@glyph Did you quote post something?
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@glyph the story in four acts we are about to see (just one example, but could be Wikipedia, or anything else as well)
@tymwol @glyph what I'm more concerned about from the Wikipedia side of things is sources that used to be reliable becoming untrustworthy LLM generated garbage (fake citations are popping up in peer reviewed papers a lot more nowadays, for example). There's some news sites that have decided meh who needs human writers. Stuff like that.
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@glyph the story in four acts we are about to see (just one example, but could be Wikipedia, or anything else as well)
Call it a conspiracy, but I'm still convinced that #StackOverflow is dying primarily because the marketing for CodeGen AI demotivated a lot of people to the point that they do not even want to program anything anymore.
I've seen a lot of (what could have been) Juniors avoid doing anything with code because AI will be able to do it in 5 years anyway so there is no point in learning it.And then the large layoffs, so the remaining ones are probably too busy to write answers there
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Call it a conspiracy, but I'm still convinced that #StackOverflow is dying primarily because the marketing for CodeGen AI demotivated a lot of people to the point that they do not even want to program anything anymore.
I've seen a lot of (what could have been) Juniors avoid doing anything with code because AI will be able to do it in 5 years anyway so there is no point in learning it.And then the large layoffs, so the remaining ones are probably too busy to write answers there
@agowa338 @glyph Well, yeah, kind of. Also, StackExchange company themselves pushed AI to SO, so they helped it happen. But... same argument can be made about any other service, for example, if we stop using Wikipedia and switch to LLMs, same thing will happen. If we stop using our brains and switch to LLMs, we would end brain dead.
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@agowa338 @glyph Well, yeah, kind of. Also, StackExchange company themselves pushed AI to SO, so they helped it happen. But... same argument can be made about any other service, for example, if we stop using Wikipedia and switch to LLMs, same thing will happen. If we stop using our brains and switch to LLMs, we would end brain dead.
You missed my point. My point was that people aren't moving towards LLMs but instead stopping to code all together and do other things instead...
If people were actually moving towards LLMs you'd see a lot of threads with people not understanding their own code and having to figure out the complex issues that LLM generated code causes (aka you'd see an uptick in people having to troubleshoot their own AI generated code hallucinations)...
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@glyph I missed the post where you did say that: I now see my response was rather redundant…
@justvanrossum no worries, just enthusiastically agreeing :)
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You missed my point. My point was that people aren't moving towards LLMs but instead stopping to code all together and do other things instead...
If people were actually moving towards LLMs you'd see a lot of threads with people not understanding their own code and having to figure out the complex issues that LLM generated code causes (aka you'd see an uptick in people having to troubleshoot their own AI generated code hallucinations)...
@agowa338 @tymwol @glyph I have been trying to understand this area with precision. I think the kinds of problems the code assistants tend to fail at are the kind that were not generally answerable on StackOverflow in the first place, and which a less experienced programmer might not even recognize or be able to describe well enough to even ask a question.
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Oh and my biggest indicator for my assumption being right is looking at all of the "AI bros" and them after a while shit talking all of the codegen stuff themselves with phrases like "what's the point of all of this when I've to hire a programmer to make it work in the end anyway?" for example...
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Oh and my biggest indicator for my assumption being right is looking at all of the "AI bros" and them after a while shit talking all of the codegen stuff themselves with phrases like "what's the point of all of this when I've to hire a programmer to make it work in the end anyway?" for example...
@agowa338 @tymwol @glyph I've done some experimentation and I found the tools to be extremely powerful in the way having a tracked excavator is more powerful than a hand shovel. Perhaps applying it takes some skill, but it magnifies human effort quite a lot. I've grown quite concerned that many people really underestimate the impact these tools are having and will have on a secular trend of power shifting away from labor.
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@agowa338 @tymwol @glyph I've done some experimentation and I found the tools to be extremely powerful in the way having a tracked excavator is more powerful than a hand shovel. Perhaps applying it takes some skill, but it magnifies human effort quite a lot. I've grown quite concerned that many people really underestimate the impact these tools are having and will have on a secular trend of power shifting away from labor.
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@agowa338 @tymwol @glyph I've done some experimentation and I found the tools to be extremely powerful in the way having a tracked excavator is more powerful than a hand shovel. Perhaps applying it takes some skill, but it magnifies human effort quite a lot. I've grown quite concerned that many people really underestimate the impact these tools are having and will have on a secular trend of power shifting away from labor.
I did some experiments too. I was actually quite happy with the very first version of ChatGPT. But any iteration on it just made it less capable and worse. They optimized it for cost which heavily impacted advanced capabilities that I enjoyed.
Same for codegen. I initially thought of it as advanced Intelisense. But then the more I (tried to) use it it just become more and more annoying as it didn't even manage to suggest the right APIs of the project itself.
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Oh and all of them failed hilariously when I tasked them with doing some negative code edits. Like typical cleanup tasks where you'd replace large chunks of codes with a single API call.
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And I think it also had some Syntax issues. But I don't remember which programming language I tried to use it with. Probably something PowerShell or C# isch but could have been something else too...
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@agowa338 @tymwol @glyph It's interesting, this doesn't at all line up with my experience. The tools I tried were able to translate ~1 paragraph of instruction about a change into a point by point plan with references, correctly enough to need very few edits, and then to execute it in one go. Similarly, to take a pasted error (I tried a few, the interesting one was a infrequently manifesting concurrency problem), diagnose two likely causes, and patch.
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@agowa338 @tymwol @glyph It's interesting, this doesn't at all line up with my experience. The tools I tried were able to translate ~1 paragraph of instruction about a change into a point by point plan with references, correctly enough to need very few edits, and then to execute it in one go. Similarly, to take a pasted error (I tried a few, the interesting one was a infrequently manifesting concurrency problem), diagnose two likely causes, and patch.
@mirth @agowa338 @tymwol sometimes it does amazing things, sometimes it wastes hours of your time. is it a net benefit? unclear. it sure *does stuff* but I haven't yet seen anything that indicates it reliably does enough stuff correctly to be an improvement to efficiency. c.f.: https://blog.glyph.im/2025/08/futzing-fraction.html
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@mirth @agowa338 @tymwol sometimes it does amazing things, sometimes it wastes hours of your time. is it a net benefit? unclear. it sure *does stuff* but I haven't yet seen anything that indicates it reliably does enough stuff correctly to be an improvement to efficiency. c.f.: https://blog.glyph.im/2025/08/futzing-fraction.html
@mirth @agowa338 @tymwol more broadly speaking, there are some strong indications that on balance it isn't delivering on its promise. A recent roundup from @davidgerard: https://pivot-to-ai.com/2025/09/09/if-ai-coding-is-so-good-where-are-the-little-apps/
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@glyph Ow, this "title butchering" is really concerning…
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@mirth @agowa338 @tymwol more broadly speaking, there are some strong indications that on balance it isn't delivering on its promise. A recent roundup from @davidgerard: https://pivot-to-ai.com/2025/09/09/if-ai-coding-is-so-good-where-are-the-little-apps/
@glyph @agowa338 @tymwol @davidgerard Your post is very well framed. I think you can simplify the equation to C/PH because I, W, and E are each approximately zero, and as you point out it's tricky to estimate the other numbers. If we assume for a second well-framed problems have P close to 1.0 (I suspect this is true), the major variability is C/H which I expect to be highly variable dependent similar to how some areas are easier to mechanically test than others.
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@glyph @agowa338 @tymwol @davidgerard Your post is very well framed. I think you can simplify the equation to C/PH because I, W, and E are each approximately zero, and as you point out it's tricky to estimate the other numbers. If we assume for a second well-framed problems have P close to 1.0 (I suspect this is true), the major variability is C/H which I expect to be highly variable dependent similar to how some areas are easier to mechanically test than others.
@glyph @agowa338 @tymwol @davidgerard What I am most concerned about are what in the post you categorize as harm to the humans and 2nd order effects. I think these get to be much more concerning as the underlying tools get more effective, and I'm not sure how to even mitigate those problems. If we look at how mass media and social media have melted people's brains a bit...
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@glyph the story in four acts we are about to see (just one example, but could be Wikipedia, or anything else as well)
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@agowa338 @glyph @tymwol @davidgerard Is there data on that? Acknowledging that this is anecdote, I see non-programmers in my extended work and social world trying to build little apps for whatever personal purpose that I don't think they would have attempted a couple years ago. I don't think most of them even know what StackOverflow is. (and their inspiration may be all about marketing rather than actual experience, so we will see how they fare)
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@aeva *exaggerated hair shoulder toss* don't hate me because I'm beautiful!
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@luca a proposito, che ne pensi di questa idea? https://news.dyne.org/rethinking-r-i-funding-opting-for-continuity/
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@informapirata @informatica @filippodb
Fortunatamente l'iniziativa è dell'unità CNECT/E3 (che è molto collaborativa), e non CNECT/C3.
Con la C3 abbiamo avuto un'esperienza a dir poco surreale e sicuramente poco incoraggiante per l'open-source:
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@Sirchrism le consultazioni sono uno strumento frequentemente adottato dall'Unione
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This sign was a crowd favorite; people kept pointing me to it. The woman holding the sign hold me she was fine with being in the photo.
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Look what I found
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@rl_dane I once dropped my work Thinkpad down two flights of concrete stairs. Still worked. They're indestructible. 🔥
