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Coding on Copilot: Data suggests downward pressure on code quality

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Re: Coding on Copilot: Data suggests downward pressure on code quality

#21

Post by actionfromafar »

rabuse wrote: post #20
hedora wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The study shows a doubling in the rate at which tech debt code is produced and checked into the repo. Anecdotally, as a principal engineer, I’ve definitely noticed that new senior engineers on the team that say they are using chatgpt/copilot produce unprecedentedly bad code at unprecedented rates. It takes me 2-3x longer to unwind such crap than it would for me to write it from scratch. As we grow the team, this will…

I was going to ask, why aren't they running the code through unit tests if they're committing such shit code? Does it pass the tests, or is it just inefficient code?

tests?

Re: Coding on Copilot: Data suggests downward pressure on code quality

#22

Post by cjbgkagh »

gtirloni wrote: post #18
hackernoteng wrote: post #13

Gee really? You mean generated code by some ML model means people get lazier and just cut/paste hallucinated code? Who would have thought?

I doubt AI is making anyone lazier and less worried about code quality, if they weren't already.

People can learn things even if they would rather not. Allowing them to take shortcuts will diminish their learning opportunities.

Re: Coding on Copilot: Data suggests downward pressure on code quality

#23

Post by naasking »

jprete wrote: post #8
naasking wrote: post #5

Possible downward pressure on code quality, but maybe it's partly because more people are getting involved in programming with coding assistance? That could be ok if there's more progress overall.

That's possible, but I don't think that would be a positive development either. Code isn't flexible or self-correcting, if you make bad code it will just break by surprise. If the only way someone can code is with LLM assistance then they won't even know what went wrong when the code breaks or takes forever or doesn't handle real corner cases. That said, I've done no LLM coding and don't have a feel for how it goes w…

> Code isn't flexible or self-correcting

Code isn't, yes, but LLMs are. That's part of the key here, coding can in some sense now be done at the prompt level along with an acceptance test suite, so rather than coding solution and test suite, you can hypothetically just write the test suite and have the LLM generated the code part.

Re: Coding on Copilot: Data suggests downward pressure on code quality

#25

Post by nicup12345689 »

naasking wrote: post #5

Possible downward pressure on code quality, but maybe it's partly because more people are getting involved in programming with coding assistance? That could be ok if there's more progress overall.

What is your definition of progress?

Re: Coding on Copilot: Data suggests downward pressure on code quality

#26

Post by stcredzero »

I think this is what's happening. Code production speed has increased. But the speed and efficiency of review and testing hasn't kept pace.

Also, my current job limits the use of AI coding tools, because of the risk of our IP leaking out. To really be useful, there is a lot of context a programmer should be able to collate. Not all of it is going to be in the repo.

Re: Coding on Copilot: Data suggests downward pressure on code quality

#30

Post by jfisher4024 »

I used to use it mainly to write unit tests, which is a nice use case because it’s obvious if it gets it wrong. (The test fails.)

One time I had to use the Go protobuff reflection API, and Copilot was actual crucial because the docs are so bad.

Can’t use it in my current role and I feel less productive.

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