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

blog.codeanywhere.com

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

#21

Post by ivan_burazin »

sublinear wrote: post #17
zarzavat wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 player…

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

But most joiners will be the ones that will use it the most, trying to leapfrog their lack of experience with AI - which will provide the biggest issue imho

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

#23

Post by sublinear »

ivan_burazin wrote: post #21
sublinear wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

But most joiners will be the ones that will use it the most, trying to leapfrog their lack of experience with AI - which will provide the biggest issue imho

Whatever organization they end up at that doesn't catch cheating during the interview process deserves what they get.

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

#25

Post by minusf »

tippytippytango wrote: post #14

I hate to even reply to this because it's falling into the author's trap. But, it's the typical new-tech clickbait. There's no data to back up their alarmist, knee-jerk hand wringing, just like when people thought novels were bad for people [1], or when writing would ruin our memories [2]. This article will be looked at similarly in a few years. [1] https://archive.nytimes.com/op-talk.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/0... [2]…

as long as these systems are not let near certain industries like aviation software, health stuff i dont mind however people write their software. maybe at this point it will only improve the js frontend mess :)

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

#26

Post by msluyter »

I've been trying Github copilot. It's especially good for suggestions based on localized context. For example, if you have this:

    def do_thing():
        print('doing a thing')
    
    def do_thing_2():
        print('doing a thing 2')
    
    def do_thing_3():
        print('doing a thing 3')
(Which, btw, do_thing 2 & 3 were autogenerated). If you type:

    def do_all_the_things():
it will auto generate:

        do_thing()
        do_thing_2()
        do_thing_3()
which is great if you have localized patterns in your code. It has also perfectly generated tests for things like a wrapper around a publicly known api.

Where it starts to get a little suspect is in some of its inferences where it doesn't have the localized context or a well known api as its corpus. It can spit out disastrously incorrect code on occasion. Still a time saver, but you have to remain alert.

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

#27

Post by JohnFen »

swatcoder wrote: post #11

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/reso…

> That's not a bad thing!

I'm not so sure about that. Idiot-proofing (while being impossible -- ingenious idiots will always find a way around it) comes with tradeoffs that can easily reduce software quality.

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

#28

Post by minusf »

lasereyes136 wrote: post #7

Reminds me of the arguments against 4GLs, Low/No Code, IDEs, Code Coloring, Intellisense, automatic refactoring, and auto-completion. I used to think you had to be able to work in C to be a "real programmer" and have learned that a lot of good applications have been created by programmers not using C and some that have never used C. Before C it was assembly, and machine code before that. AI is a tool that all program…

how can you use a tool potentionally generating hidden bugs into its suggestions "correctly"? and/or legally ambigious output? these are not important for everyone, but they are to me..

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

#29

Post by tpuljak »

ivan_burazin wrote: post #21
sublinear wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

But most joiners will be the ones that will use it the most, trying to leapfrog their lack of experience with AI - which will provide the biggest issue imho

This was the point that drove me to write the article in the first place. I think that there should be some kind of knowledge threshold before you can use assistants. I think the same point can be applied to why students need to know how to calculate some equation without a calculator.

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

#30

Post by notpachet »

tippytippytango wrote: post #14

I hate to even reply to this because it's falling into the author's trap. But, it's the typical new-tech clickbait. There's no data to back up their alarmist, knee-jerk hand wringing, just like when people thought novels were bad for people [1], or when writing would ruin our memories [2]. This article will be looked at similarly in a few years. [1] https://archive.nytimes.com/op-talk.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/0... [2]…

> just like when people thought novels were bad for people, or when writing would ruin our memories

In fairness, there are also lots of counterexamples where the long-term consequences of a new technology were not adequately foreseen, and ended up posing huge problems in the long run. So I don't think it's unreasonable for people to look skeptically on these sorts of tools.

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