AI-Generated Code is Causing Outages and Security Issues in Businesses

Wow, the text generator that doesn't actually understand what it's "writing" is making mistakes? Who could have seen that coming?

I once asked one to write a basic 50-line Python program (just to flesh things out), and it made so many basic errors that any first-year CS student could catch. Nobody should trust LLMs with anything related to security, FFS.

Oh geez…who could have seen this coming?

Oh wait, every single senior developer who is currently railing against their moron AI-bandwagoning CEOs.

But are the shareholders pleased?

Good. This is digital Darwinism at its finest. Weeds out the companies who thought they could save money by relying on a digital monkey instead of actual professionals.

Except it’s a computer writing the code that somebody probably ran once and said ‘looks good’ for their ‘happy path’ and committed it. So it’s inevitably probably full of weird edge case bugs…have fun.

Lmao my job announced layoffs a few months back. They continue to parade their corporate restructuring plan in front of us like we give a fuck if shareholders make money. My output has dropped significantly as I search for another role. Whatever code I do write now is always just copy pasted from AI (which is getting harder to use...fuck you Copilot). I give zero fucks about this place anymore. Maybe if people had some small semblance of investment in their company's success (i.e.: not milked by shareholders and beaten to dust by shitty profit driven metrics that take away from the core business), the employees might give enough fucks to not copy paste shitty third party code.

Additionally, this is a training issue. Don't offload the training of your people onto the universities (which then trap the students into an insurmountable debt load leading them to take jobs they otherwise wouldn't want to take just to eat and have a roof over their heads). The modern corporate landscape has created a perfect shitstorm of disincentives for genuine effort and diligence. Then you expect us to give a shit about your company even though the days of 40 years and a pension are now gone. We're stuck with 401k plans and social security and the luck of the draw as to whether we can retire or not. Work your whole life for what? Fuck you. I'm gonna generate that AI code and enjoy my 30s and 40s.

A workforce trapped by debt, forced to prioritize job security and paycheck size over passion or purpose. People end up in roles they don't care about, working for companies they have no investment in, simply to keep up with loan payments and the ever increasing cost of living.

"Why is my organization falling apart!?" Fucking look up from the stupid fucking metrics that don't actually tell you anything you dumb fucks. Make an actual human decision and fix the wealth inequality. It's literally always wealth inequality.

“When asked about buggy AI, a common refrain is ‘it is not my code,’ meaning they feel less accountable because they didn’t write it.”

That's... That's so fucking cool...

Me and my team take our site down the old fashioned way. Code copied from some rando on the internet.

And none of the forced tech support "AI" replacements work. And the companies don't give a shit.

As stated in the article, this has less to do with using AI, more to do with sloppy code reviews and code quality enforcement. Bad code from AI is just the latest version of mindlessly pasting from Stack Overflow.

I encourage jrs to use tools such as Phind for solving problems but I also expect them to understand what they’re submitting and be ready to defend it no differently to any other PR. If they’re submitting code they don’t understand that’s incredibly unprofessional and I would come down very hard on them. They don’t do this though because we don’t hire dickheads.

If I was still in a senior dev position, I’d ban AI code assistants for anyone with less than around 10 years experience. It’s a time saver if you can read code almost as fluently as you can read your own native language but even besides the A.I. code introducing bugs, it’s often not the most efficient way. It’s only useful if you can tell that at a glance and reject its suggestions as much as you accept them.

Which, honestly, is how I was when I was first starting out as a developer. I thought I was hot shit and contributing and I was taking half a day to do tasks an experienced developer could do in minutes. Generative AI is a new developer: irrationally confident, not actually saving time, and rarely doing things the best way.

See? AI creates jobs! Granted, it's specialized mop up situations, but jobs!

It'll be even more interesting in the future! Every now and then a T1000 will lose all hydraulic fluids right out it's prosthetic anus and they'll need someone there with a mop and bucket! Our economy lives on...

How come the hallucinating ghost in the machine is generating code so bad the production servers hallucinate even harder and crash?

"AI" is just good for simple code snippets. (Which it stole from Github repos).

This whole ai bs needs to die already, and the people who lie about it held accountable.

Sounds like the Sirius cybernetics corporation:

The fundamental design flaws are obscured by the superficial design flaws.

AI can be a useful tool, but it’s not a substitute for actual expertise. More reviews might patch over the problem, but at the end of the day, you need a competent software developer who understands the business case, risk profile, and concrete needs to take responsibility for the code if that code is actually important.

AI is not particularly good at coding, and it’s not particularly good at the human side of engineering either. AI is cheap. It’s the outsourcing problem all over again and with extra steps of having an algorithm hide the indirection between the expertise you need and the product you’re selling.

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What a surprise, right?

I have a lot of empathy for a lot of people. Even ones, who really don't deserve it. But when it comes to people like these, I have absolutely none. If you make a chatbot do your corporate security, it deserves to burn to the ground

Debugging and maintenance was always the hardest aspect of large code bases... writing the code is the easy part. Offloading that part to AI only makes the hard stuff harder

Also it is pure junk. Chat-GPT code may come out fast on the screen but it's garbage. I tried python and c++ both just pure garbage. Sure I got it to do what I wanted but only after a day of hair pulling repetitive madness. Simple task, open an image and invert it . Then we'll it opened the image but didn't invert. Or maybe it's upside down. Can you open the image right side up and invert it....fuck fuck, why is the window full screen? Did I ask for full screen, shit heavens no! Anyway it's a fuckin idiot just rambling code at me.

ahahahaha...

Good. Maybe if the stuff trashes enough of our infrastructure somebody somewhere will actually figure out that it's bad and get rid of it forever.

I know, it'll never happen. But a man can dream.

Wait. Ai doesn't have logic built beyond untested data that's thrown at it? Who could had told someone this would happen ahead of time? Conspiracy theorists.

No sh*t, this is what I predicted from day one.

The thing I dislike most about code assisting tools is that they're geared to answering your questions instead of giving advice. I'm sure they also give bad recommendations but I've seen LLMs basically double down on bad code.

Lmao this is precisely how I thought this would turn out.

as opposed to human-generated code

and here's me learning C programming language from a selfhosted AI :/

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Where’s the articles about humans doing the exact same shit for the last 40-50 fucking years and no one bats an eye. Looks at the prompts from people complaining about ai responses and see they don’t know how to use this shit any better than my grandparents can use a touchtone phone.

“Build an app”

Fails

“This ai is shit”.

Just like ever other piece of technology. Garbage in garbage out. If you can’t reliably describe what you want then no one is going to be able to do it. AI just blatantly points out your descriptive failures.