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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

#2

Post by pjkundert »

Learning to code with an AI assistant is pretty much the ideal way to learn and understand the profound limitations of LLM based AIs.

After just a few minutes, the outputs presented by your AI in a highly confident manner will be shown to be … suspect, or completely wrong.

It quickly casts a shadow over everything else it confidently spews forth as “truth”.

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

#5

Post by dpflan »

Without expert filtering of the suggestions, yes, disaster. Experts will benefit the most from this because they can filter incorrect suggestions and reinterpret. Novices will be more susceptible.

There is certainly ongoing research on this, expert systems have been an area of research for a while. Here is recent research relevant to this post: Do Users Write More Insecure Code with AI Assistants? (https://arxiv.org/pdf/2211.03622.pdf)

More relevant discussion, from Andrew Ng's The Batch newsletter: Check the Generated Code Generates Overconfident Coders section: (https://www.deeplearning.ai/the-batch/issue-180/)

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

#7

Post by lasereyes136 »

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 programmers need to learn how to use correctly.

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

#8

Post by ExpeditKallax »

softwaredoug wrote: post #6

Reminds me of this classic article from Petzold wondering the same about intellisense “Does Visual Studio Rot the Mind?” http://www.charlespetzold.com/etc/DoesVisualStudioRotTheMind...

Charles Petzold, now there is name that I didn't hear in a long time. Nostalgia kicks in.

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

#10

Post by 13years »

pjkundert wrote: post #2

Learning to code with an AI assistant is pretty much the ideal way to learn and understand the profound limitations of LLM based AIs. After just a few minutes, the outputs presented by your AI in a highly confident manner will be shown to be … suspect, or completely wrong. It quickly casts a shadow over everything else it confidently spews forth as “truth”.

This is an important point I've also made.

"How can we reasonably verify the output and know it is correct? At least when using AI to create code, we can easily test the code to see if it performs according to the desired behavior. However, that is no easy task for most general information. It is unclear at this point how difficult it will be to improve AI in this regard."

from - https://dakara.substack.com/p/ai-and-the-end-to-all-things

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