AI has made being OE insanely easy.
Comment on AI-generated code contains more bugs and errors than human output
Ledivin@lemmy.world 18 hours ago
Anyone blindly having AI write their code is an absolute moron.
Anyone with decent experience (5-10 years, maybe 10+?) can absolutely fucking skyrocket their output if they properly set up their environments and treat their agents as junior devs instead of competent programmers. You shouldn’t trust generated code any more than you trust someone fresh out of college, but they produce code in seconds instead of weeks.
I have tripled my output while producing more secure code (based on my security audits), safer code (based on code coverage), and less error-prone code (based on production logs and our unchanged QA process).
Now, the ethical issues and environmental issues, I 100% can get behind. And I have no idea what companies are going to do in 10 years when they have to replace people like me and haven’t been hiring or training replacements. But the productivity and quality debates are absolutely ridiculous, as long as a strong dev is behind the wheel and has been trained to use the tools.
AlecSadler@lemmy.blahaj.zone 15 hours ago
skibidi@lemmy.world 15 hours ago
Consider: [dev.to/…/the-ai-productivity-paradox-why-develope…](the facts)
People are very bad at judging their own productivity, and AI consistently makes devs feel like they are working faster, while in fact slowing them down.
I’ve experienced it myself - it feels fucking great to prompt a skeleton and have something brand new up and running in under an hour. The good chemicals come flooding in because I’m doing something new and interesting.
Then I need to take a scalpel to a hundred scattered lines to get CI to pass. Then I need to write tests that actually test functionality. Then I start extending things and realize the implementation is too rigid and I need to change the architecture.
It is as this point that I admit to myself that going in intentionally with a plan and building it myself the slow way would have saved all that pain and probably got the final product shipped sooner, even if the prototype was shipped later.
Ledivin@lemmy.world 8 hours ago
What about my comment made you believe I was using gut feelings to judge anything? My ticket completion rate, number of tickets, story points, and number of projects completed all point to massive productivity gains.
skibidi@lemmy.world 6 hours ago
The end of your comment was
Which is a general statement and not dealing with your specific circumstance. If a tool works for you, by all means keep using it.
However, broadly across software that is not the case. So the “productivity and quality debates” are not ridiculous … the data supports the sceptics.
Ledivin@lemmy.world 4 hours ago
Absolute nonsense. Have we banned hammers because some people keep hitting their hands with them? Have we banned ladders as one of the single most dangerous items in any household?
I don’t think we should be putting these tools in the hands of junior devs - as the studies show, it hinders their productivity and learning. But to generally claim that they are bad tools with no upsides is just as ridiculous as the strawman you set up.
setsubyou@lemmy.world 12 hours ago
It depends on the task. As an extreme example, I can get AI to create a complete application in a language I don’t know. There’s no way that’s not more productive than me first learning the language to a point where I can make apps in it. Just have to pick something simple enough for the AI.
Of course the opposite extreme also exists. I’ve found that when I demand something impossible, AI will often just try to implement it anyway. It can easily get into an endless cycle where it keeps optimistically declaring that it identified the issue and fixed it with a small change, over and over again. This includes cases where there’s a bug in the underlying OS or similar. You can waste a huge amount of time going down an entirely wrong path if you don’t realize that an idea doesn’t work.
In my real work neither of these really happen. So the actual impact is much less. A lot of my work is not coding in the first place. And I’ve been writing code since I was a little kid, for almost 40 years now. So even the fast scaffolding I can do with AI is not that exciting. I can do that pretty quickly without AI too. When AI coding tools appeared my bosses started asking if I was fast because I was using one. No, I’m fast because some people ask for a new demo every week. Causes the same problems later too.
But I also do think that we all still need to learn how to use AI properly. This applies to all tools, but I think it’s more difficult than with other tools. If I try to use a hammer on something other than a nail, it will not enthusiastically tell me it can do it with just one more small change. AI tools absolutely will though, and it’s easy to just let them try because it’s just a few seconds to see what they come up with. But that’s a trap that leads to those productivity wasting spirals. Especially if the result actually somehow still works at first, so we have to fix it half a year later instead of right away.
At my work there are some other things that I feel limit the productivity potential of AI tools. First of all we’re only allowed to use a very limited number of tools, some of them made in-house. Then we’re not really allowed to integrate them into our workflows other than the part where we write code. E.g. I could trivially write an mcp server that interacts with our (custom in-house) ci system and actually increases my productivity because I could save a small number of seconds very often if I could tell an AI to find builds for me for integration or QA work. But it’s not allowed. We’re all being pushed to use AI but the company makes it really difficult at the same time.
So when I play around with AI on my spare time I do actually feel like I’m getting a huge boost. Not just because I can use a claude model instead of the ones I can use at work, but also just basic things like e.g. being able to turn on AI in Xcode at all when working on software for Apple platforms. On my work Macbook I can’t turn on any Apple AI features at all so even tab completion is worse. Or in other words, those realities of working on serious projects at a serious company with serious security policies can also kill any potential productivity boost from AI. They basically expect us to be productive with only those features the non-developer CEO likes, who also doesn’t have to follow any of our development processes…
KENNY_LOGIN_LILLIAN@lemmy.world 11 hours ago
This is Alias. You are on my list.
add skibidi
DontAskAboutUpdog@lemmy.world 10 hours ago
Jeez, you aint joking about that brain injury :( I whish you good luck with your life. I am not trying to be an AH, i truly do whish you the best.
KENNY_LOGIN_LILLIAN@lemmy.world 10 hours ago
Thank you! Yes, it’s DID. Not official though. I diagnosed myself earlier this morning.