Like every well-adjusted middle-aged man, I’ve taken a recent interest in Warhammer 40k. There’s something about painting dystopian nightmares that is ever so soothing. And while it’s not a cheap hobby the price is much less than a mid-life crisis car. Much to the joy of my wife. My faction of choice is the Adeptus Mechanicus. I find it hilarious to mix technology and science with a cult like fervor. Working complex machines with the disciplines of a hardcore religion. Memorizing rituals to work machines. Burning incense to appease the machine spirit. Speaking a special language that lets them interface with the machines faster. Their depiction has changed throughout the years where they’ve been either the top scientists or they’re a cargo cult that doesn’t actually understand what they’re doing, they just pray and follow dogma and hope the machine does whats intended.

Long time lurker, first time poster. Don’t know what it’s been with my job but spurred this rant.

  • resipsaloquitur@lemmy.world
    7·
    13 hours ago

    Aside from all the financial and anti-social considerations, I think AI is “vindication” for all the middle and upper managers who felt engineers were either lazy or precious about their work. “See, I shouted at the computer and it did what I wanted in seconds instead of months! Why can’t you do that, nerds?”

    Unfortunately, voicing concerns about quality will only reinforce this dynamic.

    And while I agree broadly with what you wrote… AI writing unit tests? God help us all.

    P.S. neologism alert: morged.

    • moto@programming.devOP
      3·
      12 hours ago

      “See, I shouted at the computer and it did what I wanted in seconds instead of months! Why can’t you do that, nerds?”

      It also doesn’t say “no” like those nerds keep doing

      AI writing unit tests? God help us all.

      Haha, like I said in the foot note. If you don’t like it, good! “This is not a good use case, let’s scrap it and move on” is a perfect thing to say here.

      It’s the only thing I could think to try it with that I could easily audit results for. It mostly works. But there are a few things it does that causes me to scrap results

      • It loves to mock dependencies, even idempotent ones that don’t connect to 3rd party dependencies
      • The verbiage for the test names doesn’t speak towards requirements and is more like “it works” and often includes the word “should”.
      • It sometimes likes to mock the Subject under Test, which is a huge no no

      Often though I can keep some of it and just scrap the bad parts. And if it causes me problems I’m happy to quit it. It’s not revolutionary. I’m just whelmed.