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| Author | AI-developed software for System 7 (Read 534 times) | ||||||||||||||||||
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Bolkonskij
Administrator 2048 MB  Posts: 2053 
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on: May 29, 2026, 06:52
How do you view the topic of new software being written for System 7 with the use of AI? Arguably, it helps a lot with development, be it debugging or finding workarounds to problems. Some people let the entire code being written by Claude & others based on their specifications. What's everybody's take on that? Are you using such software? Or not? Do you think it's potentially a positive thing or rather negatively? What is the impact for our favorite OS? |
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fogWraith
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32 MB  Posts: 60
Reply #1 on: May 29, 2026, 08:08
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It's such a touchy subject for so many, for some reason. Personally, I don't really mind what other people use to write their software, as long as there is a basic understanding of what is going on in their code. For those writing backends for online services / server apps, there is always a security concern, I'd look twice or thrice before using something written entirely by AI if the case revolves around such an application or service. Personally, I hate writing documentation, and this is my main use case for using AI. Sure, I have to audit everything it spits out and verify that what it spit out is accurate, but that process beats writing the actual documentation by miles. If the generated documentation is untrue and not factual, I have nobody else but myself to blame. The second case is incredibly useful, if I hit a wall (weird bug, code refuses to work even though it looks like it should), I can simply ask for advice or examples, compare, make the appropriate adjustments and continue with my work. Beats having to use a search engine or Stack Overflow. It just saves a lot of time. So I guess there are both positive and negative sides to the whole AI thing. One is the potential for whoever ever had the want to create something for System 7 (or greater) but lacked the resources - this grants knowledge and the opportunity to learn from what they are using AI to create. The most negative I guess is the backlash the ones using AI receives. Sometimes it's downright disgusting how some people react and act as soon as they get a whiff of "here be AI". Well, that's my short take on it.
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68040
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512 MB Posts: 984 68k - thy kingdom come, thy will be done !
Reply #2 on: May 29, 2026, 16:44
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I would highly advise against the attempt. And I'm talking out of experience here. Simple script snippets and specially hints as to the functionality behind a specific subject are an AI's strong point. But anything more complex than that and you're begging for pain & trouble. Case in point: Try to have an AI write you a lengthy AppleScript for MacOS 8.1 that is not infused with language elements that were introduced for much later AppleScript versions. There-is-no-intelligence-behind-AI. Its just a statistical analysis correlation machine with some elaborate language model attached to the back and front. Nothing more. Since very few web articles about AppleScript bother to include the phrase "do not use for earlier MacOS versions" any dumb, blind and deaf algorithm will inevitably get things mixed up here. And then comes the problem that AI doesn't know how to say "I don't know". It will present you with the perfect software code to solve your problem. Specially Grok will even brag about how good it supposedly works. Problem is it won't even make it out of the editor. Because the AS interpreter refuses to digest that stuff. With a compiler you'll be spending days hunting down logical errors that do not exist. Because the problem is that you were told to use the wrong language elements or software libraries, that do not do what the AI told you they would accomplish.
Last Edit: May 29, 2026, 16:46 by 68040
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Bolkonskij
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Administrator 2048 MB Posts: 2053
Reply #3 on: June 08, 2026, 16:41
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I'm kind of torn on the question. I can clearly see the advantages of using AI to e.g. debug your code or as fogwraith noted, to help writing documentation for it. It's a huge time saver and it can help to actually advance your knowledge by showing solutions or security concerns that you may not have thought about. That said, I also see potential downsides. Apart from the environmental impact, I'm concerned about what will happen when one day in the future those "greybeards" who learned to code from scratch on their C64s will enter pension age and a younger generation never used to write code *without* AI-assistance will take over. I see that with younger collegues at work and it kind of worries me. Perhaps unjustifily so. So to sum it up, using AI as an optional helper is probably a good idea. To use it as a kind of replacement is a difficult thing and may lead to undesireable outcomes. Given how I've seen CEOs and their middle management react to it ("yes! finally we can scrap those expensive programmer jobs!)" I fear for the worst. We shall see. In terms of System 7, I see the big advantage that we may get a lot more software. In fact, we already do see more software being worked on, just today I saw somebody posting screenshots of a new weather report application running on his System 7 PowerBook Duo230. Whereas it had been impossible to invest the required time to write software (unpaid!) for a hobbyist platform, it now gets a lot more realistic. AI helps shorten the tedious development process and annoying scouting for documentation. From experience, I can also say that it has gotten a lot better in recent years. It was barely able to write a bare-bones classic Mac application with all the toolbox inits just two years ago, now that is no problem anymore. Though I find it still phantasizes about a lot of things. (e.g. I had that happen with compiler settings in Think C 5 some time ago ... the suggested option wasn't there and never has, and I only found out after searching for 20 minutes until I got confirmation it wasn't my fault) My only wish is that whenever something was written with the help of AI, the sources should be provided along so everybody is free to check them out / evaluate the AI code.
Last Edit: June 08, 2026, 16:50 by Bolkonskij
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68040
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512 MB Posts: 984 68k - thy kingdom come, thy will be done !
Reply #4 on: June 08, 2026, 17:01
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You know why "Black Box", Spaghetti Code" and "AI written software" are all congregating on the same page in the phone book? Any chunk of code that exceeds a few pages and was machine written, requires another machine to handle it. That even goes true for an ever larger portion of last generation AI engines. We are rapidly approaching an age were we can't even understand the language in which the ghosts we raised will talk to one another. There is a reason why nobody has as of yet developed a complete software suite for the PC with AI. You can hide an awful lot of bad coding behind the raw CPU & memory power of big servers. On small personal computers - and specially vintage machines - that picture changes dramatically.
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