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by psyclobe 201 days ago
> and I've even seen unit tests > that mock the actual function > under test.

Yup. Ai is so fickle it’ll do anything to accomplish the task. But ai is just a tool it’s all about what you allow it to do. Can’t blame ai really.

4 comments

In fairness I’ve seen humans make that mistake. We had a complete outage in the testing of a product once and a couple of tests were still green. Turns it they tested nothing and never had.
> In fairness I’ve seen humans make that mistake

These were (formerly) not the kinds of humans who regularly made these kinds of mistakes.

Leverage.

Those slops already existed, but AI scales them by an order of magnitude.

I guess the same can be said of any technology, but AI is just a more powerful tool overall. Using languages as an example - lets say duck typing allowed a 10% productivity boost, but also introduced 5% more mistakes/problems. AI (claims to) allow a 10x productivity boost, but also ~10x mistakes/problems.

I've had Claude try to pull the same trick on me just yesterday. It will also try to cheat and apply a "fix" that just masks the real problem.
If a tool makes it easy to shoot yourself in the foot, then it's not a good tool. See C++.
I'm no apologist but this statement doesn't ring for me. It's easy to shock yourself with electricity, is it a bad tool?
Electricity isn't a tool, it's nature. An unenclosed electrical plug which you had to be really careful when handling would be a bad tool, yes.

A tool is something designed by humans. We don't get to design electricity, but we do get to design the systems we put in place around it.

Gravity isn't a tool, but stairs are, and there are good and bad stairs.

Appreciate the perspective.

Of course it's bad. It's new. But it won't always be either of those things. I think "bad" is relative assessment and based on a build-up of knowledge, often over decades.

Electrical plugs and stairs are "good" only because that knowledge has been discovered and has been regulated. Expecting a tool to be literally and metaphorically fool-proof immediately upon discovery strikes me as pretty disingenuous.

In the case of AI, the most anti-AI crowd are often vehement with their fingers in their ears saying "it's not good and never will be, and shouldn't exist." To be fair, the pro-AI crowd are often raving as if all the kinks had already been worked out.

A knife then.
Most tools are dangerous in the hands of the inept or the careless. Don’t run with scissors.
A gun is a good tool easy to shoot yourself in the foot with