Comment on AI Coding Is Massively Overhyped, Report Finds
ikirin@feddit.org 4 weeks agoI’ve seen and used AI for snippets of code and it’s pretty decent at that.
With my colleagues I always compare it to a battery powered drill. It’s very powerful and can make shit a lot easier. But you’d not try to build furniture from scratch with only a battery powered drill.
setsubyou@lemmy.world 4 weeks ago
What bothers me the most is the amount of tech debt it adds by using outdated approaches.
For example, recently I used AI to create some python scripts that use polars and altair to parse some data and draw charts. It kept insisting to bring in pandas so it could convert the polars dataframes to pandas dataframes just for passing them to altair. When I told if that altair can use polars dataframes directly, that helped, but two or three prompts later it would try to solve problems by adding the conversion again.
This makes sense too, because the training material, on average, is probably older than the change that enabled altair to use polars dataframes directly. And a lot of code out there just uses pandas in the first place.
The result is that in all these cases, someone who doesn’t know this would probably be impressed that the scripts worked, and just not notice the extra tech debt from that unnecessary dependency on pandas.
It sounds like it’s not a big deal, but these things add up and soon your AI enhanced code base is full of additional dependencies, deprecated APIs, unnecessarily verbose or complicated code, etc.
I feel like this is one aspect that gets overlooked a bit when we talk about productivity gains. We don’t necessarily immediately realize how much of that extra LoC/time goes into outdated code and old fashioned verbosity. But it will eventually come back to bite us.