I had a related episode at work when my coworker asked me why his seemingly trivial 10 line piece of code was misbehaving inexplicably. It turned out he had two variables `file_name` and `filename` and used one in place of another. I asked him how he ended up with such code, he said he used copilot to create it. Using code from a generative AI without understanding what it does is never a good idea.
We hired a new guy at work. In one of his first tasks he had chosen to write some bash, and it was pure nonsense. I mean it contained things like: if [ -z "${Var}+x" ] Where I can see what the author was trying to do, but the code is just wrong. I dont mind people not knowing stuff, especially when it's essentially Bash trivia. But what broke my heart was when I pointed out the problem, linked to the documentation, b…
There were many times in my career when I had what I expected to be a one-off issue that I needed a quick solution for and I would look for a quick and simple fix with a tool I'm unfamiliar with. I'd say that 70% of the time the thing "just works" well enough after testing, 10% of the time it doesn't quite work but I feel it's a promising approach and I'm motivated to learn more in order to get it to work, and in the remaining 20% of the time I discover that it's just significantly more complex than I thought it would be, and prefer to abandon the approach in favor of something else; I never regretted the latter.
I obviously lose a lot of learning opportunities this way, but I'm also sure I saved myself from going down many very deep rabbit holes. For example, I accepted that I'm not going to try and master sed&awk - if I see it doesn't work with a simple invocation, I drop into Python.