Forem: Seniru Pasan Indira

AI hype is stupid - your job is not in danger if you have real talent!

Seniru Pasan Indira — Sat, 02 Aug 2025 13:58:47 +0000

Originally from my website, I'd appreciate some support to grow it!

A little bit of history...

Around 2020 - 2021, Github announced Copilot - a generative coding assistant powered by AI. It was in technical preview and was available for a limited group of developers for beta testing. They advertised it as a tool to help writing boilerplate code, backend server codes, test cases, etc. while keeping security in mind.

According to many users, it wasn't that great at the time, but there was hope for sure

Around the same time, a project called DALL-E Mini happened as a submission for a Google hosted hackathon. It generated weird images. However, it was fun. People had nothing to do, because of COVID-19, which made them generate more and more of those weird images.

This marked the beginning of the new AI era. Lots of people got awareness about AI and generative AI - thanks to the weird image generating service.

On 2022, OpenAI announced ChatGPT, and nothing was the same ever since.

ChatGPT has been trained with vast amount of data existing in the internet. And it uses a sophisticated algorithm to predict text streams and keep the conversations flowing and interesting. However, due to this specific way of implementation, it was never a great tool for coding. Everybody knew that, including OpenAI - which resulting in them releasing better and improved models.

But the problems still prevail!

Problems with these generative models

Lack of context: These tools often doesn't know the existing methods, components, practices, and standards. Sure, latest tools have better context but it is never perfect. And you have to really understand the project and be a proficient programmer provide all these contexts.
Over complexity: Going along with the above point, since it doesn't really know the context, it tries to be perfect by adding all the possible scenarios. Sometimes you don't need all that. An experienced programmer can always do it better and shorter.
Hallucination
ZERO UNIQUENESS: I've seen my pals releasing their portfolios since the release of tools like cursor, etc. Funny enough, they all look the same. Same with their blogs, everything looks the same.

I'm 100% sure in few more months, they will release way better models addressing all these issues. But that's not the real deal.

So why am I ranting?

When these tools were released we knew how useful they can be, and how we could have used them to help our work. Everyone knew that these are not going to give you the perfect output. And people with actual experience often joked when they heard things like AI is going to take over your job - because it can never replicate your creativity. It can never be you or replicate your emotions.

However, all these noobie coders, with 0 skill and 0 knowledge, happened to discover these tools, and now have made it their personality. They call themselves skilled for some reason. My brother in Christ, you are not skilled; it's just some other person doing something for you. Let's get to this point later.

It has become a crisis now most of the entire industry is being filled up with these noobs, hiding under AI. Funny to hear arguments like it's going to save time. Don't get me wrong, it does save your time, and you should use them for that exact reason. But there's a way to do that. Use AI to complete repetitive tasks (like writing test cases), or research new stuff.

Don't just give a prompt, and call it real skill.

Do you realize,

You are just an intermediate between the requirements and the actual product. Your only job is passing the requirements to the tool and waiting until the outcome. Do you realize that a 12 years old with a decent background can do that too? Do you realize if someone designed some tool that would identify the requirements by itself and finished the product by itself, you become completely useless?

My friend, it's your job is in danger, not mine!

Let me quickly re-iterate why crap that are entirely built with AI are useless.

No uniqueness, no emotion. All it has is perfect structure or perfect grammar.
Lacks context, and sometimes do things out of context
Long ass codes (it's laughable to see 10000+ lines of code for a simple website)
Shit performance, and no security, unless you are specific about it.
You know nothing about the final product

I'd like to talk more about that last point. I made a solution to the N-Queens problem 7 years ago. I was so proud about that and I still remember how I did that to this date. I'll be honest, the performance was garbage because I was brute-forcing the thing. But I know how to improve it because I know exactly where it went wrong.

I talked with some guy that has came up with an algorithm for something. I'm not going to say who or what. They mentioned they finished that project in last month. I asked how they implemented it. They just spat out some stuff that are not relevant to my question. They said they did it in last month so they don't really remember how they did it... I'm pretty sure they didn't even see that code until this point.
So we both revised the code and explained what was going on. I asked if they have any idea on how to improve the algorithm. They had no idea because they had 0 skills and 0 clue of the algorithm. On the other hand, I saw so many areas for improvement.

Your ChatGPT is not going to help you improve something if you don't know what to fix. And to know that you have to actually understand the work. For that

either you have to write the entire thing by yourself
or just be so good that you can look at the thing and understand what's going on.

Now your ignorant ass might argue,

"cAn'T yOu jUsT gEneRaTe wItH Ai aNd iMpRovE iT lAtEr?"

To be actually good you have to do things by yourself. So I'd rather keep on practicing that.
It's harder to nitpick things one by one. I'd rather write the thing by myself because I actually know how to do the work.

Even better if I can write it by myself, and use AI to improve that. Because as a human there are things that I might miss. And I actually do that. AI is really helpful in that regards.

My rule of thumb is do the base by yourself, establish structure and rules. And let the slaves fill in the blanks for you.

credits: from hackernoon, https://hackernoon.com/ai-please-wash-my-dishes-let-me-write-a-desperate-plea-for-creative-freedom Where's the AI to do my dishes while I do my art?

I just plugged in a funny meme that is actually talking about something serious. I got it from another blog from hackernoon. Please read it too (link is pasted above). We need AI to do our hard chores so we can focus on our creative work. Not the other way around guys!

My challenge to those AI losers

try doing something that actually works, it shouldn't break on a random Saturday because your sorry ass committed passwords and secrets to your Github.
try to actually implement something with limited resources. Storage limitations, poor computation power, runtime limitations. AIs were trained with codes on ideal environments.
give it some new language, it wouldn't do shit.
try to work with a private API. And watch AI inventing new methods.

How about the CEOs saying AI is the future?

Let's go through a list

"Probably in 2025, we at Meta, as well as the other companies that are basically working on this, are going to have an AI that can effectively be a sort of midlevel engineer that you have at your company that can write code. (Mark Zuckerberg, source)
"AI is going to eliminate a lot of current jobs, and there will be classes of jobs that totally go away. AI is also going to change the way a lot of current jobs function, and it’s going to create entirely new jobs." (Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, source)

You have to realize that these people are CEOs of companies that relies on success of AI. Zuck wants to say Meta AI is the future so more people uses that. Sam Altman wants to promote OpenAI too. So ofcourse they are going to claim statements like this. It's clever advertisement...

Conclusion

AI definitely has it's place in the future, and I'm never denying the fact it is a really useful tool. It just has to go to the right hands. AI is never going to replace real skill or creativity. So keep on what you have been doing over the past years. AI chaps can continue doing their thing and make it easier to get more jobs for us.

There's more concerns with AI such as environmental, legal, and ethical issues - but we don't even have to get to that.

Just use it responsibly, thanks!

Project ideas for beginners

Seniru Pasan Indira — Fri, 13 Dec 2019 07:02:47 +0000

Beginners or experts, all need practice to become perfect. But beginners may find it hard to practice as some of them have no idea to start something at all. Trust me, I'm also one of them. Working on a project is a very good way to recall what we learned recently and improve our thinking and coding skills. So I decided to compile a list of ideas for just starters, average beginners and beginners with some experiences.

Ideas for code newbies

Fizz buzz generator
Simple calculator (which let the user select the operation and performs calculations)
Converter
- Unit converter
- Morse code converter
- Currency converter
- Any converter of your choice!
Simple GUI program
- A program which allows user to type in
- A program which allows user to choose options and displaying it
Rock paper scissor game
Your portfolio

Ideas for average beginners

Calculator (more advanced calculator than in the newbies section. You may use eval functions in languages to make the task easier. Also improve the styles)
All in one converter
A text editor which allows to save and retrieve files from disk.
Tic-tac-toe game
Improve your previous portfolio
Simple Command prompt (I mean create a new CLI. Allow user to type commands and print statements. It should also be able to perform calculations and inform user if the commands are wrong)
Simple chat bot
Program which fetch random quotes from web and display it to the user.
Simple search engine (Don't think so much. Create a data set yourself and let the user to enter a query and return entries related to queries)
Server response simulator (You should do research on internet on how servers perform responses and try to imitate the behaviour. For simplicity you don't need to perform actuall requests and responses.
Stopwatch or a timer

Ideas for beginners with experience

Diary app
- It should be able to save records of the user and open a record when the user wants. Also it should be structured nicely
Improve the morse code converter to save, open and fetch files from disk or internet.
Improve your terminal to do more creepy things
- Handling escapes
- Emulating behaviour of pipes
Create a discord bot which
- Greets a new user
- Greets every morning
- Say 'Bye!' when somebody leaves
Improve the chat bot
- It should understand more things
- It should give clear results after user entered something
- It should display images if user enters a image path, and say if the image doesn't exists
- It should perform general tasks like displaying time
- Add simple games (text based) to your chat bot
Tower of Hanoi
Create a simple RPG game
Create a farming game (My first project)
Create simple clones of facebook, google, youtube and even dev.to
Emulate a REST client. You may also integrate this with the server response simulator for a better functionality (You do not need to perform actual requests and responses again!)
Do a research and create a web page for it
Create a Markdown to (HTML, BB code coverter) and vice-versa

Those are the ideas that I can give you. Comment below your creations better ideas than this. Also ❤️ this if you like this content.

Thanks for READING!

Badges for your projects

Seniru Pasan Indira — Fri, 13 Dec 2019 06:33:38 +0000

You may have seen badges in READMEs of different repos - maybe in Github, Gitlab or Bitbucket. You may have also wondered why people are embedding them in their repos and how could they be helpful to users. If so, this is the right place for you.
Others also welcome to read as this could contain some valuable stuff

There are many reasons people adding badges to their README.

Because they are visaully appealing
Because they provide information simply and sweetly and quickly

Usually repos with badges attract users more than projects without badges in their README. Badges are a good way to show your colours and the quality of your product. Also it gives a pleasant view to your users.

Most importantly, they can communicate the information of your project very quickly. People usually display their project's build status, coverage reports, documentation, social status quickly using the badges.

Here are the things that I found as the most essential badges to include in your repo.

Build status

This tells us about how the current project base performed in the CI pipelines and tests of different kinds - you may include many reasons as possible. Generally most of the CI providers give you a nice looking badge to include in your README. Here are some examples

It is better if you could insert the corresponding link for every badge you insert

Code coverage

Code coverage tells the performance of the tests created simply. It checks for lines and statements covered by statements to create the coverage reports. Many coverage report providers give you another badge to include in your repository (codecov and coveralls are 2 providers that I personally like)

Code quality

Code quality is another important thing to maintain a long-term project. It allows people not to mix styles and make a complete mess. It also helps to avoid mistakes we often do in programming.

License

A good way to catch the user's attention to license is creating a badge. There are many ways to include badges about license and I found shields.io as the easiest.

You can simply create the badge you want by filling the relevant details there.
https://shields.io/category/license

Social status

If you are looking for people to contribute your project more often, the best way is to keep social. Social status badges enforces your users to see the social status of you and your projects and will also help you to catch contributors to other projects as well. There are many categories under this. This may also include donation links. Following are the most important things for me. I'm using shields.io for this one as well.
Follow the link

Github stars
Github followers
Github forks
Twitter followers
Open collective backers
First timers only

There could be more and more reasons to add badges to your repo. Let me know if you found more.

PS: I'm using shields.io to make awesome badges. You may also try it
PS++: I'm new to blogging. So please let me know if I doing something wrong

My Story

Seniru Pasan Indira — Sat, 23 Nov 2019 04:50:11 +0000

This is my first time writing a blog post. So It'll be good if I started with my story.

Note: I'm not a good blogger yet. Please share your ideas on how can I improve

I'm a student when I'm writing this. My first experience with programming was awesome - I actually found programming accidently. All of the thanks go to my school's ICT society. I first learned HTML and Java from that place. My curiosity increased with the new things I can do with the things I learned there. So I followed some online tutorials in addition to learn more.

There I found a platform called 'Sololearn' where many developers around the world connected together for learnig, coding, helping and playing. My experience with that community was awesome. I participated for many coding challenges there and improved my skills and reputation gradually. With the help of the app and community I learned many new languages such as JS, HTML, CSS, C#, C++, Ruby, Python, Swift, Kotlin, R etc.

There are lots of stories for each new thing I learned. First I wanted to become a ML guy. I committed several weeks for just learning the math basics, but all vanished off as my parents wanted me to do study other things. As a result, I decided to code again as usual.

One day I found about git and github in sololearn. I was not interested in that much, but I used it because many recommended using it. Using them I've done many useful projects, for example

Morse Code Converter
Farming Game
Mars Rover Simulator
Calculator

I was coding for a new project called 'TFM My Tribe' - a tribe management app for a game called transformice. As a result I addicted to play games again. Bug this changed many things in my life. With the experience I gained from previous projects and VCS, I become more active in Github!

I discovered many projects and studied them. Their project structure was so different than mine. Why are they making it too complex when things could be done more simply? My curiosity increased; so I studied them deeply. Well - nothing found specially.

While I'm blindly searching for new unknown things, somebody hosted an AMA in sololearn. That's how I hard about CI/CD pipelines. I did more research on them.

After about 2 months, I found something common in all repositories in github. It's the 'build status' badge. I wondered what is that. Again after many experiments, I found tht, it was the thing we call CI.

I also wanted to include a nice-looking 'build' badge in my repos. So I decided to find one in Github marketplace. My first choice was to use Azure Pipelines. It was good though I couldn't understand it completely.

The first project I intergrated CI was my tribe manager. Actually there was no workflows defined, but I got the nice-looking badge I was searching for 😄

After a few days I realized Azure is slow to load and hard to catch up. Alongside many were using Travis CI - just another CI tool. So I moved from Azure to that slowly.

At the same time I created a new project called 'Colorlab-JS'. Hopefully, that project improved me a lot. That was the project I introduced testing frameworks to myself. I wrote some tests with mocha and added them to run with the CI - this was the first time I used the CI more productively.

While I was progressing, Github introduced Github actions - another CI tool. I wanted everything under one place. So I quickly switched to actions. It was easier and thought me lots of the YAML syntx used in workflows.

After a week of hard work, I automated all the tests and deployments. At that time I found another pretty badge in popular repos - the coverage badge. Coverage is the best tool I met because it states how good are our tests. silly I didn't understood this earlier. Creating coverage reports were not as easy as I thought before. I wasted a whole week without proper guidance. Hopefully, I managed to create coverage reports with 'Istanbul' and uploaded them to 'codecov'. I scored more than 75% in my first run. It was fun! But with the time, I had to abandon 'Colorlab' project. Although it gave rise to a new hope vested with tfm. As I started to log into tfm again, I wanted to develop modules again for it as I did before. My friend Overjoy (Jacub - real name) gave me an idea for a module. That was the birth of the TFM Clicker game. With a little help of him I released the 1st version of my module and got traffic faster and many stars in Github. I learned project management a lot from that projectt.

My next idea was to add linecharts to the clicker to create stock market environment. Within 2-3 days I developed and released 'LineChart-TFM' for that purpose. I did a great task with CI in that project. All the things related with minifying and docs were automated by CI.

At that time, Overjoy was developing another project and he need a good timer library. So I developed and released a better timer library within a week with a good use of CI.

Eventhough I'm using my CI, I felt that I'm not using it for some mandatory tasks. That was testing and coverage reports. I cannot use TFM API out of tfm. So I decided to create a new environment for tfm modulese for development and testing. I named that project 'Module-API-TFM'. I could use the CI for many things in that project including testing and uploading coverage reports. I haven't done anything with docs yet, but I'm working on it currently. That means the story ends

Thanks a lot for reading my first blog post. Include your ideas and suggestion below