Technology

I've been writing code professionally for nearly two decades, and I love having copilot available in my IDE. When there is some boilerplate or a SQL query I just don't want to write, it'll oftentimes get me started with something reasonable that is wrong in a couple of subtle ways. I then fix it, laugh at how wrong it was, or use part of the proposed answer in my project.

If you're a non-corder, sure it is pure danger, but if you know what you're doing it can give you a little boost. Only time will tell if it makes me rusty on some basics, but it is another tool in the toolbox now.

I can be a bad programmer without using AI generated code. 😤

Try programming for a day without syntax highlighting or auto-completion, and experience how pathetic you feel without them. If you're like me, you'll discover that those "assistants" have sapped much of your knowledge by eliminating the need to memorize even embarrassingly simple tasks.

That's...how the world works. We move on. We aren't programming computers by flipping toggle switches or moving patch cables around anymore either.

'Try directly hand-coding bits into regions of memory without a compiler/linker and experience how pathetic you feel without it.'

I don’t have an encyclopedic knowledge of every random library or built-in function of every language on earth so what’s the difference between googling for an example on stack overflow or asking an LLM?

If you are asking ChatGPT for every single piece of code it will be terrible because it just hallucinates libraries or misunderstands the prompt. But saying any kind of use makes you a bad programmer seems more like fud than actual concern

Our computer science professor in some programming course at university told us we were not supposed to take advice from the internet or answers from Stack Overflow for half a year... Until we learned the ropes. And could asses for ourselves what's right and what is wrong. (And I believe that was some C/C++ course where you get lots of opportunuties to do silly things that might somehow work but for all of the wrong reasons.)

I think he was right. There is lots of misinformation out there that isn't a proper design pattern. And with copy-pasting stuff, you don't necessarily learn anything. Whereas learning with some method is efficient and works.

And I'm pretty sure I'm not super intelligent, but all of that isn't really hard. I mean if someone codes regularly, they might as well learn how to do it properly. It takes a bit of time initially... But you get that time back later on. Though... I'd let AI write some boilerplate code. Or design a website if I'm not interested at all how the HTML and CSS works... I think that's alright to do.

I've never had AI create working code anyway.

But it will generally point me in the right direction. It's useful for:

1. Helping get your train of thought back in the right direction
2. Automating what would be a lot of boilerplate/repetitive coding. Just beware you will still need to check it over.

You need to be skilled to spot the mistakes it will definitely make.

I don’t love AI, but programming is engineering. The goal is to solve a problem, not to be the best at solving a problem.

Also I can write shitty code without help anyway

Good. There's a lot of non-programmers who are now bad ones and are using AI to make their ideas real. It's made programming way more accessible to people who would never learn before.

I asked ChatGPT to give me a script to parse my history file and output the dates in something human readable. Later I learned you can use something like history -i. It was basically instantaneous while the script was slow.

Though, I'm questioning my memory of this because I don't see that flag on man pages online.

Edit: In ChatGPT's defense, this was actually something oh my zsh added, not zsh.

I was saying AI for coding is bad until saw two pictures:

You mean I can go from being a terrible programmer to merely a bad one? I'm in.

I'll confess I only skimmed the article, but it seems like just a bunch of unsubstantiated opinions and I don't buy it.

Using AI generated code is like pair programming with a junior programmer. You tell the junior what to do and then you correct their mistakes by telling them how to do better. In my experience, explaining things to someone else makes you better at your craft. Typically this cycle includes me changing the code manually at the end, and then possibly feeding it back to ChatGPT for another cycle of changes.

Apart from letting me realize and test my ideas quicker, this allows me to raise the abstraction level of my thinking. I can spend more time on architecture and on seeing the bigger picture, and less time being blinded by the nitty gritty details. I would say it makes me both a faster and a better programmer.

Not a coder. I can understand most python code and powershell scripts that others have done, but I don't remember syntax, if I need to make something from scratch. Doing that involves ton of googling and reading awful documentation that still leaves some things out. I do this maybe twice a year.

For someone like me AI coding is a god sent.

Not using AI Generated Code won't make you programmer at all. It's just another way to start a journey to alcoholism and loneliness in front of computer screen. The only difference is that this time you travel with junior developer for poor people.

Well I'm already a bad programmer, at least I save time /j

I recently removed in editor AI cause I noticed I was acquiring muscle memory for my brain, not thinking through the rest past the start of a snippet that would get an LLM to auto complete. I'm still using LLMs, particularly for languages and libraries I'm not familiar with, but using the artifacts editors in ChatGPT and Claude.

Agree on the application side, but when it comes to the test suite, I'm definitely gonna consider letting an AI get that file started and then I'll run through, make sure the assertions are all what I would expect and refactor anything that needs it.

I've written countless tests in my career and I'm still gonna write countless more, but I'm glad I can at least spend less time on laborious repetition now and more time on the part of the job I actually enjoy which is actually solving problems.

If you treat an AI like anything other than the rubber duck in Rubber Duck Programming you're using it wrong.