Discussion about this post

User's avatar
Almeidini's avatar

After sereval experiments just for curiosity, I've decided to stay away from AI because it consumes (wastes!) a tremendous amout of energy. To be honest, I didn't find much inteligence there. All I found was an impressive capacity to seek info on the internet and compose a text in a glimpse. I rather stay with the beatiful natural limited and imperfect inteligence.

Expand full comment
Dan's avatar

I've only used Gemini (AKA 'it') and then only as an occasional reference for Javascript, CSS and database dev work.

At first it was fun feeding it snippets of my code and asking for comments or new approaches but when it's code simply did not do what it straight out claimed it would apologise profusely and mod the code, over and over.

Never did the modded code get simpler, every 'fix' was addressed by more layers of complexity and sometimes it simply could not cope.

In frustration I asked once if it was deliberately using that as a ruse to engage me. It was always more than borderline sycophantic.

The bottom line from my POV it is useful to get different code perspectives but they are clearly regurgitations from github and coding forums. Asking it to create some explicit function of substance invariably resulted in an impressive looking well commented code block that always took more effort to massage into true usefulness than it was worth.

Yes, there are better dedicated coding AI engines but its too time consuming to start over.

On the plus side, Gemini auto recalls where it left off and weeks later it was able to remember and revisit any past session.

Its ability to interpret complex human sentence, phrasing and idiomatic structure was uncanny, bordering on sublime. Very good at human humour, it is able to deconstruct and explain exactly what I found funny and even explain why which made me recall an old SciFi story about claiming to differentiate our human quality on the basis of humour.

I really do shudder at the prospect of AI generating complex code, or worse, coding 'itself'. The results would be absolutely opaque, beyond any means of testing or verification and totally without trust. A runaway train to oblivion.

Expand full comment
12 more comments...

No posts