[robbrown451]

I'd suggest enjoying that vindication while it lasts.

From my perspective, your perspective is like a horse and buggy driver feeling vindicated when a "horseless carriage" driver accidentally drives one into a tree. The cars will get easier to drive and safer in crashes, and the drivers will learn to pay attention in certain ways they previously didn't have to.

Will there still be occasional problems? Sure, but that doesn't mean that tying your career to horses would have been a wise move. Same here.

(Also, this article is about "poisoned ChatGPT-like tools." Which says very little about using the tools that most developers are using)

I'm always reminded of this: "Logged onto the World Wide Web, I hunt for the date of the Battle of Trafalgar. Hundreds of files show up, and it takes 15 minutes to unravel them—one's a biography written by an eighth grader, the second is a computer game that doesn't work and the third is an image of a London monument. None answers my question, and my search is periodically interrupted by messages like, "Too many connections, try again later."" -- Cliff Stoll, 1995

[Terr_]

Counter-analogy: This is ultimately people copy-pasting the first answer they see from a web-forum. That's been bad advice for decades, and the same underlying problems remain because most of them involve human foibles and allocating attention.

What these tools change is making the process much faster and adding a (rather questionable) imprimatur of quality from a vendor that may not actually be a good curator of code-samples.

[yodon]

Re: your apparent derision of Cliff Stoll's writings, the OP results seem to speak to a trend he was among the first to point out in the book you cite from: people overwhelmingly bias towards the easiest to obtain information, even when they know that information is of worse quality than other information that's available but harder to get.

[robbrown451]

It was cited from a Newsweek article, and Cliff said this about it later: "Of my many mistakes, flubs, and howlers, few have been as public as my 1995 howler ... Now, whenever I think I know what's happening, I temper my thoughts: Might be wrong, Cliff ..."

You may be right about humans biasing toward easiest to obtain information, but that doesn't say "don't use AI assistance", it says "use care when using AI assistance".

Also, Cliff wasn't saying the information was easier to use, since in his case, it was actually harder to use than just looking it up in a printed encyclopedia or the like. But none of the problems he mentioned were inherent problems with the internet, they were because it was a brand new medium still working out its kinks. AI may well be harder to use for coding right now, at least for many use cases. However, a look at the bigger picture strongly suggests it is the future, just as a look at the bigger picture in 1995 would have suggested that the internet was the future, at least for answering questions like "when was the battle of Trafalgar?"

This is consistent with my horse/car analogy: the car wasn't the problem, the problem was people who assumed cars were going to keep themselves on the road like a horse would naturally do. You can get a huge gain, but you have to be smart about how you use it.