I’ve seen a few articles saying that instead of hating AI, the real quiet programmers young and old are loving it and have a renewed sense of purpose coding with llm helpers (this article was also hating on ed zitiron, which makes sense why it would).
Is this total bullshit? I have to admit, even though it makes me ill, I’ve used llms a few times to help me learn simple code syntax quickly (im and absolute noob who’s wanted my whole life to learn code but cant grasp it very well). But yes, a lot of time its wrong.
The hate is ridiculous as is the hype.
It’s a new tool that is often useful when used correctly. Don’t use it to write entire applications - that’s a recipe for disaster.
But if you’re learning a new language it’s amazing. You have an infinitely patient and immediately available tutor that can teach you a language’s syntax, best practices, etc. I don’t know why that would make you “ill” besides all the shame “real developers” seem to want to lump on anybody who uses AI. If you’re not concerned about passing some “I don’t use an IDE” nerd’s purity test you’ll be fine.
The truth, as always, is in the middle. Plenty of programmers hate it, and plenty of programmers like it. It just so happens that these kinds of spaces attracts more or the hate crowd, and paid shill articles attract more or the like crowd ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Yes. But I’m not paying for premium like some of my cowokres. I use it to avoid the grunt work, and to avoid things I know I’d have to google.
I used some coworkers account for a while and auto complete is amazing. I it guesses wrong you just keep tipping as usual. If its right, hit tab and saves you like 20 seconds.
On the other hand I have cokowkers that do not check the chatgpt output and the PRs make no sense. Example: instead of making a variable type any (which is forbidden in our codebase) they did
Let a : date|number|string|object|(…) = fetchData()
Programmers are promoted to architects who write high-level specs with a subordinate to do the leg work (AI). I think the hate is because not everyone is good at planning and some people are better at perfecting implementation details, and AI isn’t helpful there.
If by promoted you mean required to do architect’s but not qualified, nor paid for that
I’ve had good luck having it write simple scripts that I could easily handle myself. For example, I needed a script to chop a directory full of log files up into archives, with some constraints. That sort of thing.
I haven’t tried it on anything more substantial.
This was using Copilot because I haven’t found a good coding model that will run locally on 16GB VRAM.From my experience it’s really great at bootstrapping new projects for you. It’s good at getting you sample files and if you’re using cursor just building out a sample project.
It’s decent at being an alternative to google/SO for syntax or previously encountered errors. There’s a few things it hallucinates but generally it can save time as long as you don’t trust it blindly.
It struggles when you give it complex tasks or not-straightforward items. Or things that require a lot of domain knowledge. I once wanted to see what css classes were still in use across a handful of react components and it just shat the bed.
The people who champion AI as a human replacement will build a quick proof of concept with it and proclaim “oh shit this is awesome!” And not realize that that’s the easy part of software engineering.
Some definitely are. But I think a lot aren’t. Hell, a lot of programmers still don’t even use an IDE.
I don’t know why it would make you ill.
The same reason I wont use autotune or melodyne. Its just gross to me.
I don’t feel like it’s the same - autotune can make me more in tune than I could ever achieve. Current LLMs definitely can’t write better code than me, they can just do it faster.
I sometime describe it as an intern. Its useful but many of the things its useful for replicates things that addons in the ide did anyway. Its also handy for web searches to be a bit quicker. Ultimately I don’t see it going away.
Definitely depends on the sub-sector of the industry you’re in. There’s no shortage of stories of people who swear by it, or who are having it forced on them by management.
Me personally’ I’ve never wanted or been pressured to use it, and I work for a company with “AI” in the damn name. To be fair, though, this company was around doing general machine-learning stuff before the current LLM craze exploded. Also, I work with a small team that was only bought by this company a few years ago, and thus far has been allowed to remain practically independent. Also also, the business domain my team works in is finance and accounting, where there’s bot much practical application for ML, and where you REALLY can’t afford to fuck around and find out, with business data.
You can either spend your time generating prompts, tweaking them until you get what you want and then using more prompts to refining the code until you end up with something that does what you want…
or you can just fucking write it yourself. And there’s the bonus of understanding how it works.
AI is probably fine for generating boiler plate code or repetitive simple stuff, but personally I wouldn’t trust it any further than that.
There is a middle ground. I have one prompt I use. I might tweak it a little for different technologies, languages, etc. only so I can fit more standards, documentation and example code in the upload limit.
And I ask it questions rather than asking it to write code. I have it review my code, suggest other ways of doing something, have it explain best practices, ask it to evaluate the maintainability, conformance to corporate standards, etc.
Sometimes it takes me down a rabbit hole when I’m outside my experience (so does Google and stack overflow for what it’s worth), but if you’re executing a task you understand well on your own, it can help you do it faster and/or better.
I use it now and again but not integrated into an ide and not to write large bits of code.
My uses are like so
Rewrite this rant to shut the PO/PM up. Explain why this is a waste of time
Convert this xml to json or x to y
Given these tables give me the sql to do xyz.
Sometimes for troubleshooting an environment issue
Do I need it , no. But if it saves me some time on bullshit tasks then thats more time for me
Sorry, I agree with other replier, but why would you use AI to convert from and to XML… when another more objective, reliable, and deterministic tool to convert exists for a long time. You know well how often LLM makes up stuff…
My brother in programming,
please don’t use AI for data format conversion when deterministic energy efficient means are readily available.
- an old man.
It was just an example to illustrate the point. I use specific convertors for actual format conversions. Actual uses have been map it to a custom data model .
You are right though , right tool for the job and all that.
🙄
I’d never trust it to make the change but I recently asked for a Python script to do a change I needed and it did it perfectly first try (verified the diff).
Also I don’t know Python at all.
— a fellow old man
I’m pretty sure every time you use AI for programming your brain atrophies a little, even if you’re just looking something up. There’s value in the struggle.
So they can definitely speed you up, but be careful how you use it. There’s no value in a programmer who can only blindly recite LLM output.
There’s a balance to be struck in there somewhere, and I’m still figuring it out.
I’m pretty sure every time you use AI for programming your brain atrophies a little, even if you’re just looking something up. There’s value in the struggle.
I assume you were joking but some studies have come out recently that found this is exactly what happens and for more than just programming. (sorry it was a while ago so I dont have links)
There are similar studies on the effects of watching a Youtube video instead of reading a manual.
Doesn’t sound like they’re joking to me.
This is literally the exact same argument made against using books and developing writing.
I’ve been using phind as a technical-focused AI search engine, which is a great addition to my toolset.
I’m mindful of using it vs searching [ref docs etc], not only in the kind of search and answer I’m looking for but also energy consumption impact, but it’s definitely very useful. I’m a senior dev though, and know what to expect and I am able to assess plausibility, and phind provides sources I can inspect too.
As for code assistance, I find it plausible that it can be useful, even if from my personal experience I’m skeptical.
I watched an Microsoft talk from two devs, which was technically sound and plausible in that it was not just marketing but they talked about their experience, including limits of AI, and where they had to and to what degree they had to deal with hallucinations and cleanup. They talked about where they see usefulness in AI. They were both senior, and able to assess plausibility, and do corrections where necessary. What I remember; they used it to bounce ideas back and forth, to do an implementation draft they then go over and complete, etc.
Microsoft can do the investment of AI setup, code sharing to model, AI instructions/meta-description setup investment, etc.
My personal experience was in using copilot for Rust code, for Nushell plugins. I’m not very familiar with Rust, and it was very confusing, and with a lot of hallucinations.
The PR descriptions CodeRabbit did were verbose and not useful for smaller PRs I made. That has been a while ago.
At work we have a voluntary work group exploring AI. The whole generate your whole app kind of thing seems plausible for UI prototypes. But nothing more. And for that it’s probably expensive.
I’m not sure how much the whole thing does or can do for efficiency. Seems situational - in terms of environment, setup, capabilities, and kind of work and approach.
Phind has been decent for me when I’m looking for prior art and/or research papers on something I’m trying to develop/implement. It’s nice to be able to pose a question as I would to a colleague and get references back that I can read for myself.
Sadly, it still hallucinates some stuff, and when it doesn’t it tends to give me references that are tangentially related to my query but don’t actually cover it.
Not a programmer, but I used it at my last job to get over humps where I was stuck on PowerShell scripts. AI can show you a path you didn’t know or hadn’t thought about. The developers seemed to be using it the same way. Great tool if you don’t completely lean on it and you know enough to judge the output.
Thats the key, use it to learn, not to do your thinking
I find it excels at one-off scripts. They are simple enough that every parameter and line of code fits in a small bit of memory. They are really bad at complex tasks, but they can help if you use it judiciously.
I used ChatGPAT to write some fairly straight forward bash scripts last week and it was mostly awful. I ended up massaging it enough to do what I needed, but I would have been better off just writing it myself and maybe asking it a couple syntax questions (although the regex I needed was one of 8 things it stumbled over)
From my experience it’s great at doing things that have been done 1000x before (which makes sense given the training data), but when it comes to building something novel it really struggles, especially if there’s 3rd party libraries involved that aren’t commonly used. So you end up spending a lot of time and money hand holding it through things that likely would have been quicker to do yourself.
The pycharm AI integration completes each line. That’s very useful when you are repeating a well known algorithm and not distracting when you are doing something unusual. So overall, for small things AI is a speed up. I haven’t tried asking chatgpt for bigger coffe chunks, I haven’t had the greatest experience with it up to now and ii don’t want to spend more time debugging than I am already.
Oh man, the Codeium auto complete in PyCharm has been just awful for me. Slow enough that it doesnt come up fast enough that I ever expect it (and rarely comes up when I pause to wait for it) then goes away instantly when I invariably continue typing when it comes up. Then won’t come back if I backspace, erase the word and start retyping it, etc. And competes with the old school pycharm auto complete sometimes which adds another layer of fun.
the 1000x before bit has quite a few sideffects to it as well.
- lesser used languages suffer because there’s not enough training data. this gets annoying quickly when it overrides your static tools and suggests nonsense.
- larger training sets contain more vulnerabilities as most code is pretty terrible and may just be snippets that someone used once and threw away. owasp has a top 10 for a reason. take input validation for example, if I’m working on parsing a string there’s usually context such as is this trusted data or untrusted? if i don’t have that mental model where I’m thinking about the data i might see generated code and think it looks correct but in reality its extremely nefarious.
It’s decent at reviewing its own code, especially if you give it different lenses to look though.
“Analyze this code and look for security vulnerabilities.” “Analyze this code and look for ways to reduce complexity.”
And then… think about the response like it’s a random dude online reviewing your code. Lots of times it raises good issues but sometimes it tries too hard to find little shit that is at best a sidegrade.
Its also trained on old stuff.
And because its old, you get some very strange side effects and less maintainability.
this
