Good devs gain little.
I gain a lot.
Devs gaining little (if anything) from AI coding assistants
Submitted 1 month ago by psychothumbs@lemmy.world to technology@lemmy.world
https://www.cio.com/article/3540579/devs-gaining-little-if-anything-from-ai-coding-assistants.html
Comments
Blue_Morpho@lemmy.world 1 month ago
Warl0k3@lemmy.world 1 month ago
Its basically a template generator, which is really helpful when you’re generating boilerplate. It doesn’t save me much if any time to refactor/fill in that template, but it does save some mental fatigue that I can then spend on much more interesting problems.
It’s a niche tool, but occasionally quite handy. Without leaps forward technically though, it’s never going to become more than that.
dgmib@lemmy.world 1 month ago
Just beware, sometimes the AI suggestions are scary good, some times they’re batshit crazy.
Just because AI suggests it, doesn’t mean it’s something you should use or learn from.
rocci@lemmy.ml 1 month ago
Feel the same way!
Greg@lemmy.ca 1 month ago
Generative AI is great for loads of programming tasks like helping create regular expressions or syntax conversions between languages. The main issue I’ve seen in codebases that rely heavily on generative AI is that the “solutions” often fix today’s bug while making future debugging more difficult. Generative AI makes it easy to go fast in the wrong direction. Used right it’s a useful tool.
VonReposti@feddit.dk 1 month ago
While I am not fond of AI, we do have access to it at work and I must admit that it saves some time in some cases. I’m not a developer with decades of experience in a single language, so something I am using AI to is asking “Is it possible to do a one-liner in language X where it does Y?” It works very well and the code is rarely unusable, but it is still up to my judgement whether the AI came up with a clever use of functions that I didn’t know about or whether it crammed stuff into a single unreadable line.
ggppjj@lemmy.world 1 month ago
It introduced me to the basics of C# in a way that traditional googling at my previous level of knowledge would’ve made difficult.
I knew what I wanted to do and I didn’t know what was possible or how to ask without my question being closed as a duplicate with a link to an unhelpful post.
In that regard, it’s very helpful. If I had already known the language well enough, I can see it being less helpful.
UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world 1 month ago
Great for Coding 101 in a language I’m rusty with or otherwise unfamiliar.
Absolutely useless when it comes time to optimize a complex series of functions or upgrade to a new version of the .NET library. All the “AI” you need is typically baked into Intellisense or some equivalent anyway. We’ve had code-assist/advice features for over a decade and its always been mid.
Semi_Hemi_Demigod@lemmy.world 1 month ago
This is what I’ve used it for and it’s helped me learn, especially because it makes mistakes and I have to get them to work. In my case it was with Terraform and Ansible.
ggppjj@lemmy.world 1 month ago
Haha, yeah. It really loves to refactor my code to “fix” bracket list initialization (e.g.
List<string> stringList = []) because it keeps not remembering that the syntax has been valid for a while.It’s newest favorite hangup is to incessantly suggest null checks without asking if it’s a nullable property that it’s checking first. I think I’m almost at the point where it’s becoming less useful to me.
Asetru@feddit.org 1 month ago
What about just reading the documentation?
turmacar@lemmy.world 1 month ago
Even with amazing documentation, it can be hard to find the thing you’re looking for if you don’t know the right phrasing or terminology yet. It’s easily the most usable thing I’ve seen come out of “AI”, which makes sense. A Language Model being able to parse language a very literal application.
ByteOnBikes@slrpnk.net 1 month ago
I learned bash thanks to AI!
For years, all I did was copy and paste bash commands. And I didn’t understand arguments, how to chain things, or how it connects.
HighlyRegardedArtist@lemmy.world 1 month ago
You do realize that a very thorough manual is but a
man bashaway? Perhaps it’s not the most accessible source available, but it makes up for that in completeness.
Landless2029@lemmy.world 1 month ago
Everyone keeps talking about autocomplete but I’ve used it successfully for comments and documentation.
You can use vs code extensions to generate and update readme and changelog files.
Then if you follow documentation as code you can update your Confluence/whatever by copy pasting.
Dremor@lemmy.world 1 month ago
I also use it a lot for unit tests. It helps a lot when you have to write multiple edge cases, and even find new one at times. Like putting a random int in an enum field (enumField = (myEnum)1000), I didn’t knew you could do that…
Landless2029@lemmy.world 1 month ago
Yeah. I’ve found new logic by asking GPT for improvements on my code or suggestions.
I cut the size of a function in half once using a suggested recursive loop and it blew my mind.
Feels like having a peer to do a code review on hand at all times.
dipdowel@feddit.nl 1 month ago
Yeah, I also find it super helpful with unit tests, saves a lot of time.
TheEighthDoctor@lemmy.world 1 month ago
I’m a penetration tester and it increases my productivity a lot
Tattorack@lemmy.world 1 month ago
Penetration tester, huh? Sounds like a fun and reproductive job.
TheEighthDoctor@lemmy.world 1 month ago
But it can be very HARD sometimes
Gonzako@lemmy.world 1 month ago
so it’s a vector of attack?
yikerman@lemmy.world 1 month ago
I mainly use AI for learning new things. It’s amazing at trivial tasks.
GreenKnight23@lemmy.world 1 month ago
as a dental assistant I can also confirm that AI has increased my productivity, checks notes, by a lot.
9point6@lemmy.world 1 month ago
My main use is skipping the blank page problem when writing a new suite of tests—which after about 10 mins of refactoring are often a good starting point
TrickDacy@lemmy.world 1 month ago
I truly don’t understand the tendency of people to hate these kinds of tools. Honestly seems like an ego thing to me.
FlorianSimon@sh.itjust.works 1 month ago
Carbon footprint. Techbro arrogance. Not sure what’s hard to understand about it.
GreenKnight23@lemmy.world 1 month ago
I sent a PR back to a Dev five times before I gave the work to someone else.
they used AI to generate everything.
surprise, there were so many problems it broke the whole stack.
this is a routine thing this one dev does too. every PR has to be tossed back at least once. not expecting perfection, but I do expect it to not break the whole app.
TrickDacy@lemmy.world 1 month ago
Like I told another person ITT, hiring terrible devs isn’t something you can blame on software.
leftzero@lemmynsfw.com 1 month ago
Having to deal with pull requests defecated by “developers” who blindly copy code from chatgpt is a particularly annoying and depressing waste of time.
At least back when they blindly copied code from stack overflow they had to read through the answers and comments and try to figure out which one fit their use case better and why, and maybe learn something… now they just assume the LLM is right (despite the fact that they asked the wrong question and even if they had asked the right one it’d’ve given the wrong answer) and call it a day; no brain activity or learning whatsoever.
TrickDacy@lemmy.world 1 month ago
That is not a problem with the ai software, that’s a problem with hiring morons who have zero experience.
YungOnions@sh.itjust.works 1 month ago
Typical lack of nuance on the Internet, sadly. Everything has to be Bad or Good. Black or White. AI is either The best thing ever™ or The worst thing ever™. No room for anything in between. Considering negative news generates more clicks, you can see why the media tend to take the latter approach.
I also think much of the hate is just people jumping on the AI = bad band-wagon. Does it have issues? Absolutely. Is it perfect? Far from it. But the constant negativity has gotten tired. There’s a lot of fascinating discussion to be had around AI, especially in the art world, but God forbid you suggest it’s anything but responsible for the total collapse of civilisation as we know it…
FlorianSimon@sh.itjust.works 1 month ago
If it didn’t significantly contribute to the cooking of all lifeforms on planet Earth, most of us would not mind. We would still deride it because of its untrustworthiness. However, it’s not just useless: it’s also harmful. That’s the core of the beef I (and a lot of other folks) have against the tech.
TrickDacy@lemmy.world 1 month ago
I think you nailed it with everything you just said.
gaael@lemmy.world 1 month ago
Also, when a tool increases your productivity but your salary and paid time off don’t increase, it’s a tool that only benefits the overlords and as such deserves to be hated.
stephen01king@lemmy.zip 1 month ago
Oh, so do you use a 13 year old PC because a newer one increases your productivity without increasing your salary and paid time off?
tee9000@lemmy.world 1 month ago
Its really weird.
I want to believe people arent this dumb but i also dont want to be crazy for suggesting such nonsensical sentiment is manufactured. Such is life in the disinformation age.
Like what are we going to do, tell all Countries and fraudsters to stop using ai because it turns out its too much of a hassle?
FlorianSimon@sh.itjust.works 1 month ago
We can’t do that, nobody’s saying we can. But this is an important reminder that the tech savior bros aren’t very different from the oil execs.
And constant activism might hopefully achieve the goal of pushing the tech out of the mainstream, with its friend crypto, along other things not to be taken seriously anymore like flying cars and the Hyperloop.
alienanimals@lemmy.world 1 month ago
The writer has a clear bias and a lack of a technical background (writing for Techies.com doesn’t count) .
You don’t have to look hard to find devs saving time and learning something with AI coding assistants. There are plenty of them in this thread. This is just an opinion piece by someone who read a single study.
kureta@lemmy.ml 1 month ago
if you are already competent and you are aware that it doesn’t necessarily give you correct information, the it is really helpful. I know enough to sense when it is making shit up. Also it is, for some scenarios, faster and easier then looking at a documentation. I like it personally. But it will not replace competent developers anytime soon.
jas0n@lemmy.world 1 month ago
This opinion is a breath of fresh air compared to the rest of tech journalism screaming “AI software engineer” after each new model release.
ShunkW@lemmy.world 1 month ago
And yet, higher ups continue to lay off more devs because AI “is the future”.
breckenedge@lemmy.world 1 month ago
In my experience, most of the tech layoffs have been non-devs. PMs and Designers have been the hardest hit and often their roles are being eliminated.
ShunkW@lemmy.world 1 month ago
I mean, I’m a dev who got laid off almost a year ago and still can’t find anything. I know tons of others who are in similar positions. So…
asmodee59@lemmy.world 1 month ago
Who are those guys they keep asking this question over and over ? And how are they not able to use such a simple tool to increase their productivity ?
tonytins@pawb.social 1 month ago
Places GPT-based “AI” next to flying cars
pennomi@lemmy.world 1 month ago
Flying cars exist, they’re just not cost effective. AFAICT there’s no GPT that is proficient at coding yet.
otp@sh.itjust.works 1 month ago
It’s a lot easier to access ChatGPT than it is to access a flying car
Sylvartas@lemmy.world 1 month ago
As far as I know, right now the main problem with flying cars is that they are nowhere near as idiot-proof as a normal car, and don’t really solve any transportation problem since most countries’ air regulations agencies would require them to exclusively take off and land in airports… Where you can usually find tons of planes that can go much further (and are much more cost effective, as you pointed out)
eager_eagle@lemmy.world 1 month ago
lol their “”“full report”“” saying 41% more bugs has 2 pages and reads like a promotional material
you can download it with a 10 minute email if you really want to see for yourself.
ulkesh@lemmy.world 1 month ago
No shit. Senior devs have been saying this the whole time. AI, in its current form, for developers, is like handing a spatula to a gourmet chef. Yes it is useful to an extremely small degree, but that’s it…for now.
finitebanjo@lemmy.world 1 month ago
A convoluted spatula that sometimes accidentally cuts what your cooking im half instead of flipping it and consumes as much power as the entirety of Japan.
interdimensionalmeme@lemmy.ml 1 month ago
It’s when you only have a pot and your fingers that a spatula is awesome. I could never bother finish learning C and its awkward syntax. Even though I know how to code in some other language, I just couldn’t write much C at all and it was painful and slow. And too much time passed between attempts that I forgot most of it in between. Now I can easily make simple C apps, I just explain the underlying logic, with example of how I would do it in my preferred language and piece by piece it quickly comes together and I don’t have to remember if the for loop needs brackets of parenthesis or brackets nor if the line terminator is colon or semi colon.
Choco1ateCh1p@lemmy.world 1 month ago
Every now and then, GitHub Copilot saves me a few seconds suggesting some very basic solution that I am usually in the midst of creating. Is it worth the investment? No, at least not yet. It hasn’t once “beaten” me or offered an improved solution. It (more frequently than not) requires the developer to understand and modify what it proposes for its suggestions to be useful. Is is a useful tool? Sure, just not worth the price yet, and obviously not perfect. But, where I’m working is testing it out, so I’ll keep utilizing it.
tdawg@lemmy.world 1 month ago
I honestly stopped using it after a week
sirico@feddit.uk 1 month ago
It’s just fancier spell check and boilerplate generator
IvanOverdrive@lemm.ee 1 month ago
Claude is my coding mentor. Wouldn’t want to work without it.
dubyakay@lemmy.ca 1 month ago
I run code snippets by three or four LLMs and the consensus is never there. Claude has been the worst for me.
CaptSneeze@lemmy.world 1 month ago
Which one has been best? I’m only a hobbyist, but I’ve found Claude to be my favorite, and the best UI by a mile.
Grandwolf319@sh.itjust.works 1 month ago
Yep, by definition generative AI gets worse the more specific you get. If you need common templates though, it’s almost as good as today’s google.
mint_tamas@lemmy.world 1 month ago
… which is not a high bar.
histic@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 month ago
Garbage in garbage out is how they all work if you give it a well defined prompt you can get exactly what you want out of it most of the time but if you just say fix this problem it’ll just fix the problem ignoring everything else
zbyte64@awful.systems 1 month ago
You’re holding it wrong
alienanimals@lemmy.world 1 month ago
Wait till this guy learns how a theremin work.
tkw8@lemm.ee 1 month ago
I’m shocked. There must be an error in this analysis. /s
Maybe engage an AI coding assistant to massage the data lol
LordCrom@lemmy.world 1 month ago
I get more benefit from a good IDE that helps me track libraries, cars, functions, grammar checks my code, offers a pop-up with params and options…
I don’t needcode I would grade as a D- from an AI. Most of what I write comes from my code closet anyway. I have skeleton code for so much, and I trust my old code more than AIs new code
BigBenis@lemmy.world 1 month ago
It’s great as essentially a StackOverflow that I can talk to in real time. But as with SO, I’ve still got to figure out what pieces go where.
RagingRobot@lemmy.world 1 month ago
AI search results made stack overflow answers harder to find now lol
turmacar@lemmy.world 1 month ago
It’s definitely exploded but content farms were a problem even before 2022. There’s a reason google results starting with “reddit” / “stack overflow” were trending so hard.
Cpo@lemm.ee 1 month ago
I partly disagree, complex algorithms are indeed a no, but for learning a new language it is awesome.
Currently learning Rust and although it cannot solve everything, it does guide you with suggestions and usable code fragments.
Highly recommended.
daniskarma@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 month ago
It has some uses.
But I’m waiting for a good self hosted model and to have a more powerful gpu to properly run it.
EleventhHour@lemmy.world 1 month ago
Debs that are punching above their class, however, probably get great benefit from it. I would think it’s also an OK teaching tool, except for how inaccurate it can be sometimes.
filister@lemmy.world 1 month ago
To be honest ChatGPT pretty much killed the fun of programming.
ByteOnBikes@slrpnk.net 1 month ago
What?
filister@lemmy.world 1 month ago
Programming was like a challenge, you have a problem and you need to solve it. You look into the internet, stack overflow, test different chunks of codes, reading documentation, etc. nowadays is simply splitting one problem into pieces, and then copy pasting.
Zoots@lemmy.world 1 month ago
Judging this article by it’s title (refuse to click). Calling BS. ChatGPT has been a game changer for me personally
eager_eagle@lemmy.world 1 month ago
I like to use suggestions to feel superior when trash talking the generated code
einkorn@feddit.org 1 month ago
For me, it is a glorified auto-complete function. Could definitely live without it.
CatsGoMOW@lemmy.world 1 month ago
Same for me, but that glorified auto complete helps a lot.
MeatsOfRage@lemmy.world 1 month ago
Hell yea. Our unit test coverage went way up because you can blow through test creation in second. I had a large complicated migration from one data set to another with specific mutations based on weird rules and GPT got me 80% of the way there and with a little nudging basically got it perfect. Code that would’ve taken a few hours took about 6 prompts. If I’m curious about a new library I can get a working example right away to see how everything fits together. When these articles say there’s no benefit I feel people aren’t using these tools or don’t know how to use them effectively.
Kualk@lemm.ee 1 month ago
We always have to ask what language is it auto-completing for? If it is a strictly typed language, then existing tooling is already doing everything possible and I see no need for additional improvement. If it is non-strictly typed language, then I can see how it can get a little more helpful, but without knowledge of actual context I am not sure if it can get a lot more accurate.
I recall co-pilot demo people using Python. Same demo with GO, C#, Rust would have less impact.