What Frustrates Autistic Software Engineers Most?

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autisticoder
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10 Jul 2025, 1:21 pm

I asked Autistic software engineers: what's the most frustrating part of your job?
The answers? Quicksand. Time. Clients. And yeah… Windows.


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kokopelli
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10 Jul 2025, 1:31 pm

autisticoder wrote:
I asked Autistic software engineers: what's the most frustrating part of your job?
The answers? Quicksand. Time. Clients. And yeah… Windows.


One would be the coming AI invasion. AI might help in taking care of some of the tedious parts of writing code, but it cannot understand a problem and set about a plan to fix the issue. It is really more of something that masks the results and may convince you that you have fixed it while introducing many flaws that may be used against the code that was written.

Some years ago, someone tried to use neural networks to determine when there were tanks hidden in the forest from pictures. The results were wonderful -- they could 100% identify those pictures with tanks hidden in the forest and those pictures without tanks hidden in the forest. But then when they tried to to use it against real world data, it failed miserably. After detailed analysis and testing, it was determined that all of the training data with no tanks was in bright sunlight and all of the training data with tanks was on an overcast day (or vice versa). What the AI was really doing to find tanks was determine whether or not the sun was shining. It was useless to actually find tanks.

Don't trust the AI.



autisticoder
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10 Jul 2025, 3:25 pm

kokopelli wrote:
autisticoder wrote:
I asked Autistic software engineers: what's the most frustrating part of your job?
The answers? Quicksand. Time. Clients. And yeah… Windows.


One would be the coming AI invasion. AI might help in taking care of some of the tedious parts of writing code, but it cannot understand a problem and set about a plan to fix the issue. It is really more of something that masks the results and may convince you that you have fixed it while introducing many flaws that may be used against the code that was written.

Some years ago, someone tried to use neural networks to determine when there were tanks hidden in the forest from pictures. The results were wonderful -- they could 100% identify those pictures with tanks hidden in the forest and those pictures without tanks hidden in the forest. But then when they tried to to use it against real world data, it failed miserably. After detailed analysis and testing, it was determined that all of the training data with no tanks was in bright sunlight and all of the training data with tanks was on an overcast day (or vice versa). What the AI was really doing to find tanks was determine whether or not the sun was shining. It was useless to actually find tanks.

Don't trust the AI.


I remember that story. And I have personal experience trying to get AI to help me with coding.

It can help with that but too often, it’s off the mark.


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autisticoder
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10 Jul 2025, 3:25 pm

kokopelli wrote:
autisticoder wrote:
I asked Autistic software engineers: what's the most frustrating part of your job?
The answers? Quicksand. Time. Clients. And yeah… Windows.


One would be the coming AI invasion. AI might help in taking care of some of the tedious parts of writing code, but it cannot understand a problem and set about a plan to fix the issue. It is really more of something that masks the results and may convince you that you have fixed it while introducing many flaws that may be used against the code that was written.

Some years ago, someone tried to use neural networks to determine when there were tanks hidden in the forest from pictures. The results were wonderful -- they could 100% identify those pictures with tanks hidden in the forest and those pictures without tanks hidden in the forest. But then when they tried to to use it against real world data, it failed miserably. After detailed analysis and testing, it was determined that all of the training data with no tanks was in bright sunlight and all of the training data with tanks was on an overcast day (or vice versa). What the AI was really doing to find tanks was determine whether or not the sun was shining. It was useless to actually find tanks.

Don't trust the AI.


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Jakki
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10 Jul 2025, 4:04 pm

Syntax errors.....having had to learn to try to read computer dumps.


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autisticoder
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10 Jul 2025, 4:10 pm

Jakki wrote:
Syntax errors.....having had to learn to try to read computer dumps.


These days, I would probably just copy and paste the computer dumps into ChatGPT and have it tell me what the problem is and suggest a fix.


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Jakki
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10 Jul 2025, 4:53 pm

autisticoder wrote:
Jakki wrote:
Syntax errors.....having had to learn to try to read computer dumps.


These days, I would probably just copy and paste the computer dumps into ChatGPT and have it tell me what the problem is and suggest a fix.



Lololzzz... :D :D ..Well there have been posts here about chatGPT making peoples brains shrink...lololzzz
But Thank you ....its a great idea... And had been taught to code from scratch.. but so many routines can be used with little changes
to allow for different variables / potentially processing algorthyms of copy and pasting code. Makes LIFE. Sooo much easier . :D :D :D


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