GoKawiilEditor's Note: friend of ByteCode.News Hideki Idoru submitted this for publication, and it has a lot of value even if not every point is agreed with: it's not difficult to find it's failure modes observed widely in the industry these days.
AI is a bad tool.
At least, AI is a bad tool for software.
I'll start with the positive side to get it out of the way. AI can be useful if you perceive it as a data distiller. Whereas before, you'd put a thing into your search engine, click on the result that sounded most promising, then scan the page for the info you're looking for and process it in a way you understand, AI -- if it's good and true -- condenses those steps for you. Indeed, search engines today try to close the gap by inserting an AI snippet at the top of their results, but the immersive part is your ability to follow up and refine the info even further.
This used to take a long time to do manually, and it's genuinely easier to have the machine do it for you. So it's not all bad.
But that's pretty much where it ends. If you use AI for anything else, and in particularly if you use it to generate code, you're wasting your time.
Before I go into why, I have to take a step back and talk about the debate about AI itself. It is often too emotional than it needs be. A lot of it on the part of its detractors is driven by fear of losing their livelihood and becoming essentially irrelevant. I don't think the emotions help, but they do provide interesting insights into the human condition because, as I'm about to show, the fear is real (but for a different reason).
In other words: yes, you're going to become irrelevant, and no, it's not because the machines will become too smart for you. It's because you produce garbage code and they can do just a little better.
The reason AI is a bad tool is that generally speaking, it is completely opaque. A standard question one often hears is, "who is going to maintain the app you had it build for you?" Well, if you're fully onboard the AI train, you'd say: the machine. If it built it, it should surely also be able to maintain it. That's not false.
The real question is, who can verify that what the AI built is good and true? Recently, there's a lot of talk about AI allegedly finding security flaws in software. That is an unsubstantiated claim. As such, it would need to be verified by a non-machine, and arguably, the verification process would require the same amount of effort or more than would be required to find the issue to begin with.
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