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 (and maybe expect) this as a response if I asked a GenAI “do I a ROWS or a RANGE framing in this OVER() clause. I should know the result I expect and the impact of those two options. However, if I asked for format of the statement or for an explanation of the difference, I’d expect an answer.

I don’t know how widely this happens where the LLM stops helping, nor if there are any logs on why this happened. I could certainly guess some executives would want to know if the GenAI “thinks” that the user of the tool doesn’t really understand programming. Many managers might even want to query a GenAI to evaluate the humans using the tools.

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

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