Quoting: Nezchan

The speed gain ends up being negligible, and comes at the price of creativity, originality and doing work I actually enjoy instead of painstakingly fixing the mistakes of an algorithm.

The ultimate promise of AI is freeing us from the drudgery of work we enjoy so we can focus on tedious editing and error-checking at intern rates.

This is also something I feel needs to be said more. A lot of the joy I get from coding is creating those logic flows and understanding and growing that skill. I think far too many people lose this problem when they talk about how it improves productivity or whatever. I do not use these things because I don't find value in them.

Quoting: Salvatos

It is this reasoning that I also state to my peers that it's okay to generate code, but you must also take the time to review and understand how it works before implementing it.

I will admit I don’t always do that, but I agree it must be done. With ChatGPT and the likes, though, it hasn’t been an issue: the coding answers it gives me never work as-is and only serve to remind me of certain functions or methods that could be useful to solve my problem (or introduce me to them, since I’m only an amateur programmer). Then I go look them up in actual documentation or SO and come up with my own implementation.

I do not use genAI at all, so I don't often consider that you end up having to do it anyway. I also don't want it to feel like I put down or shame folks that don't take the time to understand the answers. I do think that it is important, but there is also a time and place for what Tom Scott would call bodging it together. I merely wanted to illustrate that to actually grow and learn and be a real expert requires that step and it should be one you make an effort to take every time.

I brought up the failures of my maths education as a bit of a proxy as well. What I think schooling did to me was to snuff out my feelings of joy in learning. This is a big reason I do not have a degree and I did not do college. I had to rebuild my love of learning and the joy of exploring new stuff and I did that while learning a craft on my own, so as a result I put a lot of value in the step of understanding as it is a huge part of what I love.

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Firstly, I also agree that disclosures are important. As others have said it is not just that the tools were used, but also how. I do not need to rehash those statements, so I won't.

Instead, I want to push back on some of the sentiment and talk to the topic of productivity. This idea that we should just bend over for the inevitable is a really sad mindset and reflects too well the pitfalls of the modern world. The reality here is that Tim made that comment to get people fighting with each other instead. Better the population fight about disclosure than the real issues at hand.

I work in Enterprise Software actively producing code, so I wanted to talk about that side of stuff. I am glad that a study was cited here, I will be interested to see how well my rough assessment of reality lines up with their findings. What I mean here is that I do not understand how a person could consider generating complex code from one of these models more productive. Furthermore, it cuts out the part of the process where you learn and grow and is a major issue in code development. I cannot speak on drawing or painting, but I am going to assume the same rings true there.

To break down what I am saying a bit further let's start with the productivity side of things. Integrated Development Environments (IDE)s have been generating code for a long time. However, the ways that they do so are usually finishing lines or generating common methods. I use these features regularly because typing "return true" as "re" pressing enter, then "t" enter is a productivity gain. The keystroke count goes down, but I can, at a glance, see it does what I need it to. I might also generate the shell of a unit test class which is basically a whole bunch of methods that I can then go through and fill out. Same with basic getters and setters which are the methods that manipulate object variables. The point is, I do not need to write "public String getName()" for every instance I have a string variable called name, and I can validate that "return this.name" is what I need in an instant.

There are a whole lot of powerful tools in IDEs that speed up development and produce faster and better code as you get more and more familiar with using them. So, then, why would I disagree that generative AI would produce faster/better code? Well the answer is that the more complex the code being generated gets the less likely I am to catch where it isn't doing what I want it to at a glance. "return true" is very easy to verify in an instant, where a full logical loop with multiple return values is not. This means I need to review and verify the results and in many cases writing the code from scratch would just be faster.

This is also just the first part of the process because as you iterate over that bit of code and implement it there is a lot of value in understanding how it works. This is part of why code readability is such a huge part of working with a team. So, if I generate some code and find it does not work later, I have to spend time breaking the generated code down ever further before I can write the fix. If I had written that code myself I would have an intrinsic understanding as I had to reason out the logic to do so. My point being that the actual process of writing the code is a very important part of making quality software and directly translates to productivity and speed within a code base.

The second point I made is that by skipping the steps where you write the code you lose valuable understanding and is a problem in general in the development space. I run into people regularly that do not understand the code they produce. This may be from looking it up and blindly copying a stack overflow answer or, now, generating it by a process that was trained on those answers. Either case results in the same thing. They never allow questions to become answers, they just have results. I have said for a long time that my biggest issue with maths classes when I was growing up were that you are taught that "The answer is the only thing that mattered and those can be found at the back of the book". When I was younger I never really grasped how accurate this frustration was until I started working on code with people that simply produced results.

You see, the sentiment I felt was that the process to get from 1+1=2 didn't matter, and that all you had to do was memorize what symbols did and the steps for stuff like long division. However this is a very flawed way to look at maths because what actually matters is understanding WHY 1+1=2 and how that process works. Having a rich understanding of why allows you to apply the concepts in broader and more complex ways and leads to building a basis for mastery.

AI models that produce code remove the understanding part of coding and in a way do so worse than having to adjust an answer to fit your specific use case. I have always said that its okay to look up how to do something and even encouraged doing so, but I also always say "but it is extremely important that you do not use that answer until you actually understand why it solves the problem". Asking questions and understanding answers is a fundamental skill that needs to be practiced to maintain and these tools cut that process out. Meaning if they are productive now, they will be less so later as the user relies more on the magic answer box and less on their understanding and skill.

It is this reasoning that I also state to my peers that it's okay to generate code, but you must also take the time to review and understand how it works before implementing it. Using these tools "correctly" in that light means an active reduction of productivity since you have to spend that extra effort to gain what you would have by puzzling it out and implementing it yourself.

The technology behind these things *is* very powerful and *does* have value, but not in creative spaces (and I do consider coding to be creative). A creative field requires understanding and technique, neither things generative AI can do, and worse using them actively robs the creator of skills they should be developing.

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The reality here is that this has been a long time coming. It became obvious to me when they added a games store and nitro to the software. I was already considering leaving due to more and more intrusive ads, but about a year ago Discord forced my hand and I cannot use my account anymore.

The only thing that I really lost was access to the communities that exclusively operate inside of a Discord server and it is a little awkward when I tell people "I cannot use Discord". My hope is that this move pushes more people out of the Discord only mindset as they get fed up with the anti consumer stuff we are going to see happen.

I think I am a minority case with Discord, but for what I used it for (Voice communication and messaging small groups of close friends), I have found Signal to be an excellent replacement, and I recommend folks give it a try.

As for what happened with Discord, the short of it is that when I changed my email they flagged my account erroneously as a compromised account which forced it to require a phone attached for verification. I spent almost two months trying to work with their service team to resolve the problem before I finally gave up. I should note I have become a bit of a privacy advocate over the years and do not believe Discord needs my number to operate (after all, it didn't for over a decade), and they have blocks for VOIP numbers. Also, in the process they managed to mark my phone as invalid, so even if I wanted to I would have to buy and activate another phone to comply. Needless to say, the experience was so awful that even if stuff worked out I would have used my access to the account to tell everyone farewell and then delete my user data anyway.

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What I find so amusing about this change is that every other company is *adding* forced arbitration and class action waivers to their agreements. It made me genuinely laugh out loud last night when I saw the summary of changes.

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Now if only there was an online without broadcasting the game I play status. Someday I might get that, someday.

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Given how much effort it is to get working, and with absolutely no guarantee it will continue working due to this kernel-level anti-cheat that could update and break it any time (as really, it shouldn't work at all), it's not something I will actually recommend anyone purchase. I would consider going for a different game for sure.

Yeah, this pretty much sums up why I was so bummed out when I found out they added anti cheat and specifically nProtect GameGuard. It is unfortunate as I was super excited for this one, but I guess this gets to be one I never play.

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