The engineer, who posted anonymously on X under the username voxium for fear of reprisal from his employer, called his new role at an undisclosed company "soul-sucking."
I really love when I ask the AI to do something, and it gives me 40-50 lines to do it, and I tell it there’s no way something like that should take that much code, and it’s like oh, ya you’re right, here’s a 5 line version using something from from the standard sdk.
I’ve tried to put in its memory to not do things like that, but it keeps doing it.
It’s because the average quality of code that they are trained on is like that. Most code that is written by humans is slop, and the models represent that.
Producing overly complicated solutions to uncomplicated problems
It often can do it better if you prod it though. Its just so weird that its really hard to get it to do that. It knows how even if it is trained on poor over complicated stuff.
I really love when I ask the AI to do something, and it gives me 40-50 lines to do it, and I tell it there’s no way something like that should take that much code, and it’s like oh, ya you’re right, here’s a 5 line version using something from from the standard sdk.
I’ve tried to put in its memory to not do things like that, but it keeps doing it.
Possibly motivated to do more complex problems to spend more tokens?
Even without external libraries, it routinely comes up with solutions that are at least 3-4x the complexity and LOC than how I would implement it.
It’s because the average quality of code that they are trained on is like that. Most code that is written by humans is slop, and the models represent that.
Producing overly complicated solutions to uncomplicated problems
It often can do it better if you prod it though. Its just so weird that its really hard to get it to do that. It knows how even if it is trained on poor over complicated stuff.
How much time does that prodding take vs how long would it take you to just write the (better) code yourself?
Its usually just 1 or 2 messages saying i dont like this so its only the time it takes to read it and say try again. A minute or two?
Its faster to just ask to do it again in most cases.