Is llm-generated code going to render Windows completely unusable and completely unmaintainable?
Nah, just nearly unusable and nearly unmaintainable.
We can tell, windows 11 is absolute ass
The frontend is ass but under the hood it’s still the same old Windows. Microsoft’s unwillingness to make major changes under the hood keeps it usable for the most part once you disable all the spyware and bloatware (or as much as you can anyway).
Obviously you shouldn’t be using it at all if you can afford to and are knowledgeable enough.
Windows 11 is already being built that way
Yeah. We know.
His point is that manually typing code line by line, in an editor, is becoming the least interesting part of the job.
Disagree. This is the most rewarding part. This is where your ideas are transformed into real solutions. Personally, it’s also where I am able to reason about a problem fully, develop a complete understanding, and realize mistakes in my initial thinking.
At least 1/4 of the reason I quit my programming job is doing all the shit that WASN’T coding. Yeah a lot of it sucks (Like remembering exact syntax or worrying about some bs that humans shouldn’t have to like deref’ing a null or some shit). But 90% of the fun of coding was figuring out the puzzles. Applying the right solution. Figuring out little tricks.
Which of these do these guys like to do? Code review in general. Some guy submitting a rejection of your shit because he wasn’t in the call where we realized “oh this is how we have to do it for 30 reasons”. Figuring out why your shit won’t compile. Writing build files. Fixing build files because windows and linux both suck and can’t decide on basics (or our tools wouldn’t do shit automatically suddenly, despite them doing it when I first got there). Being told to rewrite your code and make it worse because “well we need it simple, not good” (the solution you presented isn’t complex, none of the code I ever wrote was beyond a C student). Sitting in a meeting for some reason. Being told by customers that they need something they said they didn’t. Waiting for some tool to finish that takes 6 hours to run sometimes. Making the same test for the 30th time. Filling out paperwork/“agile” “story” shit.
Like I haven’t touched a single coding assistant beyond auto/tab complete. (And I’m not plugging in “claude” into it, just using whatever shit vscode or w/e is defaulting to 95% of the time.) No matter how good they are, I don’t see the point. Maybe some specific llm/““ai”” tool could review my code. But the actual CODING, the writing, was never the really hard part. It was the design, working modern design with legacy code/reality, and not wanting to shoot your pc for failing to load a file and failing a build.
It’s making me realize that there’s an entirely different type of programmers who aren’t doing it to solve problems. I still don’t quite get their angle though. Solving problems is what makes programming interesting.
For a lot of people it doesn’t matter if the work is interesting or not, as long as they get paid for it.
This is basically all of my coworkers, and I’ve burnt so many of my spoons I’m unable to make myself program outside of work anymore.
i dropped out but i always liked the thinking about the problem and hated actually writing code. i blame english class.
I disagree, it’s the “a-ha” moment when a piece of code just works and the thing you wanted as output is now in the screen.
The worst part is being stuck with some weird error and spending hours not getting anywhere because you didn’t say the magic words in the way the compiler liked.
But have you thought about the excitement of being able to find another way to record and sell customer data? Or maybe how to round about violate people’s rights for money?
This era of Microsoft made me finally make the full switch to Linux and I’m really happy about it. Linux is just great now.
We’re all wondering why all these updates keep breaking vital functions?
Totally tracks. Unfortunately it might just be the autism in me, but I’m noticing that it’s quickly becoming more acceptable to ship malformed/nonsensical code as long as it “just works.” lol gone are the days when attention to detail is desirable trait it seems.
I pray everyday that this mindset causes Silicon Valley to go to shit
I don’t think the suits have ever really given a shit about code quality unless it had a downstream affect on profits, but the slop machines have definitely accelerated the trend. Getting okayed to pay off tech debt has been a struggle as long as I’ve been in the industry.
Tbf I have an LG Rumor Touch and the OS on that thing was sent out on a “just write enough to make it work” mentality.
It’s a miracle the phone even boots. My little spec checking program is able to list files but not open/create any. I know my program isn’t at fault because it works fine on my other phones!
LG Rumor Touch
CDMA phone software was hell. These devices were always an afterthought to manufacturers since they were contractually obligated to produce devices (for Verizon) but CDMA networks were only ever about 10% of the global market share at their peak. R&D costs for these devices were almost never possible to pay off unless a device happened to be Motorola Droid levels of popular. Typically they were heavily based on a GSM phone that actually worked and thus were the hardware equivalent of a really bad video game port.
Even Apple didn’t bother to put effort into the CDMA iPhones during the 4/s and 5/s generations. The devices lacked roaming capability, couldn’t use data or text while on a call, and were consistently buggier than their GSM counterparts.
I don’t know what to tell you other than that your LG device was a cursed product made to be cursed, because it had to interact with a cursed network. Trying to get stuff to work with the CDMA network almost always meant that some other major parts of the OS’s code would break.
Yeah I collect old phones so thankfully I never had to actually use the CDMA network.
I will say I have a Samsung SPH-M330 (technically two, but one’s a “PLS” model from… somewhere). It’s also a CDMA phone and runs the standard Qualcomm BREW operating system.
…It’s actually pretty well coded lmfao. My silly little projects haven’t run into any egregious crap. They ask the OS to do something… And it does it! There’s some silly security vulnerabilities though. Probably helped it was a budget phone Samsung spat out so there likely wasn’t 24/7 crunch time enforced on the team that made the phone.
The LG Voyager is in a less glamorous position as, while all the OS system calls work, there’s multiple security vulnerabilities that give off 2nd hand embarrassment, and everything runs in “Supervisor” mode, so you can read/write to pretty much EVERYTHING in memory.
Does mean you can twiddle around with the DRAM timings though, which is pretty dope. One of the adjustable PLLs drives something related to the “GPU”/LCD driving stuff. Sadly no CPU overclocking, that doesn’t seem possible.
Do you have a Nokia N95? N-gage?
I kinda really liked the Lumia Windows phones even though I never used one. (and probably would have hated it)
I had a Samsung Blackjack when I was a kid! Believe it ran Windows Mobile 5.0 or something.
Nice phone! Less nice was the bit where AT&T pressured Samsung into not including Wifi on the device. I hate “Mother Bell”.
Wish I still had that phone.
Tbh it was kind of unacceptable that so many devices lacked wifi. Pretty much every phone that released after 2006 should have just included a wifi chip.
It absolutely was unacceptable. Pisses me off.
I found a YouTube link in your comment. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:
That… explains a lot
Actually it doesn’t, it was shitware even before LLMs
And it shows
If you frowned at that, remember that Linus Torvalds also supported AI-code in Linux, saying: “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.”
They always cite this and not Greg KH (co-maintainer with Torvalds) saying that a third of all LLM submissions for security bugs are dead ends and trying to restrict the overwhelming amount of machine generated patches which have only doubled or tripled their normal workload. Or that these models are being used to review a immensely large C codebase where blinking the wrong way means someone can pwn an entire system in 100 lines of code.
It’s because they’re fucking posers and should take the penguin operating system that they’ve purposefully underfunded out their mouth. AI boosters need to be purged.
Microsoft is magnitudes worse at using “AI”, but I still question whether it’s a worthwhile tool. I wonder how long it will be before someone gets a little lazy and vibe codes severe vulnerabilities into the Linux kernel. Yes, humans can also make mistakes, but there is more accountability. There is reason behind their decisions, at least a little more than a pseudorandom number generator.
My work relies on an LMS. During their dev con, they showed off how they are building using spec plans and devops, and ux devs and so on all together then hand it off to LLMs. It sounded impressive — well, they’ve been delayed two months in a row.
Isn’t this accepted as true by virtually every non-FOSS software engineer, or are the devs at my workplace particularly drunk on the kool-aid?
My coworkers by and large dislike using LLMs because they can feel their skills atrophying from disuse but at the same time the pressure from above to comply and use “AI” as much as possible is overwhelming. Layoffs target those who speak against uncritical adoption of LLMs as the future, and those who are insufficiently accelerated by AI. That metric is judged by how many pull requests you deploy to prod per day, so everyone is now using LLMs to write hundred-liner PRs with a subtask for each one and slamming the reviewers to get them merged so they look good in the (easily gamed) metrics.
It’s wide spread but not universal.
Unfortunately both can be true at once. The industry seems pretty fucked. I wanna get out but I have literally no other skills that could pay for my continued existence.
I don’t think the industry is fucked, AI is still just a tool and you would need someone to guide it. The job will shift from writing to guiding and tuning. Also you will still need manual coding for critical applications. I honestly think I should have went with electrical engineering. Look on the bright side we seem to be heading to the same future as Wall-E
Yeah, shit fucking sucks. And everyone I know in meatspace is pretending it’s fine while I’m too burnt out to develop other skills and too out of shape to do manual labor.
