI doesn't need to "match junior programmers" if it makes the junior programmers redundant because the senior programmers are way more effective and don't need their help anymore.
This seems to be what's actually happening, judging by recent hiring patterns.
Re: (Score:2)
if it makes the junior programmers redundant
don't need their help anymore.
A true senior developer never "needed" the help of a junior dev to begin with. A junior developer's role is not to be some senior's personal secretary to take mundane boilerplate tasks the senior doesn't want to do. The goal is to eventually grow them into a dev capable of taking their own complex, senior-level tasks so that more work can actually be done or the senior can move on to other projects/jobs/retire.
If you see jun
Creator of Third Worst Framework Has Opinions (Score:2)
Whatever the creator of RoR thinks is bad, is probably the opposite.
Yeah, vibe coding is chancy at best. But there are much better ways to use AI tools than lazily asking it to write everything--or even anything at all. LLMs are great for debugging, code reviews, and other things that don't actually generate code.
The proper use of current AI tools is.. (Score:3)
..as assistants to experts who know how and where to use them and know how to review the results.
Hypemongers make the pitch to investors that AI will allow companies to avoid paying people, usually by vastly overpromising results.
Creating novel, robust, maintainable, complex systems is hard, regardless of the power of the tools used.
Posts are appearing from expert programmers who are impressed by AI results.
The hypemongers use this as evidence to support their claims that someone who knows nothing can create complex code using a simple text prompt and then release it without understanding how it works.
The tech is advancing rapidly and is becoming more useful. It would be better for everyone if commentators simply reported the facts, not the wild speculation.
Managers vs trenches (Score:3)
Those on the ground know the giant grift that AI coding is right now. I'm not sure management will ever figure it out, though, and we're all going to suffer in the meantime.
Re: (Score:1)
MBAs don't understand that "coding" is a term we software developers invented to make the job look less scary (and risky) to MBAs. In reality, coding is by far the easiest part of software development. Software development isn't "coding", software development is the design of systems to automate complex tasks (as much as possible), it involves a thorough understanding of the problem at hand (aka domain knowledge), complex organizing of components, and managing trade-offs.
Unless it's some crappy website,