Seeing many people using AI to prototyping and ordering boards, I am curios if JLCPCB, PCBWAY and the other prototyping services has upticks in their orders. It would be great to see some numbers.
It’s not a joke. My goals in life were all based around developing mastery for a meaningful purpose, and now there’s no need. What keeps me going is that at least I have some consumerist goals like understanding consciousness and physics or mathematics.
Anybody who thinks that way is just in doing so, and I can think that way for 50% of the time, but it’s difficult to maintain that without extrinsic motivators. When the computer can make a more compelling experience of any kind for another person I can’t help but feel my pursuits are not worthwhile.
I have been using Gemini, Claude, ChatGPT, Grok (whatever is available) to create esp32 boards. As I am very new into this field, I mostly use them to query about schematics, ICs, routing, kicad, electronic foundations and so on. They are great help and provide me invaluable advice. However It's always better to validate one's result with others. I have many cases where they would provide me catastrophic advice and a second opinion fixed it.
It's always fun to get apologies from LLMS. I love it.
I'll check the newer models as soon as possible to see how much improvement they provide.
"As a professional developer, I would find it very frustrating to have to debug someone else's code and also be held responsible for that code." Are you really a professional programmer? A very basic responsibility for many professionals are maintaining someone else's code.
What do you mean by "someone else's code"? Because, if I am taking responsibility for it, it is not "someone else's," it is—at least in part—my code. I am not in a position to say "this is someone else's," professionally speaking.
I cannot speak for the author of the article, but for my own part, I find it frustrating to take responsibility for code which no one else believes they should own. This can come about when professionals abdicate their responsibility because "AI wrote it," i.e., it's "someone else's code."
- When you are working in a team, you always take responsibility of the code your team mates has written, (review, maintain, bugfix, extend, refactor..)
- Sometimes organizations reorg and you land in owning already written code by some other team (whole takeover)
- Some other times you take a position to maintain and fix, refactor, bugfix an unknown codebase. You will work on this and leave. So it is never your code. (can be whole takeover, can be temporary ownership)
That makes sense. For me, being "responsible," becoming the new "owner," and "debugging" code which I did not write, can each be frustrating.
With regard to LLM generated code, the frustration often comes from there not being a previous "someone" who had been responsible for the code; or rather, the original author was in my opinion, irresponsible, and I must assume responsibility.
To your earlier point, I think your examples can be frustrating regardless of whether or not you're a professional—it being a regular part of the job notwithstanding.
That's my point. It should not be frustrating. It's part of the job. A responsibility a professional should be ready for.
On the part of vibe coded code, it can be a "bad code base" and readily so it's very understandable that reading it can be frustrating. However it could also be very well written. LLM written code can be considered a codebase that was written by a large portion of the developer community all together. It's not coming from some software. Software curated that from human written code one word at a time.
The interpretation of the quote which resonated with me is that, in my experience as a professional code writer, I find it frustrating to take responsibility for code which was written by someone who themselves did not engineer the code responsibly. In my experience, LLMs have made irresponsible software development significantly easier, faster, and cheaper relative to their impact on responsible software development. This is frustrating, especially given my belief that LLMs are one of the most significant tools we have today.
I don't think we agree on the definition of "professional" as it does or does not relate to what one feels (let alone what one should or should not feel), exclusive of what one does. I.e., I believe one can feel frustrated whilst also being professionally responsible... they can also feel frustrated and act irresponsibly, or any combination of feelings and actions. Part of professionalism to me is, in fact, performing one's responsibilities regardless of what one feels.
Perhaps what "feel frustrating" needs to be agreed upon. I took it as I would not like to do this as I feel it to be kind of distasteful, not as I would take this but the code would be confusing.
For me it was related to some benign brain mass'es arm touching my ear nerve. This causes me some hearing loss, and also it was causing tinnitus. However I realized tinnitus directly correlated with my blood pressure. So If I control my blood pressure I don't have it.
AI writes faster, so the rate it incurs tech debt is proportionally higher. However it's ability to have large context kept on memory compared to humans is also a key component fighting against it. These are occasionally forgotten when code quality of AI for large code bases are discussed. So Yes I think humans also build spaghetti, but as they write slower they get to the same place a lot later. However humans can't correct it, or can't correct it fast enough. AI can.
It does somewhat depend on the application size. Seems to me that for regular software projects (that aren't enterprise SaaS) a good programmer will create better software than Claude. Maybe the dehumanizing way to say it is that humans have more efficient/improved retrieval. The amount of time I see repeat code for no reason, or code/context that has been obviously missed is absurd.
That's not enough as the abstraction of hardware and software has increased exponentially. Not only that expectations are more. Just building for a definitive set of single configuration is not enough. Any software needs to run on Amd64, RiscV, Arm64, has to be containerised, and run on OsX, Windows, Linux.. Nowadays you would need more and more knowledge/experience to be able to function without external help.
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