No AI Please!

Reddit account deleted - it’s mostly full of delusional “AI” posts.

When I see a post or an article that has “AI” in it’s title I’m swiping off. Most of them are like this. Same goes for podcasts and YouTube videos - just AI related trash. Unsubscribed to all channels that have “AI” in latest 2-3 video titles - those were the majority.

I’ve banned LLM contributions on my OSS projects, that mostly remind political speeches - just wordy diarrhoea without substance. Some are actually useful, but it takes too much time to find them in the pile of AI trash, so it’s easier just to ban those altogether. I’ve deleted most of GitHub repositories and migrated them to self-hosted fully offline ones (happily using Gitea at the moment).

I have spend ages trying to embrace LLM, and ended up regretting this - 99% of those “contributions” ended up in technical debt and unexplainable bugs. Still paying the cleaning up debt. It’s a skill issue, yeah, right.

I’m really happy using my head and producing something of genuine quality at the moment.

IDEs

Ok, I’ve completely uninstalled GItHub Copilot from Visual Studio and VS Code. I thought I’d really miss it, because this this was just awesome. And it was missed straight away - felt like I was missing a limb. However, not for long - the IDE/editor itself felt way more responsive and after a few hours I was surprises that the “classic” autocomplete does it for me. It also took another day to feel less stupid - I’ve realised that simple knowledge was gone - just couldn’t remember how to declare an array in any programming language, and sort of similar things as well. That went back relatively quickly, but I wonder if I could remember it after another year of “relying” on LLMs. Feels good actually.

I’ve left Junie enabled in PyCharm and CLion - mostly because I like the way Junie works, and having a lot of unused credits. Although Junie is rarely used - other than autocomplete and very occasional refactoring. Still unclear whether Junie is making me more productive as taking refactoringsas granted is quite dangerous in my field, so I’d spend a lot of time triple checking they are correct. Statistically, they are around 70% of the time, however if I’d accept those 30% of errors it would not end up well at all. One thing clear - if Junie would disappear tomorrow, the only thing that would be missed is the “smart” autocomplete.