[frumper]

I knew a guy that made a good living as a freelance web developer decades ago. He would pretty much just copy and paste code from tutorials or stack overflow and had no real idea how anything worked. Using code without understanding it is never a good idea, it doesn’t need to be from AI for that to be true.

[f6v]

Or maybe you’re just exaggerating. I’ve done my fair share of copy pasting and it never worked to just do it without understanding what’s going on.

I think the problem with “AI” code is that many people have almost a religions belief. There’re weirdos on internet who say that AGI is couple years away. And by extension current AI models are seen as something incapable of making a mistake when writing code.

[n4r9]

The other downside to AI code vs stackoverflow is that a stackoverflow post can be updated, or a helpful reply might point out the error. With the advent of LLMs we may be losing this communal element of learning and knowledge-sharing.

[Piskvorrr]

We aren't. LLMs may have been useful for a moment in time, before the trick "it's now MY OWN creation, no IP strings attached - when it comes through the plagiarism machine" became apparent, and before the models started eating their own tail. Now they're just spiralling down, and it will IMNSHO take something else than an iterative "a future version will surely fix this, One Day, have faith."

[n4r9]

There are signs of a decline in people asking and answering questions on sites like stack exchange: https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/387278/has-stack-ex...

So I hope you're right, but the evidence is currently that you're wrong. Let's see how it plays out, I suppose.

[Piskvorrr]

- Which might be a different matter: of specifically SE declining. (A very different, and long-running, tragedy, but one that began long before the current AI boom and prompted by very different, non-technical issues.)

- That said, surely traffic will decline for Q&A sites. "How do I connect tab A into slot B" is something that people are likely to query LLMs for; the response will surely sound authoritative, and could be even correct. That's definitely a task where LLMs could help: common questions that have been asked many times (and as such, are likely to be well-answered in the human-made training data). A 20001st question of "how do I right-align a paragraph in HTML" has not been posted? Good. Rote tasks are well-suited to automation. (Which, again, brings us back to the issue "how to distinguish the response quality?")

[jtbayly]

But what happens with the next generation of questions? The reason LLMs can answer how to right-align a paragraph in HTML is at least in part because it has been asked and answered publicly so many times.

Now imagine that HTMZ comes along and people just go straight to asking how to full justify text in HTMZ for their smart bucket. What happens? I doubt we’ll get good answers.

It feels like the test of whether LLMs can stay useful is actually whether we can stop them from hallucinating API endpoints. If we could feed the rules of a language or API into the LLM and have it actually reason from that to code, then my posed problem would be solved. But I don’t think that’s how they fundamentally work.

[davidthewatson]

I upvoted your comment because I'm afraid you may be correct. I say, "afraid" because I can remember the day when a member of my team was fired for copy pasta from SO with little, if any understanding, into "production" code.

The problem, of course, is that this might work once in a while for low hanging fruit, until the web inherited things like DICOM and we now have medical imaging in the web browser (I've heard in Apple Vision Pro), where robotics implies the price of unforeseen bugs is not accidental death or dismemberment of one patient, but potentially many.

[johnnyanmac]

I've seen it too. You can get away with a lot of inefficiencies and still technically get the job done.

[jazz9k]

I knew someone similar. They would just get free templates and sell them as a website to customers, with almost no changes, aside from logos and text. Most had no Javascript or css and looked terrible, even by 2005 standards.

His clients were usually older small business owners that just wanted a web presence. His rate was $5000/site.

Within a few years, business dried up and he had to do something completely different.

He also hosted his own smtp server for clients.It was an old server on his cable modem in a dusty garage. I helped him prevent spoofing/relaying a few times, but he kept tinkering with the settings and it would happen all over again.

[Laakeri]

But he made a good living out of it, so in the end it was a good idea?

[emseetech]

It certainly puts a ceiling on a career. And I'd argue it probably gave him a pretty rough shelf life. At some point he has to understand what he's doing.

Unless he's so good at selling his services he can consistently find new clients. And if that's the case, he'd probably kill it in sales.

[dazzawazza]

I'll bet the ceiling is CTO.

[fragmede]

sales engineer is quite a lucrative career. don't have to be really good at it, just enough to be useful.

[snoxy]

Sales engineers have to be good enough to bluff their way through the layers of hyperbole/minor exaggeration/utter bullshit (delete as applicable) the sales team have spun. Whether their conscience gets involved before the deal closes, different question.

[gizmo686]

Not at my work. Around here sales engineers just say "this is a proof of concept, X will be different in the final version". Then, after they close the deal, they give us their half implemented feature they developed that none of us heard about before, and tell ys that we need to finish it and include it in the next release.

[HeyLaughingBoy]

Most people never reach the theoretical ceiling of their careers, so he probably did quite well.

[efilife]

Cope. People often make money on things they know nothing about

[thephyber]

He may have made a good living, but his customer / employer bought low quality code with lots of tech debt.

That business model only works until customers are sophisticated enough to understand tech debt. In the future, more customers will be less willing to pay the same good wages for low quality code.

[throwaway2037]

    > but his customer / employer bought low quality code with lots of tech debt.

Sarcastic reply: Isn't that most tech? Even good (above average) developer produce lots of tech debt and sometimes low quality code.

[b112]

"Webdev" makes me think of wordpress, which is like planting 20 onions in your backyard, and comparing yourself to a farmer with acres of crops.

I can completely believe someone had no idea what they were doing when copy/pasting, and working on wordpress.

[datavirtue]

Yeah, and the business people could not care less. I am on a team taking in millions of dollars from a Delphi Windows app from 1997. Zero tests, horribly mangled business logic embedded in UI handlers. Maintaining that app is not feasible. I'm rebuilding a modern version of it only because it is embarrassing to demo and is such a UX nightmare that our distributor made us commit to a new app.

[falcor84]

>a guy that made a good living ... never a good idea

Arguably the term for a bad idea that works is "good idea"

[digging]

Or maybe "good" and "bad" aren't useful descriptors in this context.

[macksd]

There are plumbers who make a living but whose work results in leaks in people's homes. They're making a living, but I don't consider the way they work "a good idea".

[frumper]

That's fair. From a personal perspective it was a good idea. He regularly had sites get compromised though, so for his customers it wasn't always a good product. He generally kept his customers happy though.

[Cthulhu_]

This is a known issue from like the 2000s where there were so many bad PHP tutorials, a lot of SQL injection and XSS etc came from those.

[JKCalhoun]

At least AI comments their code.