"AI" is a failed technology, in the sense that it's neither fit for purpose, nor a likely path to its stated end goal of "AGI", but a lot of people's profits currently depend on pretending it's not.
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@mellowfish That's... just your opinion. Agentic coding (I don't think you can call it "engineering") is heavily subsidized by big AI companies right now, and that's going away sooner or later. The software world will have a painful wake up call from all the spaghetti code being pumped out right now.
calling code that’s currently being generated by AI agents “spaghetti code” is a pretty sure sign that you either haven’t actually used it seriously or don’t know how to use it.
AI-generated code can absolutely be terrible. so can human-generated code. the interesting question is whether you know how to get the agent to produce good code and how to review, test, and evolve it.
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Heard Cory Doctorow speak recently & he used radiologists as an example--instead of AI as a "tap on the shoulder" assisting & aiding radiologists, numerous radiologists will be replaced by AI but "human" radiologists will have to sign off AI agents results and will bear the medical liability.
@FallsMom Cory Doctorow is right on some topics, but I consider him not extreme enough on "AI". This shtick works while there are qualified radiologists who retain their skills. It falls apart once the deskilling effects of "AI" are in the loop.
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"AI" is a failed technology, in the sense that it's neither fit for purpose, nor a likely path to its stated end goal of "AGI", but a lot of people's profits currently depend on pretending it's not. I am curious to see how long the hype will last once the Nvidia ouroboros ends and money stops being pumped into marketing.
Furthermore, I still have yet see a plausible revenue model explained...
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calling code that’s currently being generated by AI agents “spaghetti code” is a pretty sure sign that you either haven’t actually used it seriously or don’t know how to use it.
AI-generated code can absolutely be terrible. so can human-generated code. the interesting question is whether you know how to get the agent to produce good code and how to review, test, and evolve it.
@skavish I have never used "AI" in my professional or personal life and have no intentions of doing so.
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@Noisecolor I'd like to point you to the data centres being built around the world to accomodate "AI" investments, their energy and water consumption, how it's affecting communities living around them. There's an even deeper conversation that could be had about the belief a lot of the tech execs have expressed that a sufficiently advanced "AI" would solve the climate crisis, diverting efforts from actual solutions.
the environmental-impact argument against AI doesn’t really hold water when you put the numbers in context. the comparison with everyday activities like eating a burger is pretty revealing.
https://welley.social/@skavish/posts/pt_01m4nt61s1ecjrvbczk5zb45z6
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@FallsMom Cory Doctorow is right on some topics, but I consider him not extreme enough on "AI". This shtick works while there are qualified radiologists who retain their skills. It falls apart once the deskilling effects of "AI" are in the loop.
Agreed.
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@skavish I have never used "AI" in my professional or personal life and have no intentions of doing so.
that explains the confidence
if you’ve never actually used it, then you’re not really in a position to judge what agentic coding looks like when used properly.
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@Noisecolor I'd like to point you to the data centres being built around the world to accomodate "AI" investments, their energy and water consumption, how it's affecting communities living around them. There's an even deeper conversation that could be had about the belief a lot of the tech execs have expressed that a sufficiently advanced "AI" would solve the climate crisis, diverting efforts from actual solutions.
@Gargron
Global warming, pollution, energy issues, all there, on the list of solvable things humanity decided not to solve, long long long before ai.But, back to the point: Ai won't go away. Especially now as more and better infrastructure is being built, that will unlock ever better capabilities.
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"AI" is a failed technology, in the sense that it's neither fit for purpose, nor a likely path to its stated end goal of "AGI", but a lot of people's profits currently depend on pretending it's not. I am curious to see how long the hype will last once the Nvidia ouroboros ends and money stops being pumped into marketing.
@Gargron What we term AI today is misnamed and misused and oversold.
But the technology as such (i.e. LLMs and Neural Networks and the like) isn't useless.
E.g. my daughter is training AI to recognize and classify life in ROV videos from the deep sea ocean floors.
Many such applications. "AI" doesn't get bored and is extremely good at spotting patterns and things that break the patterns.
But, yeah, it is shit for coding...
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@Luminous_J I've explained why it's failed technology in the same sentence. Perhaps you've lost the ability to interpret complex sentence structures? It is a technology that is fundamentally unable to provide consistently true information or behave in a deterministic way. This means you cannot rely on it to provide information or perform tasks, and it is dangerous and irresponsible to pretend otherwise.
@Gargron
I am fascinated by your ad hominem attack, but I'm not here to score points or win a right-or-wrong debate.Why not address the substance of my response and engage in a fair debate based on facts and experiences?
Let me start:
What if a technology doesn't need to provide 100% reliable information to be useful, provided its limitations are understood and appropriately managed?And what if future developments improve the reliability of these models and address some of their current limitations? Would AI still be inherently dangerous and irresponsible as a technological tool?
I'm genuinely interested in the reasoning behind your conclusion that AI is a failed technology.
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that explains the confidence
if you’ve never actually used it, then you’re not really in a position to judge what agentic coding looks like when used properly.
@skavish You think I, a maintainer and engineer on one of the largest open-source software projects on GitHub, am not in a position to judge what agentic coding looks like? Sure. Have a nice day!
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Heard Cory Doctorow speak recently & he used radiologists as an example--instead of AI as a "tap on the shoulder" assisting & aiding radiologists, numerous radiologists will be replaced by AI but "human" radiologists will have to sign off AI agents results and will bear the medical liability.
@FallsMom @Gargron Many would criticise that by saying good luck on enforcing liability. Corporations with the antitrust and monopolistic control of the markets finance politicians to protect them from liability. That would include covering up the unethical and immoral signing off of Ai agents to protect their profits. The cause of the problem is corporate sovereignty and it’s not crashing in slow motion!
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@skavish You think I, a maintainer and engineer on one of the largest open-source software projects on GitHub, am not in a position to judge what agentic coding looks like? Sure. Have a nice day!
if you’ve never used it, then yes, you’re not in a position to judge what it looks like when used properly. being an experienced engineer and maintainer gives you plenty of expertise in software engineering, but it doesn’t magically give you first-hand experience with a tool you explicitly said you’ve never used.
you can absolutely argue that you don’t want to use it. that’s a different claim.
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"AI" is a failed technology, in the sense that it's neither fit for purpose, nor a likely path to its stated end goal of "AGI", but a lot of people's profits currently depend on pretending it's not. I am curious to see how long the hype will last once the Nvidia ouroboros ends and money stops being pumped into marketing.
@Gargron AI (note the lack of quotes) has been around since the 50s and has produced many successes; such as the machine vision software that makes pick and place robots possible. Presuming you mean LLMs by the quotes, then you are right. LLMs are a dead end on the path to AGI.
But machine learning (ML) is only one part of AI and LLMs are only one product of ML. Perhaps the eventual failure of LLMs will lead to a 2nd AI winter but non-LLM AI will continue to make progress.
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"AI" is a failed technology, in the sense that it's neither fit for purpose, nor a likely path to its stated end goal of "AGI", but a lot of people's profits currently depend on pretending it's not. I am curious to see how long the hype will last once the Nvidia ouroboros ends and money stops being pumped into marketing.
@Gargron I see more and more coders convinced they must use it. I wonder about the long term effects across the industry when products become a black box managed by Claude in a few years. I am also curious how it will all play out!
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@Gargron AI (note the lack of quotes) has been around since the 50s and has produced many successes; such as the machine vision software that makes pick and place robots possible. Presuming you mean LLMs by the quotes, then you are right. LLMs are a dead end on the path to AGI.
But machine learning (ML) is only one part of AI and LLMs are only one product of ML. Perhaps the eventual failure of LLMs will lead to a 2nd AI winter but non-LLM AI will continue to make progress.
@MartyFouts We're in agreement.
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@Gargron counterpoint: we are well past the point of no return for agentic engineering. There will always be purists who insist on writing code by hand but we aren’t returning to that being the default even after the bubble pops. And I think quiet use of AI as glue will propagate more or less unseen through a lot of tech until it is the expected/desired thing vs a bolted-on buzzword.
Are there myriad problems with both of these? Of course. But that much is not “failure” in any meaningful sense.
@mellowfish @Gargron as bad as it may sound, that is the unfortunate reality. People are doing absolutely mind-blowing stuff with AI that up until a few years ago was considered completely impossible from the perspective of any software engineer, yet here we are mixing videogames. AI in coding is not going away also because most companies have very generic workflows and don't really care of shipping good code if AI can manage it and work 24/7 without getting tired
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@mellowfish That's... just your opinion. Agentic coding (I don't think you can call it "engineering") is heavily subsidized by big AI companies right now, and that's going away sooner or later. The software world will have a painful wake up call from all the spaghetti code being pumped out right now.
@Gargron @mellowfish Open-weight models don’t suddenly get massively more expensive, so this is a non-issue.
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@skavish You think I, a maintainer and engineer on one of the largest open-source software projects on GitHub, am not in a position to judge what agentic coding looks like? Sure. Have a nice day!
@Gargron thanks, blocked welley.social and @mellowfish
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calling code that’s currently being generated by AI agents “spaghetti code” is a pretty sure sign that you either haven’t actually used it seriously or don’t know how to use it.
AI-generated code can absolutely be terrible. so can human-generated code. the interesting question is whether you know how to get the agent to produce good code and how to review, test, and evolve it.
