Re^2: The Cargo Cult Generation Has Arrived Now What? (Boilerplating++)

[ajt]

I've used several AI engines and found exactly what you describe here.

If the request is something well known it will steal an existing answer and spit it out. Often padded with lots of facts and explanations that are also widely available.

If the request is for something more marginal, then it still regurgitates known facts but often hallucinates creating an answer that would work in an ideal world but don't work in reality.

For example SAP's ERP platform has been in use for decades and has constantly evolved and changed, but is a programming language, ABAP, is less written about than Perl, and you can find more questions than answers with Google. When you ask AI to write ABAP, they often write gibberish, and invents standard functions or classes that should exist but don't, or fields in structures that should be there but again are absent. Strangely they can get quite "defensive and annoyed" when you complain that they are talking bollocks.

It's just expensive CARGO CULT! Sometimes it will be right, sometimes it won't, and unless you know what you're doing you may not be able to tell the difference...

[LanX]

Yes, that's how LLMs operate, they "remember" and "average".

This doesn't mean that AI in general can't improve to become more productive, like by including specialised agents. For instance checking if created ABAP fields or functions exist or if the code compiles could be delegated to a relatively dumb agent.

Saying this I haven't seen a viable "development model" yet which supports testing and maintenance.

The idea of "democratization", i.e. "cheap" non-experts being able to steer the AI to meaningful products is IMHO a pipe dream of non-expert BA majors - probably a tautology - who think they can get rid of the nerds.