I’ll get this right out of the way first and foremost: if you absolutely need to use ai, run it locally. If you are gpu poor, find a service that hosts models on someone else’s machine, like silly tavern, kobold, lama, or things like artbot if you want to Vincent Van Techbro.
So I’ve been dabbling in farting around with this job stealing, planet vaporizing, technology for a year now and boy are these things nothing but hot air. I’ve tried all the frontier models for daily search engine stuff, questions, advice on stupid stuff like what games to play or what comics to read. Grok, (gag me) Gemini, ChatGPT, Claude, it’s all the same and it’s all shit.
Just yesterday ChatGPT gave me all the wrong issues of spider-man to read and that was the straw that broke the camel’s back and pissed me right off. Grok is just unhinged and wants to erp with you especially if you are a minor, Gemini is SORT OF okay, but that’s because they enshittified google search to make way for it. Claude is the most quirk chungus of the models, you can tell it was programmed to talk like a redditor or a discord moderator and that’s apparently the trick to fooling vc dipshit this is AGI.
Anywho these things are not worth it, but apparently capitalism has decided we are eternally 2 years away from agi so it’s full steam ahead of data centers shoved into the orifice of every closed down strip mall in the decaying rustbelt.
I got a new job in the last year and my boss is … friendly. He owns this small business, so he is what he is. There are a handful of people at this company with decent programming skills. It is not a software company, but has a few internal tools and small web applications. I am one of the programmers. Lately he has gotten the AI bug quite badly. He thinks the old way of software is just going to go away and AI just going to do everything in the future. Honestly, I have used Claude Code to vibe some stuff for work that I hate doing and I can get pretty decent results, but I am sort of operating as a senior developer giving assignments to a junior, reviewing its decisions, giving feedback, giving goals and requirements for maintainability, making sure each iteration is on track, stuff like that. I have a lot of experience so I know what the results should look like. But I also like to write good quality code, so I still write a lot myself.
So because the boss/owner thinks Code is Solved with AI, we’re giving a bunch of people at the company with no programming skills and frankly average at best basic computing skills Claude Code and asking them to try having it write tools to automate parts of their workflow. IT is horrified. I am morbidly curious. Like I said, I can get it to do things because I am guiding it at every step. The boss is simply not going to understand that the shit they’re generating is unmaintainable trash and that code that nobody can understand is a liability. He once showed me something he had it write and it was like a browser mockup of a user interface that obviously did nothing pertaining to the task it needed to do.
He thinks basic software engineering fundamentals are The Old Way. But computer science is real. Code generated by AI is still subject to the same principles as human generated code. No matter how good it gets at generating code, it will still need structure. The potential meanings of a certain quantity of lines of unstructured slop is still intractable for any computer humans could ever potentially build. Code needs to be verifiable in some way and made of components that can be understood individually. Algorithms have provable properties. Not to mention that the end result of success here is a company with no institutional knowledge of the business or skills. There is no reason for such a company to exist. Anyway, I love being essentially told that the entire field of computer science is The Old Way.