MudMan

I don’t know, some of these guys have acccess to a LOT of code, and even more debate about what those good codebases entail.

I think the other issue is more relevant. Even 128K tokens is not enough for something really big, and the memory and processing costs for that do skyrocket. People are trying to work around it with draft models and summarization models, so they try to pick out the relevant parts of a codebase in one pass and then base their code generation just on that, and… I don’t think that’s going to work reliably at scale. The more chances you give a language model to lose their goddamn mind and start making crap up unsupervised the more work it’s going to be to take what they spit out and shape it into something reasonable.

I think the effects of it are… a bit more nuanced than that, perhaps?

I can definitely tell there are places where I’m plugging knowledge gaps fast. I just didn’t know how to do a thing, I did it AI-assisted once or twice and I don’t need to be AI assisted anymore because I understood how it works now. Cool, that. And I wouldn’t have learned it from traditional sources because asking in public support areas would have led to being told I suck and should read the documentation and/or to a 10 video series on Youtube where you can watch some guy type for seven hours.

But there are also places where AI assistance is never going to fill the blanks for me, you know? Larger trends, good habits, technical details or best practices that just aren’t going to come up from keeping a smart autocorrect that can explain why something was wrong.

Honestly, in those spaces the biggest barrier is still what it was: I don’t necessarily want to “progress” on those areas because I don’t need it and it’s not my job. I can automate a couple things I didn’t know how to automate before, and that’s alright. For the rest, I will probably live with the software someone else has made when it exists.

The problem is hubris, right? I know what I don’t know and which parts I care to learn. That’s fine. Coding assistant LLMs are a valid tool for someone like that to slightly expand their reach and I presume there’s a lot of people like that. It’s the random entrepeneurs who have been sold by big corpos that they don’t need a real programmer to build their billion-dollar app anymore that are going to crash and burn and may take some of the software industry down with them.

Fully agreed. Everybody is betting it’ll get there eventually and trying to jockey for position being ahead of the pack, but at the moment there isn’t any guarantee that it’ll get to where the corpos are assuming it already is.

Which is not the same as not having better autocomplete/spellcheck/“hey, how do I format this specific thing” tools.

Yeah, the AI corpos are putting a lot of effort into parsing big contexts right now. I suspect because they think (probably correctly) that coding is one of the few areas where they could get paid if their AIs didn’t have the memory of a goldfish.

And absolutely agreed that making sure the FOSS alternatives keep pace is going to be important. I’m less concerned about hating the entire concept than I am about making sure they don’t figure out a way to keep every marginally useful application behind a corporate ecosystem walled garden exclusively.

We’ve been relatively lucky in that the combination of PR brownie points and general crappiness of the commercial products has kept an incentive to provide a degree of access, but I have zero question that the moment one of these things actually makes money they’ll enshittify the freely available alternatives they control and clamp down as much as possible.

Sorta kinda. It depends on where you put that line. I think because online drama is fun when we got to the “vibe coding” name we moved to the assumption that all AI assistance is vibe coding, but in practice there’s the percentage of what you do that you know how to do, the percentage you vibe code because you can’t figure it out yourself off the top of your head and the percentage you just can’t do without researching because the LLM can’t do it effectively or the stuff it can do is too crappy to use as part of something else.

I think if the assumption is you should just “git gud” and not take advantage of that grey zone where you can sooort of figure it out by asking an AI instead of going down a Google rabbit hole then the performative AI hate is setting itself up for defeat, because there’s a whole bunch of skill ranges where that is actually helpful for some stuff.

If you want to deny that there’s a difference between that and just making code soup by asking a language model to build you entire pieces of software… well, then you’re going to be obviously wrong and a bunch of AI bros are going to point at the obvious way you’re wrong and use that to pretend you’re wrong about the whole thing.

This is basic online disinformation playbook stuff and I may suck at coding, but I know a thing or two about that. People with progressive ideas should get good at beating those one of these days, because that’s a bad outcome.

It’s pretty random in terms of what is or isn’t doable.

For me it’s a big performance booster because I genuinely suck at coding and don’t do too much complex stuff. As a “clean up my syntax” and a “what am I missing here” tool it helps, or at least helps in figuring out what I’m doing wrong so I can look in the right place for the correct answer on something that seemed inscrutable at a glance. I certainly can do some things with a local LLM I couldn’t do without one (or at least without getting berated by some online dick who doesn’t think he has time to give you an answer but sure has time to set you on a path towards self-discovery).

How much of a benefit it’s for a professional I couldn’t tell. I mean, definitely not a replacement. Maybe helping read something old or poorly commented fast? Redundant tasks on very commonplace mainstream languages and tasks?

I don’t think it’s useless, but if you ask it to do something by itself you can’t trust that it’ll work without singificant additional effort.

Sorry, but no. My current path is

C:\Users\<user>\Documents

I literally just navigated to my documents folder in a explorer window and copy pasted the path here. I swear I’m not making this up.

I’m pretty sure that these days syncing your documents folder with OneDrive is two separate opt-ins: one to log in to OneDrive at all and one to select whether to sync your libraries.

I am not going to set up a VM just to check this, but I have multiple Windows machines in operation on Win10 and Win11 at home right now and none of them are syncing my libraries. That ranges from five year old Win10 installs to Win11 installs as recent as a couple of months ago.

For the record, I don’t think you’re crazy either. There’s definitely something baked into the install we’re doing differently or some version difference or whatever. It’s surprisingly hard to suss this out at this point, since there’s a fairly complex set of could-backed choices, first time setup choices and maybe even regional changes, I’m not sure. The one interesting, kinda shocking takeaway is how differently our machines can be set up based on probably some checkmark we each set up differently once ages ago or whatever the hell this is.

See, then you fell for a dark pattern, because I refused to use it on first boot and there is no One Drive folder in this brand new computer I’m currently using at all. It isn’t the standard My Documents folder, it doesn’t have a folder at all and the application icon isn’t on my system tray.

That’s why I was asking about the Win10 install being different, but I’ve installed Win 11 twice this year, once in a computer for personal use that currently doesn’t have any One Drive folder at all and one for work where One Drive is logged in to a work account (along with Office 365) and it only syncs that work folder, not the personal folders, photos and whatnot. You can absolutely have a Windows (11, anyway) install with no One Drive synced to anything at all, or even running.

It sucks that Windows designs its install process as a dark pattern-ladden attempt to get you to sign up for crap, but you can reject all of it. Maybe I do it enough I have the habit and I underestimate how hard it is to choose what you actually want. I guess that’s the equivalent to having a working Windows 98 key memorized in the early 2000s.

No, you’re thinking about the Microsoft Account login (which still has workarounds but whatever). OneDrive needs to have its own separate login, in case you, like me, have a separate account for work or need to have multiple One Drive accounts or if you have paid One Drive, 365 and whatnot.

So you can absolutely log in to Windows with a MS account and log in to One Drive with your work account… or not log in at all and just not have it running, which is what I do.

I have installed Win11 on a new computer build this year. I promise I’m looking at my system tray and there is zero One Drive icons on it. No One Drive folder in my Windows file explorer, either.

I’m confused. Are you logged in to OneDrive?

I mean, don’t get me wrong, I loathe OneDrive. It’s the flakiest, most unreliable piece of software in MS’s current end-user-focused stable…

…but it still needs you to log in. If you log out from OneDrive it does nothing. It’s a separate login from the Windows login, too, if you’ve used one of those to install Windows.

I genuinely haven’t used Win10 in enough time I don’t recall if it gave you more notifications to re-enable it, but after refusing to log in and taking OneDrive out of my startup tasks I don’t think it’s come up again on any of my Windows devices.

I think this thread is meant to flatter programmers and make linguists and sociologists extremely angry.