AI isn’t ready to replace human coders for debugging, researchers say
Even when given access to tools, AI agents can’t reliably debug software.
Unsurprisingly, it's necessary to understand a problem to solve it - just like the proverbial infinite monkey would in theory produce the entire body of work of Shakespeare given enough time, in reality, only Shakespeare managed to write proper Shakespeare the first time out.
AI is the infinite monkey of coding. I, as a senior developer, have spend entirely too many hours of my working life fixing code written by monkeys, and I have already had to correct AI code (thankfully small and generated by a colleague who promptly apologized and decided to do his homework and study the problem at hand instead of winging it with Crapilot).
But get this: Shakespeare was an ape that did in fact produce all of Shakespeare's works. 🤯
AI coding is an improvement on infinite monkey Shakespeare in the sense that it only types whole words from a dictionary. Although that dictionary has been built from a mix of classic literature and SNS posts.
I am indeed lucky because the company I work for cares about its employees. It's literally written in the company statutes: the company exists to make money of course, but first and foremost to serve its workforce and the community, and takes decisions to maximize the well-being and the personal growth of the employees and the community.
We took an honest look at including AI in our workflow, but we decided it wasn't worth the social destruction. Only a few employees use it - mostly the marketdroids to generate illustrations on the sales literature.
I am aware that this is a rare type of company and I cherish that job.
Consider yourself lucky. My boss doesn't have any idea what a llm "ai" is, but he's pushing us to use it, at every opportunity he can find.
Forget about telling him it's bullshitting code, that's just a model that it's guessing the next word... It's magic for him.
Once, he showed me how cool "prompting" was for something that he generated. It took him 10 minutes to "prompt" it, while doing it would have taken 5.
"Yeah, but it's getting better every year".
Living in the promise of a brighter future; I am still waiting for all the cancer cures and the flying cars...
infinite monkey. I love it. borrowed.
As an engineer, I’m not looking forward to the entire generation(s?) of vibe coders who couldn’t explain what a byte is and the ways one might be stored on a system.
Manual memory management is already relatively niche and not needed for most programming tasks
A byte is what you eat obv bruh
Ai isn't replacing coding either.
No, but it constraining the labor market. AI is a hammer that employers are enthusiastically wielding to “discipline” labor, and to put developers “in their place” and accustomed to asking for and accepting less.
AI (and the threat of AI) is being used to end the days of developers enjoying high pay and strong market leverage. Investors and c-levels don’t care about the craft of software, they care about profit. Labor costs are an impediment to more profit.
If one senior level developer can be replaced with AI plus two or three entry level devs in India cranking out shit that barely works but still sells, at half the cost, then you know what will happen.
They do not care about you, your job, or your craft. You are seen as a tool in their designs, and you have had too much power for too long. They want to dispense with as many expensive, opinionated knowledge workers as quickly as possible. Even AI that half works is better than a competent but uppity expensive employee, from their POV.
I agree, this is the real impact of Ai. It won't replace developers, but make them work for less money. But I actually think real programmers will be even more needed in the future, if there is ton of bad code written by non coders with Ai or even by real coders with the support of Ai. That means we get more code, that needs to be reviewed and worked on by real programmers.
Therefore on one hand it will lessen the money earned for real programmers, on the other hand they will be more useful and needed in the future.
"we'll all be peasants by 2027" 🥴
Don't worry, it is ready to replace human coders for writing bug.
rebugging, if you will
I wouldn't trust current models to do any real work. Aaand I think humans will be cheaper than LLMs for a long time to come. Ultimately all costs are labor and if you need to give the power plant people (running the plant, mining the fuel, building the plant) sandwiches to get them to provide power for your llm, you're probably better off giving a human programmer sandwiches instead.
The ai bubble pops when investors decide they want dividends instead of speculative gains.
they will anyway.
and fuck them tbh, let it ruin their codebases.
And presumably debugging is a lot more work as AI is just a fancy template lookup and has no idea what it is doing.
Basically quickly generate crap code then hope you can debug it into something acceptable.
If you want debug code, then hopefully it isn't written by an Ai agent. Otherwise good luck (besides simple functions or code blocks off course).
Not really for writing yet either. Its an assistant. It can write code sections and comments that then have to be reviewed and edited a bit. Rather than a coder having to go back and forth between a search engine as they write they are more likely to be able to stay in the ide.
If you google stuff all the time you have serious problems.
Have you actually worked in a programming role before? Googling things is absolutely the norm. Most people don't know every single in and out of every library/framework they're using, especially when learning new ones. This goes double for more complex or sprawling frameworks where it may be less than obvious how to perform a particular task from the documentation alone or when running into undocumented limitations or bugs (although admittedly an in-IDE assistant won't be too useful for that anyway).
Nope, it's a hell of a good assistant tho (according to my friend who uses it daily for coding).
