Experienced software developer, here. “AI” is useful to me in some contexts. Specifically when I want to scaffold out a completely new application (so I’m not worried about clobbering existing code) and I don’t want to do it by hand, it saves me time.
And… that’s about it. It sucks at code review, and will break shit in your repo if you let it.
Not a developer per se (mostly virtualization, architecture, and hardware) but AI can get me to 80-90% of a script in no time. The last 10% takes a while but that was going to take a while regardless. So the time savings on that first 90% is awesome. Although it does send me down a really bad path at times. Being experienced enough to know that is very helpful in that I just start over.
In my opinion AI shouldn’t replace coders but it can definitely enhance them if used properly. It’s a tool like everything. I can put a screw in with a hammer but I probably shouldn’t.
Like I said, I do find it useful at times. But not only shouldn’t it replace coders, it fundamentally can’t. At least, not without a fundamental rearchitecturing of how they work.
The reason it goes down a “really bad path” is that it’s basically glorified autocomplete. It doesn’t know anything.
On top of that, spoken and written language are very imprecise, and there’s no way for an LLM to derive what you really wanted from context clues such as your tone of voice.
Take the phrase “fruit flies like a banana.” Am I saying that a piece of fruit might fly in a manner akin to how another piece of fruit, a banana, flies if thrown? Or am I saying that the insect called the fruit fly might like to consume a banana?
It’s a humorous line, but my point is serious: We unintentionally speak in ambiguous ways like that all the time. And while we’ve got brains that can interpret unspoken signals to parse intended meaning from a word or phrase, LLMs don’t.
Everyone on Lemmy is a software developer.
Sometimes I get an LLM to review a patch series before I send it as a quick once over. I would estimate about 50% of the suggestions are useful and about 10% are based on “misunderstanding”. Last week it was suggesting a spelling fix I’d already made because it didn’t understand the - in the diff meant I’d changed the line already.
Exactly what you would expect from a junior engineer.
Let them run unsupervised and you have a mess to clean up. Guide them with context and you’ve got a second set of capable hands.
Something something craftsmen don’t blame their tools
The difference being junior engineers eventually grow up into senior engineers.
Does every junior eventually achieve becoming a senior?
No, but that’s the only way you get senior engineers!
I agree, but the goal of CEOs is “line go up,” not make our eng team stronger (usually)
Explain this too me AI. Reads back exactly what’s on the screen including comments somehow with more words but less information Ok…
Ok, this is tricky. AI, can you do this refactoring so I don’t have to keep track of everything. No… Thats all wrong… Yeah I know it’s complicated, that’s why I wanted it refactored. No you can’t do that… fuck now I can either toss all your changes and do it myself or spend the next 3 hours rewriting it.
Yeah I struggle to find how anyone finds this garbage useful.
If you give it the right task, it’s super helpful. But you can’t ask it to write anything with any real complexity.
Where it thrives is being given pseudo code for something simple and asking for the specific language code for it. Or translate between two languages.
That’s… about it. And even that it fucks up.
I have asked questions, had conversations for company and generated images for role playing with AI.
I’ve been happy with it, so far.
That’s kind of outside the software development discussion but glad you’re enjoying it.
As a developer
- I can jot down a bunch of notes and have ai turn it into a reasonable presentation or documentation or proposal
- zoom has an ai agent which is pretty good about summarizing a meeting. It usually just needs minor corrections and you can send it out much faster than taking notes
- for coding I mostly use ai like autocomplete. Sometimes it’s able to autocomplete entire code blocks
- for something new I might have ai generate a class or something, and use it as a first draft where I then make it work
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I have to use it for work by mandate, and overall hate it. Sometimes it can speed up certain aspects of development, especially if the domain is new or project is small, but these gains are temporary. They steal time from the learning that I would be doing during development and push that back to later in the process, and they are no where near good enough to make it so that I never have to do the learning at all
no shit. ai will hallucinate shit I’ll hit tab by accident and spend time undoing that or it’ll hijack tab on new lines inconsistently
Writing code is the easiest part of my job. Why are you taking that away?
For some of us that’s more useful. I’m currently playing a DevSecOps role and one of the defining characteristics is I need to know all the tools. On Friday, I was writing some Java modules, then some groovy glue, then spent the after writing a Python utility. While im reasonably good about jumping among languages and tools, those context switches are expensive. I definitely want ai help with that.
That being said, ai is just a step up from search or autocomplete, it’s not magical. I’ve had the most luck with it generating unit tests since they tend to be simple and repetitive (also a major place for the juniors to screw up: ai doesn’t know whether the slop it’s pumping out is useful. You do need to guide it and understand it, and you really need to cull the dreck)
I think about how much the planet is heating up because people like me are a little too lazy to be competent. I am glad my nieces and nephews get to pay our price we are raising every day on their behalf, to improve their world supposedly with our extra productivity, right?
I’ve used cursor quite a bit recently in large part because it’s an organization wide push at my employer, so I’ve taken the opportunity to experiment.
My best analogy is that it’s like micro managing a hyper productive junior developer that somehow already “knows” how to do stuff in most languages and frameworks, but also completely lacks common sense, a concept of good practices, or a big picture view of what’s being accomplished. Which means a ton of course correction. I even had it spit out code attempting to hardcode credentials.
I can accomplish some things “faster” with it, but mostly in comparison to my professional reality: I rarely have the contiguous chunks of time I’d need to dedicate to properly ingest and do something entirely new to me. I save a significant amount of the onboarding, but lose a bunch of time navigating to a reasonable solution. Critically that navigation is more “interrupt” tolerant, and I get a lot of interrupts.
That said, this year’s crop of interns at work seem to be thin wrappers on top of LLMs and I worry about the future of critical thinking for society at large.
Just the other day I wasted 3 min trying to get AI to sort 8 lines alphabetically.
By having it write a quick function to do so or to sort them alphabetically within the chat? Because I’ve used GPT to write boilerplate and/or basic functions for random tasks like this numerous times without issue. But expecting it to sort a block of text for you is not what LLMs are really built for.
That being said, I agree that expecting AI to write complex and/or long-form code is a fool’s hope. It’s good for basic tasks to save time and that’s about it.
The tool I use can rewrite code given basic commands. Other times I might say, “Write a comment above each line” or “Propose better names for these variables” and it does a decent job.
I had to sort over 100 lines of data hardcoded into source (don’t ask) and it was a quick function in my IDE.
I feel like “sort” is common enough everywhere that AI should quickly identify the right Google results, and it shouldn’t take 3 min
I wouldn’t mention this to anyone at work. It makes you sound clueless
My boss insists I use it and I insist on telling him when it can’t do the simplest things.
It sounds like you’ve got it all figured out. Best of luck to you
