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.
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. All that’s changed is the branding.
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.
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.
And yet, higher ups continue to lay off more devs because AI “is the future”.
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.
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…
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.
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.
This opinion is a breath of fresh air compared to the rest of tech journalism screaming “AI software engineer” after each new model release.
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.
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…
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.
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.
Good devs gain little.
I gain a lot.
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.
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.
Feel the same way!
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
I’m a penetration tester and it increases my productivity a lot
Penetration tester, huh? Sounds like a fun and reproductive job.
But it can be very HARD sometimes
I mainly use AI for learning new things. It’s amazing at trivial tasks.
so it’s a vector of attack?
as a dental assistant I can also confirm that AI has increased my productivity, checks notes, by a lot.
To be honest ChatGPT pretty much killed the fun of programming.
I truly don’t understand the tendency of people to hate these kinds of tools. Honestly seems like an ego thing to me.
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.
removed by mod
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?
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.
Like I told another person ITT, hiring terrible devs isn’t something you can blame on software.
that depends on your definition of what a “terrible dev” is.
of the three devs that I know have used AI, all we’re moderately acceptable devs before they relied on AI. this formed my opinion that AI code and the devs that use it are terrible.
two of those three I no longer work with because they were let go for quality and productivity issues.
so you can clearly see why my opinion of AI code is so low.
I would argue that it’s obvious if someone doesn’t know how to use a tool to do their job, they aren’t great at their job to begin with.
Your argument is to blame the tool and excuse the person who is awful with the tool.
my argument is that lazy devs use the tool because that’s what it was designed for.
just calling a hammer a hammer.
Using a tool to speed up your work is not lazy. Using a tool stupidly is stupid. Anyone who thinks these tools are meant to replace humans using logic is misunderstanding them entirely.
You remind me of some of my coworkers who would rather do the same mind numbing task for hours every day rather than write a script that handles it. I judge them for thinking working smarter is “lazy” and I think it’s a fair judgement. I see them as the lazy ones. They’d rather not think more deeply about the scripting aspect because it’s hard. They rather zone out and mindlessly click, copy/paste, etc. I’d rather analyze and break down the problem so I can solve it once and then move onto something more interesting to solve.
sometimes working smarter is actually putting the work in so you don’t have to waste time and stress about if it’s going to work or not.
I get Dreamweaver vibes from AI generated code. Sure, the website works. looks exactly the way it should. works exactly how it should. that HTML source though… fucking aweful.
I can agree, AI is an augment to the tools you can use. however, it’s being marketed as a replacement and a large variety of devs are using it as such.
shitty devs are enabled by shitty tools.
They rather zone out and mindlessly click, copy/paste, etc. I’d rather analyze and break down the problem so I can solve it once and then move onto something more interesting to solve.
From what I’ve seen of AI code in my time using it, it often is an advanced form of copying and pasting. It frequently takes problems that could be better solved more efficiently with fewer lines of code or by generalizing the problem and does the (IMO evil) work of making the solution that used to require the most drudgery easy.
Some tools deserve blame. In the case of this, you’re supposed to use it to automate away certain things but that automation isn’t really reliable. If it has to be babysat to the extent that I certainly would argue that it does, then it deserves some blame for being a crappy tool.
If, for instance, getter and setter generating or refactor tools in IDEs routinely screwed up in the same ways, people would say that the tools were broken and that people shouldn’t use them. I don’t get how this is different just because of “AI”.
Okay, so if the tool seems counterproductive for you, it’s very assuming to generalize that and assume it’s the same for everyone else too. I definitely do not have that experience.
I honestly stopped using it after a week
I like to use suggestions to feel superior when trash talking the generated code
Devs that are punching above their class, however, probably get great benefit from it. I would think it’s also an OK learning tool, except for how inaccurate it can be sometimes.
lol Uplevel’s “”“full report”“” saying devs using Copilot create 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.
just some meaningless numbers.
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
