this post was submitted on 12 Apr 2025
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Programming

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AI isn’t ready to replace human coders for debugging, researchers say (arstechnica.com)
submitted 1 week ago by neme@lemm.ee to c/programming@programming.dev
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[–] ExtremeDullard 43 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (4 children)

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).

[–] PushButton@lemmy.world 4 points 1 week ago

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...

[–] Redkey@programming.dev 4 points 1 week ago (1 children)

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.

[–] ExtremeDullard 5 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

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.

[–] Colloidal@programming.dev 1 points 1 week ago

But get this: Shakespeare was an ape that did in fact produce all of Shakespeare's works. 🤯

[–] sip@programming.dev 1 points 1 week ago

infinite monkey. I love it. borrowed.

[–] astrsk@fedia.io 38 points 1 week ago (2 children)

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.

[–] chicken@lemmy.dbzer0.com 9 points 1 week ago (2 children)

Manual memory management is already relatively niche and not needed for most programming tasks

[–] JustAnotherKay@lemmy.world 13 points 1 week ago

While you're not wrong, we still need to understand it at least well enough to avoid RCE and fix memory-related bugs

[–] heavydust@sh.itjust.works 5 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Bytes is a way to store data. Its unrelated to memory management, even if its automatic.

[–] chicken@lemmy.dbzer0.com 4 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (1 children)

I wouldn't say unrelated, but anyway what's the broad term for what you are doing when you are being concerned with how bytes are stored then? Whatever that is, there's a generation of coders already who aren't doing so much of it

[–] heavydust@sh.itjust.works 4 points 1 week ago

Endianness.

[–] nitefox@sh.itjust.works 5 points 1 week ago

A byte is what you eat obv bruh

[–] thingsiplay@beehaw.org 28 points 1 week ago (2 children)

Ai isn't replacing coding either.

[–] Photuris@lemmy.ml 15 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (1 children)

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.

[–] thingsiplay@beehaw.org 6 points 1 week ago

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.

[–] sip@programming.dev 4 points 1 week ago

"we'll all be peasants by 2027" 🥴

[–] pseudo@jlai.lu 17 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Don't worry, it is ready to replace human coders for writing bug.

[–] sus@programming.dev 9 points 1 week ago

rebugging, if you will

[–] mvirts@lemmy.world 13 points 1 week ago

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.

[–] umbrella@lemmy.ml 12 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

they will anyway.

and fuck them tbh, let it ruin their codebases.

[–] furrowsofar@beehaw.org 7 points 1 week ago (1 children)

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.

[–] thingsiplay@beehaw.org 2 points 1 week ago

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).

[–] HubertManne@piefed.social 5 points 1 week ago (1 children)

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.

[–] heavydust@sh.itjust.works -3 points 1 week ago (1 children)

If you google stuff all the time you have serious problems.

[–] yoevli@lemmy.world 6 points 1 week ago (1 children)

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).

[–] heavydust@sh.itjust.works -1 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (1 children)

I've been coding for more than 20 years. Googling things is the norm but not the job. You should have all your docs and API stored offline anyway.

The guy said going back and forth with a search engine. That's what juniors do, not software engineers.

[–] HubertManne@piefed.social 1 points 1 week ago (1 children)

what have you worked in the same language for twenty years? I don't have all the libraries memorized and not only do new ones get created but formats change. Unless I have been using something recently I always check.

[–] heavydust@sh.itjust.works 1 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (1 children)

There are a lot of offline doc downloaders, man pages, books, even raw repositories to make sure that you're independent and can work offline or without a VPN to the company.

And again, I was only saying that only juniors do google searches all the time. When you get some experience, you have broader tasks like adding features, debugging, handling the architecture, or refactoring that require less google stuff.

[–] HubertManne@piefed.social 0 points 1 week ago

I mean debugging and adding features is coding and debugging im even more likely to look up the things im looking at since I did not write it myself. I honestly rarely use man pages except for linux commands when im at the command line atm. Architecture usually is usually has its own team outside of the lowers.

[–] LovableSidekick@lemmy.world 2 points 1 week ago

Nope, it's a hell of a good assistant tho (according to my friend who uses it daily for coding).

[–] HarkMahlberg@kbin.earth 1 points 1 week ago

https://www.linusakesson.net/programming/kernighans-lever/index.php