The company I work for has recently mandated that we must start using AI tools in our workflow and is tracking our usage, so I've been experimenting with it a lot lately.

In my experience, it's worse than useless when it comes to debugging code. The class of errors that it can solve is generally simple stuff like typos and syntax errors — the sort of thing that a human would solve in 30 seconds by looking at a stack trace. The much more important class of problem, errors in the business logic, it really really sucks at solving.

For those problems, it very confidently identifies the wrong answer about 95% of the time. And if you're a dev who's desperate enough to ask AI for help debugging something, you probably don't know what's wrong either, so it won't be immediately clear if the AI just gave you garbage or if its suggestion has any real merit. So you go check and manually confirm that the LLM is full of shit which costs you time... then you go back to the LLM with more context and ask it to try again. It's second suggestion will sound even more confident than the first, ("Aha! I see the real cause of the issue now!") but it will still be nonsense. You go waste more time to rule out the second suggestion, then go back to the AI to scold it for being wrong again.

Rinse and repeat this cycle enough times until your manager is happy you've hit the desired usage metrics, then go open your debugging tool of choice and do the actual work.

How are they at debugging? In a silo, they’re shit.

I’ve been using one LLM to debug the other this past week for a personal project, and it can be a bit tedious sometimes, but it eventually does a decent enough job. I’m pretty much vibe coding things that are a bit out of my immediate knowledge and skill set, but I know how they’re supposed to work. For example, I’ve got some python scripts using rekognition to scan photos for porn or other explicit stuff before they get sent to an s3 bucket. After that happens, there’s now a dashboard that’s going to give me results on how many images were scanned and then marked as either acceptable or flagged as inappropriate. After a threshold of too many inappropriate images being sent in, it’ll shadowban them from sending any more dick pics in.

For someone that’s never taken a coding course, I’m relatively happy with the results I’m getting so far. Granted, this may be small potatoes for someone with an actual development background; but as someone that’s been working adjacent to those folks for several years, I’m happy with the output.

Working just fine. It one shot a kodi tv channel addon for me last week end. Used it to integrate kofax into docusign. Building 2 blazor apps one new one an upgrade. Used it to create a stack of mc servers for the kids with a dashboard of statuses and control switches. My son is working on his own mc mod with it. Use it almost daily for random file organization and management scripts. Using it to clean uo my media library meta data. Anytime i have to do something to more than 5 or so files i pull it up and ask for a script.

Its a tool like any other. There will be people who adapt and people who fail to. Just like we had with computers the internet. It zeems to be long forgotten now but literally ALL of these anti ai arguments were made against computers and the internet 30_50 years ago. Very similar ones were made when books and writing became common place as well.

You’re making a great analogy with the 3D printing of a house.

However, if we consider the 3D printed house scenario; that skilled craftsman is now able to do things on his own that he would have needed a team for in the past. Most, if not all, of the less skilled members of that team are not getting any experience within the craft at that point. They’re no longer necessary when one skilled person can now do things on their own.

What happens when the skilled and highly experienced craftsmen that use AI as a supplemental tool (and subsequently earn all the work) eventually retire, and there’s been no juniors or mid-levels for a while? No one is really going to be qualified without having had exposure to the trade for several years.

I've found them useful, sometimes, but nothing like a fraction of what the hype would suggest.

They're not adequate replacements for code reviewers, but getting an AI code review does let me occasionally fix a couple of blunders before I waste another human's time with them.

I've also had the occasional bit of luck with "why am I getting this error" questions, where it saved me 10 minutes of digging through the code myself.

"Create some test data and a smoke test for this feature" is another good timesaver for what would normally be very tedious drudge work.

What I have given up on is "implement a feature that does X" questions, because it invariably creates more work than it saves. Companies selling "type in your app idea and it'll write the code" solutions are snake-oil salesman.

I've only found two effective uses for them. Every time I tried them otherwise they fell flat and took me longer that it would have to write the code myself.

The first was a greenfield personal project where I let code quality wane since I was the only person maintaining it, and wanted to test LLMs. The other was to write highly repeative data tests where the model can simply type faster than me.

Anything that requires writing code that needs to be maintained by multiple people or systems older than 2 years, it has fallen completely flat. In cases like that I spend more time telling the LLM it is doing it wrong, it would have taken me less time to write the code in the first place. In 95% of cases, I am still faster than an LLM at solving a problem and writing the code.

I’m not a “software engineer” but a lot of people that don’t work within tech would probably call me one.

I’m in Cloud Engineering, but came from the sys/network admin and ops side of things rather than starting off in dev or anything like that.

Up until about 5 years ago, I really only knew Powershell and a little bit of bash. I’ve gotten up to speed in a lot of things but never officially learned python, js, go or any other real development language that would be useful to me. I’ve spent way more time focusing on getting good with IaC, and probably more of the SRE type stuff.

In my particular situation, LLMs are incredibly useful. It’s fair to say that I use them daily now. I’ve had it convert bash scripts to python for me very quickly. I don’t know python but now that I’m able to look at a python script next to my bash; I’m picking up on stuff a lot faster. I’m using Lambda way more often as a result.

Also, there’s a lot of mundane filling out forms shit that I delegate to an LLM. I don’t want to spend my time filling out a form that I know no one is actually going to read. F it, I’ll have the AI write a report for an AI. It’s dumb as shit, but that’s the world today.

opendocument.app/

github.com/opendocument-app/Op…

I've used this a couple times. Seemed okay

View OpenOffice and LibreOffice documents on the go.

It's the first and best OpenOffice and LibreOffice document viewer for Android and iOS!

^{OpenDocument Reader}

Every single time I try out Linux it’s been a shitshow. Stuff doesn’t work, drive encryption requires multiple passwords to boot up. Updates that fail.

Windows just works. Only apple is more consistent.

Not so much the user experience, but I'm not aware of any software that doesn't work with Microsoft, except for ones developed by Apple.

With the latest version of Windows, it's not even a question as to whether a given piece of software will run.

the windows just works argument actually refers to the fact that it's consistent.

If you have a problem with the desktop, nobody needs to ask you which de you use, or which parts you have substituted out. You have a graphics problem, nobody asks if wayland or x11. You have a problem with audio, nobody asks you whether you have pipewire-pulse installed and to use pipewire. Shit's the same everywhere.

I say this as an arch linux user. The choice we all love, is actually a detriment to the average non-power user.

Then i don't know what you're doing with your computer, but every time i use linux, all those things that are "awesome and just work on linux" somehow still have lots of annoying gotchas that waste too much of my time.

I've got some nice linux servers running that i'm really happy with. But once you go for the linux desktop, it's just a world of pain compared to windows, no matter how you look at it. I'm more than experienced enough to get it running in the end, but claiming that linux "just works" is delusional...

Just the fact of how the ecosystem is fractured (which is also mentioned in the article here, with running a debian package on fedora), is already something that'll make it too complicated for a lot of people to handle. And even the things "that just work", just don't. For example, i've got a steamdeck like device now, with bazzite (steamos like OS). Yes, it's amazing at running windows games in linux. I heard so many people say how with proton "running windows games on linux just works". If you stick to the ultra popular games, it for sure does. Go to a game that's a bit older or lesser known, and no it isn't. Make time to figure out settings to get it to run, tinker with controller mappings, and in the end, it might just still not work. And pretty much everything on linux feels that way, the initial impression is decent. If you stay on the safe path, it'll work pretty well. Do something a bit less common: you're on your own.

And that's its commonly accepted for trolls to blame the user, and be like "it's free, so accept it the way it is" when someone dares to ask questions or .... even.... (do i dare say it?).... complain.... Doesn't make for the most constructive environment...

Linux has achieved many great things, but the linux desktop sure has its use if you're willing to spend your time on it, but acting as if it's a better experience than the windows desktop is just delusional. There's no other way to put it.

Put any person who has zero computer experience in front of a windows computer or Linux computer and I doubt they would say the windows computer just works and the Linux one doesn't.

In my experience, usually with Linux they have less problems and it's easier to use. Until they need an application that only works on Windows.

I honestly don’t understand why I would ever write up or share a Microsoft document.

Corporate execs literally cum over MS's next big thing. A lot of companies use MS-based infrastructure and applications.

My work just issued me a Surface 7 a few weeks ago (RIP my former Thinkpad T15 G2), and while it's nice, the fucking copilot key is driving me absolutely insane. I can't disable it unless I turn on "Fn Lock" which switches it's function to open up the Context menu (i.e. right-click menu). HOWEVER, if I do that, then the F1-F12 keys' volume, brightness, and home/end/pgup/pgdn functions are disabled. I'm convinced this was an intentional decision by MS.