> Aside from (indirectly?) producing a Personal Computing crisis of > unprecedented proportions since the beginnings of PC in the form of > artificially created memory shortage for home computer users, AI > generally creates worse code than humans. I find it more efficient and > easier to write a program from scratch than to have to review and fix > someone else's code, including AI.
I read a lot of human generated code during the last two decades and I'm not sure that is true ;). It is definitely worse than a good programmer, but often better than an average one; the biggest problem is that it makes stupid mistakes and hallucinates. I still think it is an useful tool especially in two cases: if you don't know specifics of some area, but are experienced enough to fix it and if you need some variant of something already done a thousand times. pdmenu is a good example of the first - I found at least a "good enough" app for everything I need except this; I didn't have time to study Xlib and even if I had, it probably wouldn't be optimal to spend the time for a one-off thing. This way I have a functioning app while still knowing almost nothing about X :), because I know enough about C to fix the few logical bugs AI did. Similarly I would have to refresh my trigonometry knowledge from school (decades ago :) to create the full placement algorithm, but I remember enough to fix the AI generated one and modify it to my needs. The second one I use often at work, for example when a customer wants something done in a framework I never used, it is faster to generate basic structure with AI and fix/add the important bits, than to read hundreds of pages of docs. I also quite often need to convert some crazy formatted data into something machine readable or importable into DB (detecting values from their format, converting formats, lots of checks, etc.); I could write it myself in 30-45 min (and often spend a lot more time debugging :), or have it done with AI in 10-15, including fixing its bugs. It is usually only used once, so "code beauty" is not a concern. That said, unless there are some huge breakthroughs coming, I don't see it replacing real programmers any time soon. Sorry for going off-topic, but I see this anti-AI sentiment very often (almost as often as IMHO overblown AI enthusiasm :) and I think it is useful in many cases even for good programmers. > The main idea of suckless movement is to write efficient, frugal code > without cruft that is currently characteristic for mainstream > software, and AI just reinforces that mainstream pattern. I tried to make it as suckless as I could, at least conceptually :), the code itself definitely has a long way to go; I'll try to fix what I can and welcome any help :). I only shared it here in the hope it might be useful for someone else, not as an example of great code. I use a lot of suckless apps daily and wanted to contribute at least in a tiny way ;). - PVx
