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State of AI-assisted software development

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Re: State of AI-assisted software development

#31

Post by HardCodedBias »

Pannoniae wrote: post #8
pluc wrote: post #4

Every study I've read says nobody is seeing productivity gains from AI use. Here's an AI vendor saying the opposite. Funny.

There's a few explanations for this, and it's not necessarily contradictory. 1. AI doesn't improve productivity and people just have cognitive biases. (logical, but I also don't think it's true from what I know...) 2. AI does improve productivity, but only if you find your own workflow and what tasks it's good for, and many companies try to shoehorn it into things which just don't work for it. 3. AI does improve prod…

(3) and (4) are likely true.

In theory competition is supposed to address this.

However, our evaluation processes generally occur on human and predictable timelines, which is quite slow compared to this impulse function.

There was a theory that inter firm competition could speed this clock up, but that doesn't seem plausible currently.

Almost certainly AI will be used, extensively, for reviews going forward. Perhaps that will accelerate the clock rate.

Re: State of AI-assisted software development

#33

Post by xgbi »

Rant mode on.

For the second time of the week this morning, I spent 45 min reviewing a merge request where the guy has no idea what he did, didn’t test, and let the llm hallucinate a very bad solution to a simple problem.

He just had to read the previous commit, which introduced the bug, and think about it for 1min.

We are creating young people that have a very limited attention span, have no incentive to think about things, and have very pleasing metrics on the dora scale. When asked what their code is doing, they just don’t know. They can’t event explain the choices they made.

Honestly I think AI is just a very very sharp knife. We’re going to regret this just like regretting the mass offshoring in the 2000s.

Re: State of AI-assisted software development

#34

Post by bitwize »

wiz21c wrote: post #2

> This indicates that AI outputs are perceived as useful and valuable by many of this year’s survey respondents, despite a lack of complete trust in them. Or the respondents have hard times admitting AI can replace them :-) I'm a bit cynical but sometimes when I use Claude, it is downright frightening how good it is sometimes. Having coded for a lot of year, I'm sometimes a bit scared that my craft can, somtimes, be…

We may see a return to the days when businesses relied on systems analysts, not programmers, to design their information systems—except now, the programming work will be left to the machines.

Re: State of AI-assisted software development

#35

Post by zwieback »

wiz21c wrote: post #2

> This indicates that AI outputs are perceived as useful and valuable by many of this year’s survey respondents, despite a lack of complete trust in them. Or the respondents have hard times admitting AI can replace them :-) I'm a bit cynical but sometimes when I use Claude, it is downright frightening how good it is sometimes. Having coded for a lot of year, I'm sometimes a bit scared that my craft can, somtimes, be…

I find AI coding assistants useful when I'm using a new library or language feature I'm not super familiar with.

When I have AI generate code using features I'm very familiar with I can see that it's okay but not premium code.

So it makes sense that I feel more productive but also a little skeptical.

Re: State of AI-assisted software development

#36

Post by rhubarbtree »

xgbi wrote: post #33

Rant mode on. For the second time of the week this morning, I spent 45 min reviewing a merge request where the guy has no idea what he did, didn’t test, and let the llm hallucinate a very bad solution to a simple problem. He just had to read the previous commit, which introduced the bug, and think about it for 1min. We are creating young people that have a very limited attention span, have no incentive to think about…

Yes, we created them with social media. Lots of people on this site did that by working for the social media companies.

AI usage like that is a symptom not the problem.

Re: State of AI-assisted software development

#37

Post by SamuelAdams »

xgbi wrote: post #33

Rant mode on. For the second time of the week this morning, I spent 45 min reviewing a merge request where the guy has no idea what he did, didn’t test, and let the llm hallucinate a very bad solution to a simple problem. He just had to read the previous commit, which introduced the bug, and think about it for 1min. We are creating young people that have a very limited attention span, have no incentive to think about…

> We are creating young people that have a very limited attention span, have no incentive to think about things, and have very pleasing metrics on the dora scale. When asked what their code is doing, they just don’t know. They can’t event explain the choices they made.

This has nothing to do with AI, and everything to do with a bad hire. If the developer is that bad with code, how did they get hired in the first place? If AI is making them lazier, and they refuse to improve, maybe they ought to be replaced by a better developer?

Re: State of AI-assisted software development

#38

Post by Archelaos »

xgbi wrote: post #33

Rant mode on. For the second time of the week this morning, I spent 45 min reviewing a merge request where the guy has no idea what he did, didn’t test, and let the llm hallucinate a very bad solution to a simple problem. He just had to read the previous commit, which introduced the bug, and think about it for 1min. We are creating young people that have a very limited attention span, have no incentive to think about…

Why did you I spent 45 min reviewing instead of outright rejecting it? (Honest question.)

Re: State of AI-assisted software development

#39

Post by dawnerd »

xgbi wrote: post #33

Rant mode on. For the second time of the week this morning, I spent 45 min reviewing a merge request where the guy has no idea what he did, didn’t test, and let the llm hallucinate a very bad solution to a simple problem. He just had to read the previous commit, which introduced the bug, and think about it for 1min. We are creating young people that have a very limited attention span, have no incentive to think about…

I've just started immediately rejecting AI pull requests. I don't have time for that.

There's going to be a massive opportunity for agencies that are skilled enough to come in and fix all of this nonsense when companies realize what they've invested in.

Re: State of AI-assisted software development

#40

Post by kemayo »

dawnerd wrote: post #39
xgbi wrote: post #33

Rant mode on. For the second time of the week this morning, I spent 45 min reviewing a merge request where the guy has no idea what he did, didn’t test, and let the llm hallucinate a very bad solution to a simple problem. He just had to read the previous commit, which introduced the bug, and think about it for 1min. We are creating young people that have a very limited attention span, have no incentive to think about…

I've just started immediately rejecting AI pull requests. I don't have time for that. There's going to be a massive opportunity for agencies that are skilled enough to come in and fix all of this nonsense when companies realize what they've invested in.

Almost worse is AI bug reports. I've gotten a few of them on GitHub projects, where someone clearly pasted an error message into ChatGPT and asked it to write a bug report... and they're incoherent.
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