Lately I have been using AI more and more in my codebase and that’s been a bit of a hit and miss if you ask me.
I reckon it’s an amazing tool that allows developers to truly optimise their workflow, however at times laziness take over and code reviews are not as frequent as they should be.
I really REALLY wanted to build something without using AI after having spent months and months getting a bit too complacent. And this is the first idea that came to mind. Of course to celebrate this occasion I went for a technology I hadn’t used in almost a decade: jQuery!!!
You can find the repo here: https://github.com/fccview/ackchyually-ai
You can play around with the tool on fccview.github.io/ackchyually-ai
Few disclaimers:
- I am a full stack javascript developer (with extensive knowledge of php and a very good grasp of shell). This means majority of the detection will be revolving around javascript, if you develop in a different language and you feel like you know AI patterns in that language PLEASE do create a pull request so we can make the detection even more accurate for other type of syntax!
- The tool uses MY OWN metrics, this is doing what I usually do to see if something is (in my opinion) been made with AI and barely reviewed by a human. It’s not gospel, it’s not a scientific method, it’s most definitely going to be flawed, so keep it with a grain of salt, it can always be improved and collaboration/community support will definitely help with it
- I don’t hate AI, on contrary I enjoy using it and I find value in not needing to “google it” whenever I hit a blocker, more times than not, AI has a valid solution that can be used, refined and applied properly. What I have mostly an issue with is people randomly generating code, not reviewing it and trying to sell you the moon when they barely understand the architecture of what they built
- Please do not make this post a fight between pro/against AI individuals, that’s not the aim of it
All the patterns I am using to identify possible AI code are here: https://github.com/fccview/ackchyually-ai/tree/main/data if you come up with more patterns/ideas and have more ideas on what to look for please reply here, open an issue and/or make a pull request, but at ONE CONDITION, do NOT use AI for this. It’d go against the core principle of this one pure little app I decided to build <3
Maybe.
I think the pushback stems from a bunch of different things.
It’s genuinely bad at some things. asking it to make a clock out of CSS and HTML is mostly awful.
Historically, it’s been really bad at everything. So if someone hasn’t done a serious dive on it recently, they’re going to have the impression that it’s even worse than it really is.
A lot of people don’t understand how to use it, a lot of times it’s like working with a monkey’s paw. You’ve got to pre-guess all the things that could go wrong and keep adding detail until it has no choice but to do it right. And even then, you have to come back and do iterations sometimes.
It’s making a bunch of oligarchs extremely wealthy, for no good reason, on the backs of the working class, while we can barely buy RAM. At the same time, they’re burning through a hell of a lot of natural resources.
They’re shoving options and features down our throats and making us pay for them even if we don’t want to use them.
Some people are genuinely scared that corporations will use it to replace skiled labor with unskilled labor, which they are.
I have seen advanced versions rewrite an entire cross-platform basic interpreter in a couple of tries.
I lost a rather complicated Python program I wrote to manage projectors for my Halloween display. I had it make a framework. I went through all of my different options and modes one at a time and explained exactly how they needed to work. I recreated a couple of weeks of work in a couple of hours and added a significant number of features.
It’s crap like make that admin page look good on a cell phone that’s absolutely bananas. That’s a feature I would never have the time to sit down and work on because it’s not that big of a deal. But it would literally be a day of trial and error on multiple test devices for me to write it myself.
Would it be better received if it were marketed differently? Probably a little bit. But not beyond the things that I wrote about. It would be a subtle improvement in visibility I feel.