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PaperclipPerfector  2d ago (text post)   9972 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 9, 2026

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Yes. To me it is quite obvious as well.

I went from.

Chat-GPT 4o - Useful as a reference. Can write small scripts and functions.

Chap-GPT 5.5 - Can understand my projects, fix bugs. Still does annoying stuff.

Chap-GPT 6 Astra - I no longer write any code or even check the code that it writes.

The speed has improved by a lot as well.

I use Astra for work stuff, mostly coding and research. But the idea that you don't check it is wild to me. If it fucks up, and it can, it is incredibly professionally embarrassing. People will rightly blame you for the AI-fuckup, they will think less of your competence, and in a research/engineering setting that's professionally bad.

I have a junior that uses Astra for a ton of his work. It keeps tunneling on stuff that doesn't really matter or not really core to the goal of the project. Loses the forest for the trees so to speak. He uncritically just reports what it says and when questioned about why, or what it means he can't explain it. We've extensively talked to him about his AI usage, and honestly if it continues my boss is considering putting him on "PIP" (We don't really pip in the traditional sense).

It keeps tunneling on stuff that doesn't really matter or not really core to the goal of the project. Loses the forest for the trees so to speak.

My observation has been that "good code" looks very much the same for AI as it does for human developers, and that there is a sort of ideal fractal context or documentation where you should be able to start from no knowledge of the codebase, find the relevant sections for your query, and understand the adjacent bits well enough to confidently make changes within a limited context window. Somewhat amusingly, it wants to write too many comments (especially in places that will go out of date), where humans often have left not enough.

Also it's much better at reading code than writing it, IME.

Loses the forest for the trees so to speak.

Yes, this does happen still quite often. There's some common sense element still missing, kind of like an autistic savant.

But code correctness is largely solved. At least, it's going to be more correct than any human.

We've extensively talked to him about his AI usage, and honestly if it continues my boss is considering putting him on "PIP"

Sounds like they should just fire him since he's a thin layer between his boss and Astra. Too bad most of us will be in this place before long.

Sounds like they should just fire him since he's a thin layer between his boss and Astra. Too bad most of us will be in this place before long.

The point of juniors is have them learn how to be their own engineers. AI has made juniors like interns. If you don't invest in them you won't have staffs, seniors, and principles that can act as SMEs to AI's mistakes.

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