AI coding "assistants"

semaphore said:
Using AI has shown to reduce critical thinking and atrophying of creativity.


I’ll admit I was fascinated about it, but I barely use it anymore. I do write my own ML based solutions but they are traditional models and are not based on transformer architecture.
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I agree with you.
However, you do realize that you’re at risk as we all are, of being replaced. Of course I have no knowledge of your particular industry and what kinds of software you write.

In the industry I work, it’s a real danger- they want us all to use AI and they do not care if it is slop, as long as it works just barely and makes them $$$$$$
 
semaphore said:
Using AI has shown to reduce critical thinking and atrophying of creativity.


I’ll admit I was fascinated about it, but I barely use it anymore. I do write my own ML based solutions but they are traditional models and are not based on transformer architecture.
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Bullshit, I have done multiple courses on Python, Kotlin and HTML none of them gave me any real practice. With AI building a real app googling **** I don't know because AI got it wrong got me to build something that someone wanted and was willing to pay a lot of money for. They are happy with the software and I took that as a ****ing win because the AI didn't think for me no I used it as a tool not your/my best ****ing friend.
 
Jackal65 said:
Bullshit, I have done multiple courses on Python, Kotlin and HTML none of them gave me any real practice. With AI building a real app googling **** I don't know because AI got it wrong got me to build something that someone wanted and was willing to pay a lot of money for. They are happy with the software and I took that as a ****ing win because the AI didn't think for me no I used it as a tool not your/my best ****ing friend.
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Somebody piss in your porridge this morning or are you just a common type that has to include an expletive in every sentence to express themselves in English? Care to try again?
 
s0lar said:
Somebody piss in your porridge this morning or are you just a common type that has to include an expletive in every sentence to express themselves in English? Care to try again?
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I get that strong language can piss some people of. But my point stands, AI is just a tool, like a hammer or a socket wrench. Lumping everyone who uses it into a "moron" category is lazy thinking. People use tools to do work and solve problems all the time. Same with AI for coding. It’s not about replacing skills its about getting better. They will lock AI behind more expensive paywalls no one should rely on AI.
 
Jackal65 said:
I get that strong language can piss some people of. But my point stands, AI is just a tool, like a hammer or a socket wrench. Lumping everyone who uses it into a "moron" category is lazy thinking. People use tools to do work and solve problems all the time. Same with AI for coding. It’s not about replacing skills its about getting better. They will lock AI behind more expensive paywalls no one should rely on AI.
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You know nothing… oh sweet summer child
 
EmmanuelGoldstein said:
You know nothing… oh sweet summer child
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What are we missing then? It is not like AI can do my job. Unless it can strip an engine down replace all the parts? I am in no danger to lose my job to AI, all you pc people well that is a different story. I code because I like home automation, I like apps that can do things for me like monitor my power use, turn my compressor on and off.
 
Jackal65 said:
What are we missing then? It is not like AI can do my job. Unless it can strip an engine down replace all the parts? I am in no danger to lose my job to AI, all you pc people well that is a different story. I code because I like home automation, I like apps that can do things for me like monitor my power use, turn my compressor on and off.
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You came across a developer… my bad then
 
EmmanuelGoldstein said:
You came across a developer… my bad then
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I enjoy the process, made some money but overall I am welder by trade till I was retrenched then started to fix Taxis but my health dipped. So now my brother in law and I go buy cars cheap, rebuild the engine and sell them again for good price. my brother in law have been doing it for years now so he brings me the cars I fix them he sells them. A lot less work better money. we are 4 doing now essentially family business :ROFL:
 
I enjoy using copilot.
One language we use is obscure so it can only autocomplete some basic stuff.

As for .net, I'm hammering out blazor faster than I would have imagined.

And other times it's just an easy Google replacement when I forget the syntax to base64 or the CSS to do X etc.
 
Used copilot in 2023 quite a bit, turned it off and realized I'm faster without it.

It's nice for doing stuff like have problem, go find results for me to look at, but most of my time is spent figuring out how feature I'm currently working on slots into the existing system. The actual code is the easy bit, and Ai often does not write the cleanest code, so maintaining that is going to be problematic.

Quick build a prototype if it works, or small projects where you can just make a new one for the next task, makes sense to directly use Ai tools, but generally prefer using the chat for specific problems if need.
 
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Jackal65 said:
Bullshit, I have done multiple courses on Python, Kotlin and HTML none of them gave me any real practice. With AI building a real app googling **** I don't know because AI got it wrong got me to build something that someone wanted and was willing to pay a lot of money for. They are happy with the software and I took that as a ****ing win because the AI didn't think for me no I used it as a tool not your/my best ****ing friend.
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Are you on meth?

I posted a study showing a decline in critical thinking. If you want to argue with the research, write a competing article. Purely based on your diatribe I would say there is no more critical thinking to degrade.
 
EmmanuelGoldstein said:
I agree with you.
However, you do realize that you’re at risk as we all are, of being replaced. Of course I have no knowledge of your particular industry and what kinds of software you write.
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Sure, if you do meaningless tasks and are not specialised.

EmmanuelGoldstein said:
In the industry I work, it’s a real danger- they want us all to use AI and they do not care if it is slop, as long as it works just barely and makes them $$$$$$
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You need to distinguish between AI and generative AI. I use AI, which I mean by RNN, Conv. Custom-designed networks for specific tasks at hand, such as predictions, anomaly detection, image recognition, etc.
 
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Kosmik said:
Someone mentioned old devs a while back ( 20 years or more exp ), what a lot of current don't realize is that the focus for them is by nature always been around the problems and that passage of time has also allowed many to see languages rise and fall, most having coded in a substantial amount of differant ones. Concepts are moveable, code is just execution, design and practices are still what sets people apart.
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Exactly, I've been in dev for 20+ years.
 
I think you'll see two different perspectives here where professionals can immediately see when the tool is generating garbage code whereas a novice or part time enthusiast will probably not pick this up most of the time.
 
semaphore said:
Sure, if you do meaningless tasks and are not specialised.


You need to distinguish between AI and generative AI. I use AI, which I mean by RNN, Conv. Custom-designed networks for specific tasks at hand, such as predictions, anomaly detection, image recognition, etc.
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Yes specialized AI such as ANPR is quite valuable and been in use for ages now.

What I am seeing is that these companies want to shortcut the traditional development process, and especially the time by using AI. Then you have these tech bro managers that are actually of the belief that AI will replace humans and have begun to lay off the human devs.

The job isn’t quite a secure as it once was, is all I am saying, also, it is not easy to find a solid company that doesn’t fall over itself for this AI fad unless you got in earlier. Just conjecture on my part.
 
s0lar said:
In all honesty more often than not the code it spits out is better than mine.
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Respect. In other threads on this topic, so many come out with the view of "AI is never better than me, everything it writes is garbage".

s0lar said:
Wheres the challenge? Where is the creativity and creation?
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Where's the challenge: One level up. More on the design and architecture level. Making sure that services work in the correct way, rather than caring about writing those services. Also, being able to spot when things are suboptimal from an operating perspective.

Same for creativity and creation... I now focus more on creating solutions and making things work, rather than writing code.

To be fair, I do mostly yaml and python stuff, but I don't physically write lines of code any more.
 
semaphore said:
Exactly, I've been in dev for 20+ years.
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Okay so that makes you the most experienced in the room. What keeps you secure in your role, or rather, how is the allure of “replace humans with AI that doesn’t take sick days, time off, or slack and can do the job faster” not a topic amongst your superiors
 
That being said... what are your workflows for using AI?

Right now I ask ChatGPT, it gives me what I need, but then I need to copy and paste that from the ChatGPT app into my terminal, manually creating the files in vi etc.

I'm sure theres a faster way, but I haven't explored it yet.
 
I've been using code generation daily for about 3 months now and there are serious ups as well as downs.

+ It works great for seniors who can break down the problem and get it to do the work
- Its terrible in the hands of juniors. They'll generate something and not bother to check it in any way, they don't get to think about the problem and as a result don't learn anything. If you have a junior who's one of the types who you give a problem to, then they come back 30 minutes later and shrug while saying they don't know how to do it; well, now they're going to run it through AI thinking that its working, then its going to be your problem to have to check what the AI did, iterate and fix.

+ Its great at self-contained black box code with very few inputs/outputs (ie. 1 input method, perform calculations and then output something)
+ Its excellent at simple code, CRUD, statements, language features, issues etc.
- Its terrible at understanding how humans call into code, as a result if your generated code has many calling points there will be no clear grouping of endpoints etc., as a result of that unless if you're creating your statements very explicitly you're going to end up with terrible code libraries
- Because it can generate so fast you tend to think less in terms of libraries, you're not saving code that you know is working for re-use etc.

+ If it can one-shot something its usually of decent+ quality
- If it can't and you need to make additions then the quality is going to keep on decreasing with every request
- When you're asking it to generate code there's no cleanup of previous methods etc., so if you're going through several versions/variants then you often end up with a lot of dead code. Its fine if the problem space is simple, but if its not and (like a junior) you don't understand it very well then you'll have no clue what's going on

- I tried Copilot for some time along with suggestions. At first it seems great but you quickly realise that its coming up with a ton of garbage as well. Mentally having to read through all of those takes a toll on you and you're better off without it

Probably the biggest con in my opinion:
For any problem area that's not well understood, while coding us humans build up a mental map of the code, let's call it a directed graph of some kind. While coding we're refining this mental map to figure out the problem, then we're applying that to the code.
When you're delegating to the AI you have no map, so when you're trying to work with the code its as if you're working on some foreign codebase you've just picked up, and as a result your efficiency/output keeps dropping instead of increasing.
 
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