AI assistants: The convenient crutch for new developers or a recipe for disaster

To be optimistic in the medium term, the spread of AI code generators among novices will put pressure on languages and tooling to become even more idiot proof. That's not a bad thing!

You AI assistant may not be able to get everything right within its training data and resource allocation, and you might be too inexperienced to know what it did wrong, but languages and toolchains can adapt to better spot/describe/resolve the characteristic errors of using them. It starts an arms race that ends up with better compilers, linters, debuggers, analyzers, "debugging assistants", etc.

That change ends up being a positive one for everybody, but will take long enough that we will absolutely see plenty of new ugly messes in the meantime.

Indeed. Copilot is like productivity rocket fuel for me. More importantly, less typing means less strain on my hands/wrists and a longer career.

For junior developers I wouldn't recommend it, because as you say, they don't have the pattern matching to find and fix the hidden errors that copilot generates. Also, it's harder to conceptualise code that you haven't written.

I would compare it to the way that chess players use engines. Grandmasters can have an engine turned on without it being distracting, and they can tell when the engine is suggesting a good move vs a weird move, and explain what the move accomplishes.

Beginners, are generally advised to play with the engine turned off, and to instead analyse their moves afterward, because otherwise they will just play the engine moves and not learn anything.

personally I feel they would turn out to be useful for new developer but its likely new devs will suffer 'developmental disability' (excuse the pun) after using them for significant period. This very akin to our (Gen Xer's) parents telling us not to rely on calculator for math problems. I know there is a stack overflow rebuttal to that and chatGPT could be very valuable there, especially if it avoids sifting through manpages to discover basic functionality.

I think one area AI assistants may be very useful is to do standard code quality and advanced linter style code review. I cant remember how many times I have seen engineers give 'cosmetic' CR feedback and completely miss big structural issues. If this makes everybody focus on deeper issues then I am all for it.

I work in embedded software and often I see the code quality coming out of SoC vendors is just full of bad practices. If AI can be a good code acceptance tool especially for last minute fixes we should jump on it.

I agree with the chess analogy, but disagree with the statement about productivity.

Same could be said for calculators and arithmetic.