r/AskComputerScience • u/Some_Fly1628 • 12d ago
AI in CS/programming/coding
As someone who couldn't be farther away from this field, I started using claude recently for a project of mine and had claude code do all the work for me. Then I turned to my CS friends and they told me it was the same for them.
At one point I heard an argument that AI should be used to explain things to you or only do stuff which you'll understand afterwards.
What is it actually looking like at this state? Do any AI users in the space actually understand each function it sends out or are they trusting it blindly like me? This isnt an ethics question, just the reality of our current situation.
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u/azhder 11d ago
It is QI (quasi-intelligence). You have to start from there. It isn’t intelligent, but just appears so because it is a model of an intelligent work people have done before.
OK, to make it more visible for you, we use the term “model” to say “data”, so you should think of all those LLM as “big database”. You should look at asking it to generate something as a more sophisticated query than the SQL we use for relational databases.
What you are doing is asking the database to generate you a project that appears like all of those from GirHub and elsewhere that it was trained on.
I can understand almost any of those projects on GitHub and most of them will look alike. Most of them would have been done in some “standard” way because all those people that made them, well, they have read the same books, copied the same cookbooks, watched the same tutorials etc.
The issue with your QI generated code is that you’re retrieving a variation on what is commonly used, and stored in the database, but there is no intelligent check that variation is sound. It’s like in genetics, the genes are recombined from the parents, but you can’t be sure the baby has no genetic defects that are too severe. The generated code has defects, you just have to understand it to check if any of those is severe.