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this post was submitted on 19 Jul 2024
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Technology
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That level of condescension (rethink your life because you are making use of a tool I dont like) really isnt productive. You seem to be thinking that using AI as a tool to help you program is equivalent to turning your brain off and just copy and pasting code snippets, it isnt. It can be a good way to explore a language or framework you aren't familiar with (when combined with the documentation) or to figure out general potential methods of solving a problem.
Not the person you're replying to, but my main hangup is that LLMs are just statistical models, they don't know anything. As such, they very often hallucinate language features and libraries that don't exist. They suggest functions that aren't real and they are effectively always going to produce average code - And average code is horrible code.
They can be useful for exploration and learning, sure. But lots of people are literally just copy-pasting code from LLMs - They just do it via an "accept copilot suggestion" button instead of actual copy paste.
I used Copilot for months and I eventually stopped because I found that the vast majority of the time its suggestions are garbage, and I was constantly pausing while I typed to await the suggestions, which broke flow state and tired me out more then it ever helped.
I'm still finding bugs it introduced months later. It's great for unit tests, but that's basically it in my case. I don't let the AI write production code anymore
Even for unit tests it needs to be taken with a grain of salt because they should describe what should be there and at best Copilot can describe what is there.
The overlap may or may not be there but either way it's a dicey proposition to allow Copilot to second guess the intent behind the code and make that guess the reference.
Indeed. I stopped using it altogether a couple months ago.