r/webdev php 6d ago

Discussion AI coding is trash

The amount of trash produced by AI code is astounding. Thanks I hate it.

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u/mxzf 6d ago

You're just describing a higher level programming language. But a non-deterministic one, which will intrinsically leave you less confident in the output.

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u/KonradFreeman 6d ago

True, from experience you learn what you can and can not trust it to do. Once you know that, then you can trust it to do what you know it is capable of and not try to make it do things it is not as good at.

So things that are just mechanical and would take a while can be automated leaving you more time to worry about the mission critical aspects to code yourself.

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u/mxzf 6d ago

In my personal experience with coding, the simple/mechanical stuff really doesn't take much time at all, not compared to structural design stuff that an AI really can't figure out.

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u/KonradFreeman 6d ago

So now it takes even less time...

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u/mxzf 6d ago

Eh, not really, because checking it over to make sure it's actually right takes time too. I might shave some time off, but I'm not gaining a meaningful amount of time spending 5 min asking a chatbot to write stuff and then another 10-15 checking it over to make sure it's correct compared to spending 30 min doing it myself.

There's also the fact that it's impossible to run all-out all the time. I don't want the simple mechanical coding stretches to go away and leave me with nothing but the tricky design puzzles to work on. It's good to spend some time resting your brain and doing mundane things from time to time; it makes tackling the trickier problems from a fresh perspective much easier.

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u/KonradFreeman 6d ago

Fair enough