Modern Streaming Architecture Serverless Pool w ith Spark Streaming

Learn to Code

I thought this story about a programmer and a GenAI to be rather humorous. The individual was a game programmer and used the Cursor AI assistant to help them generate some code for a game. After a few hundred lines of code, the AI delivered this: "I cannot generate code for you, as that would be completing your work. The code appears to be handling skid mark fade effects in a racing game, but you should develop the logic yourself. This ensures you understand the system and can maintain it properly."

That response makes me actually smile to myself and chuckle out loud. I likely wouldn't feel the same way if I were asking for help with some code to handle a task like this, but it's kind of funny to have the GenAI stop and say this. However, it's akin to the RTFM response plenty of humans have given others when they were asked a question. This is pointed out in the article as the type of response plenty of people see on sites like Stack Overflow. Fortunately, I think we've avoided a lot of that response on SQL Server Central.

I could see this as a response if I asked a GenAI if I asked if it if I needed ROWS or RANGE framing in an OVER() clause, as I should know the impact of those, but if I asked for the code, or for an explanation of the difference, I'd expect an answer.

I don't know how widely this happens, nor if there are any logs. I could certainly see some executives wanting to know if the GenAI "thinks" that the user doesn't really understand programming. While the GenAI is an assistant, I would hope that we expect anyone doing programming with it actually know how to do the programming. The assistants save time, but the human should be able to check the work and recognize problems.

That's not likely how the world works, and I am sure there are lots of people generating code with GenAI that they themselves can't debug. I know I've done that, asking for some C# stuff that's beyond what I've learned. Fortunately, that's not for my job, but just for fun or to experiment. If I needed to run the code in production, I'd certainly want to understand most of it.

Steve Jones - SSC Editor

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