"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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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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@Gargron thanks, blocked welley.social and @mellowfish
@mirabilos @mellowfish Like moths to a flame. Happy to be of service.
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Just leaving this here.
https://www.reddit.com/r/BetterOffline/comments/1wrqrww/real_talk_here_in_radiology/
There are a lot of hope from all sides that AI will revolutionise a lot of things. One is that it would be great with an AI to diagnose cancer. But we can't trust the AI to be 100% accurate so we will let one human doctor sign off on everything before it's accepted.
So this doctor is sitting with an ever growing mountain of scans that needs to be signed off on. The mountain grows about 50 to 1 for every scan he signs.
Who do you think will be held responsible of any mistakes the AI makes? Well, he signed off on it, didn't he?
The cost of running these AI's are only low now because we are in the rupture market phase still but soon we will go into the monopoly phase and then the prices will be different. We are already setting up the trap, soon a personal computer will be unaffordable and unusable, you will need a subscription computer on a light computer only having a tiny cpu and memory.
@eq thank you for adding this. It brings a vital aspect that deservers to be looked at during the developments.
I also have many concerns in regard to electricity usage and climate change, besides ethical concerns in regard to independent choice of certain AI systems.I find it immensely interesting to try and grasp all perspectives, analyse and debate them.
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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 @Gargron We live in very... Curious times at the moment.
There's a massive hype to adopt something that many don't want to adopt, nor should they have to do so, but equally there's a hype train that says 'do this thing or else...'
There's a middle ground where you can use it quietly, and not use it quietly, and it really doesn't matter.
It's the either siders I'm concerned about.When those that hate it hear about it 24-7 it's like passive smoking. It sucks, it's bad for you and you wish you could escape it.
Equally when you use it for something meaningful and before you've had a chance to explain, you've been shut down because tolerance is 'agree with me or else' that equally sucks.I haven't stated which side of the fence I fall on, and I won't here without being asked. I'm not here to persuade or dissuade, just to make a point.
Moderation is good.You can see my thoughts by looking at my personal posts.
Both of you in this conversation have made your decision and that's OK, but there's nuance in everything and dismissing either side out-of-hand means you aren't thoughtful enough to know where that nuance lies.
You = general you, not you two personally.
I see a lot of love and hate recently, sadly more hate than love, more intolerance than tolerance, and that's not really the fedi I signed up for.
If we could step back about 6 years and show one another just a tad more respect, the world would genuinely be a nicer place to live in. -
@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
@super_user_do @mellowfish Most consumers find this “mind-blowing” stuff repulsive.
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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.
But AI might find niche applications, such as state/mind control by authoritarian regimes.
"Texas Tech University is using AI to help the university root out suspected "woke" texts from its curriculum, a move that has caused roughly a quarter of the university's staff to look for work elsewhere. The chatbot was developed in response to a state law that requires academia to represent that there are only two genders, male and female."
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/10/texas-university-censorship-free-speech/688827/
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you're extrapolating from the worst possible use of AI to all uses of AI.
of course, millions of people can generate mountains of garbage with it. millions of people also write terrible code without AI.
dismissing AI without examining it is just ideology, not engineering.
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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.
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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.
But apparently you do magically gain total expertise with AI the moment you use it because it's only then that you are able to tell what good output looks like. So it not only gives you immediate knowledge of using AI correctly but also immediate expertise in software engineering to be able to see that it's producing good code and designs.
And before you do use it -- you can't no matter how much software engineering you've done or seen.
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Furthermore, I still have yet see a plausible revenue model explained...
@oldguycrusty @Gargron you think the extra half trillion a year for the pentagon is intended for humans?
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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.
@skavish @Gargron It's weird to note that you have admitted he has expertise in software engineering, which would give him all the qualifications in the world to be able to tell spaghetti code from any other form of pasta ... and yet you seem to insist that if it's made by AI he's NOT qualified to make such a judgment.
Which means you think AI produced code is magic somehow and is not in fact spaghetti when it looks like spaghetti to a software engineering expert.
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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 is a failed technology". Sorry what? Every (hyperbole) task right now, from text compression to weather prediction, is being crushed by transformer architectures.
You lot can't be serious
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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 there's tonnes of businesses that make margin on inference that's pennies on the dollar compared to the "subsidised" Western APIs, this statement doesn't make sense
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@skavish I have never used "AI" in my professional or personal life and have no intentions of doing so.
@Gargron @skavish That's what Linus mentioned in his kernel list post:
"AI is a tool, just like other tools we use. And it's clearly a useful one.
It may not have been that "clearly" even just a year ago, but it's no
longer in question today.There are other questions around AI (like what the economy of it will
actually look like in the end), but "is it useful" is no longer one of
those questions. Anybody who doubts that clearly hasn't actually used
it."The other thing that makes me think this ain't going anywhere is Fabrice Bellard's work on tsac and similar and his toys often seems a little ahead of the curve imo.
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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
They'll only stop once they've persuaded enough ordinary investors to buy in that the AI jerks in charge can cash out and leave the system to crash on top of people who can't afford it, or be bailed out by governments, sadly... -
"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 by “AI” do you mean the current LLM/GPT nonsense?
While intelligence is never artificial, machines don’t actually learn, and the term “artificial intelligence” was coined in the 1950s to get grant money from intelligence agencies, the body of work marketed as “AI” has produced some useful heuristics and algorithms. LLM/GPT is *not* an example of the good stuff; ethically and climate-wise it’s horrific.
Since 1988, I’ve hoped for good things from causal inference. Still waiting
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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 It probably writes better code than you do at this point. Anyone who calls it spaghetti code TODAY has no clue what it’s capable of.
There’s a reason mathematicians are freaked out. Their heads aren’t in the sand
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@Gargron @skavish That's what Linus mentioned in his kernel list post:
"AI is a tool, just like other tools we use. And it's clearly a useful one.
It may not have been that "clearly" even just a year ago, but it's no
longer in question today.There are other questions around AI (like what the economy of it will
actually look like in the end), but "is it useful" is no longer one of
those questions. Anybody who doubts that clearly hasn't actually used
it."The other thing that makes me think this ain't going anywhere is Fabrice Bellard's work on tsac and similar and his toys often seems a little ahead of the curve imo.
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@skavish @Gargron It's weird to note that you have admitted he has expertise in software engineering, which would give him all the qualifications in the world to be able to tell spaghetti code from any other form of pasta ... and yet you seem to insist that if it's made by AI he's NOT qualified to make such a judgment.
Which means you think AI produced code is magic somehow and is not in fact spaghetti when it looks like spaghetti to a software engineering expert.
@crazyeddie The AI bros have been selling the line for a while now that readable source code is nice to have, but not particularly important, because of how fast you can start over with the same prompts. So like, basically the prompts are the real source code. The fact that they give different results from one run to another, or because of a change to the LLM, is just a nuisance we deal with in order to reap the wonderful benefits of vibecoding -- obviously, having to run the prompt twice is the same as when you had to delete build artifacts and recompile your whole app, sometimes, in the old ways.
So @skavish thinks @Gargron is a fool for reviewing the actual code, when he should be looking at CLAUDE.md and maybe some tests or whatever
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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.
It isn't failed, it works quite well in many cases as a matter of fact. Reverse-engineering example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wIe3eDfGKUo
The marketing is annoying, but the tech has legitimate usecases and is here to stay (perhaps not to the extent the companies want us to believe).
