Devs gaining little (if anything) from AI coding assistants

For me, it is a glorified auto-complete function. Could definitely live without it.

Good devs gain little.

I gain a lot.

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.

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.

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.

I'm a penetration tester and it increases my productivity a lot

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.

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

And yet, higher ups continue to lay off more devs because AI "is the future".

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.

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.

Places GPT-based "AI" next to flying cars

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.

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.

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 are legit and where they go.

It's just fancier spell check and boilerplate generator

I honestly stopped using it after a week

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 ?

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.

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.

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

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

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.

I’m shocked. There must be an error in this analysis. /s

Maybe engage an AI coding assistant to massage the data analysis lol

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.

I use it occasionally. Recently I used it to convert a written specification in a document to a java object. And it was like 95% correct - but having to manually double check everything and fix the errors eliminated much of the time savings.

However that's a very ideal use case. Most often I forget it exists.

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Claude is my coding mentor. Wouldn't want to work without it.

I use it as second last resort, and in those times, it did worked out. I had to test, verify, and make changes. Even so, I avoid using them.

I truly don't understand the tendency of people to hate these kinds of tools. Honestly seems like an ego thing to me.

To be honest ChatGPT pretty much killed the fun of programming.

Judging this article by it's title (refuse to click). Calling BS. ChatGPT has been a game changer for me personally

I'm fine with searching stack exchange. It's much more useful. More info, more options, more understanding.