Please remove it if unallowed

I see alot of people in here who get mad at AI generated code and I am wondering why. I wrote a couple of bash scripts with the help of chatGPT and if anything, I think its great.

Now, I obviously didnt tell it to write the entire code by itself. That would be a horrible idea, instead, I would ask it questions along the way and test its output before putting it in my scripts.

I am fairly competent in writing programs. I know how and when to use arrays, loops, functions, conditionals, etc. I just dont know anything about bash’s syntax. Now, I could have used any other languages I knew but chose bash because it made the most sense, that bash is shipped with most linux distros out of the box and one does not have to install another interpreter/compiler for another language. I dont like Bash because of its, dare I say weird syntax but it made the most sense for my purpose so I chose it. Also I have not written anything of this complexity before in Bash, just a bunch of commands in multiple seperate lines so that I dont have to type those one after another. But this one required many rather advanced features. I was not motivated to learn Bash, I just wanted to put my idea into action.

I did start with internet search. But guides I found were lacking. I could not find how to pass values into the function and return from a function easily, or removing trailing slash from directory path or how to loop over array or how to catch errors that occured in previous command or how to seperate letter and number from a string, etc.

That is where chatGPT helped greatly. I would ask chatGPT to write these pieces of code whenever I encountered them, then test its code with various input to see if it works as expected. If not, I would ask it again with what case failed and it would revise the code before I put it in my scripts.

Thanks to chatGPT, someone who has 0 knowledge about bash can write bash easily and quickly that is fairly advanced. I dont think it would take this quick to write what I wrote if I had to do it the old fashioned way, I would eventually write it but it would take far too long. Thanks to chatGPT I can just write all this quickly and forget about it. If I want to learn Bash and am motivated, I would certainly take time to learn it in a nice way.

What do you think? What negative experience do you have with AI chatbots that made you hate them?

  • PixelProfEnglish
    111·
    11 hours ago

    Lots of good comments here. I think there’s many reasons, but AI in general is being quite hated on. It’s sad to me - pre-GPT I literally researched how AI can be used to help people be more creative and support human workflows, but our pipelines around the AI are lacking right now. As for the hate, here’s a few perspectives:

    • Training data is questionable/debatable ethics,
    • Amateur programmers don’t build up the same “code muscle memory”,
    • It’s being treated as a sole author (generate all of this code for me) instead of like a ping-pong pair programmer,
    • The time saved writing code isn’t being used to review and test the code more carefully than it was before,
    • The AI is being used for problem solving, where it’s not ideal, as opposed to code-from-spec where it’s much better,
    • Non-Local AI is scraping your (often confidential) data,
    • Environmental impact of the use of massive remote LLMs,
    • Can be used (according to execs, anyways) to replace entry level developers,
    • Devs can have too much faith in the output because they have weak code review skills compared to their code writing skills,
    • New programmers can bypass their learning and get an unrealistic perspective of their understanding; this one is most egregious to me as a CS professor, where students and new programmers often think the final answer is what’s important and don’t see the skills they strengthen along the way to the answer.

    I like coding with local LLMs and asking occasional questions to larger ones, but the code on larger code bases (with these small, local models) is often pretty non-sensical, but improves with the right approach. Provide it documented functions, examples of a strong and consistent code style, write your test cases in advance so you can verify the outputs, use it as an extension of IDE capabilities (like generating repetitive lines) rather than replacing your problem solving.

    I think there is a lot of reasons to hate on it, but I think it’s because the reasons to use it effectively are still being figured out.

    Some of my academic colleagues still hate IDEs because tab completion, fast compilers, in-line documentation, and automated code linting (to them) means you don’t really need to know anything or follow any good practices, your editor will do it all for you, so you should just use vim or notepad. It’ll take time to adopt and adapt.

    • Em AdespotonEnglish
      51·
      7 hours ago

      Spot-on.

      I spend a lot of time training people how to properly review code, and the only real way to get good at it is by writing and reviewing a lot of code.

      With an LLM, it trains on a lot of code, but it does no review per-se… unlike other ML systems, there’s no negative and positive feedback systems in place to improve quality.

      Unfortunately, AI is now equated with LLM and diffusion models instead of machine learning in general.