Tradeoffs : programmer

[–] AllNewTypeFace@leminal.space 129 points 2 months ago (2 children)

You can instantly get whatever you want, only it’s made from 100% technical debt

[–] xmunk@sh.itjust.works 28 points 2 months ago (1 children)

That estimate seems a little low to me. It's at least 115%.

[–] vrighter@discuss.tchncs.de 22 points 2 months ago

even more. The first 100% of the tech debt is just understanding "your own" code.

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[–] orca@orcas.enjoying.yachts 70 points 2 months ago (4 children)

And then 12 hours spent debugging and pulling it apart.

[–] heavydust@sh.itjust.works 31 points 2 months ago (1 children)

And if you need anything else, you have to use a new prompt which will generate a brand new application, it's fun!

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[–] marcos@lemmy.world 9 points 2 months ago (1 children)

And it still doesn't work. Just "mostly works".

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[+] penquin@lemm.ee 57 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (10 children)

[deleted]

[–] deadbeef79000@lemmy.nz 72 points 2 months ago (1 children)

That's the thing, it's a useful assistant for an expert who will be able to verify any answers.

It's a disaster for anyone who's ignorant of the domain.

[–] abbadon420@lemm.ee 26 points 2 months ago

Tell me about it. I teach a python class. Super basic, super easy. Students are sometimes idiots, but if they follow the steps, most of them should be fine. Sometimes I get one who thinks they can just do everything with chatgpt. They'll be working on their final assignment and they'll ask me what a for loop is for. Than I look at their code and it looks like Sanscrit. They probably haven't written a single line of code in those weeks.

[–] tunetardis@lemmy.ca 18 points 2 months ago (4 children)

I turned on copilot in VSCode for the first time this week. The results so far have been less than stellar. It's batting about .100 in terms of completing code the way I intended. Now, people tell me it needs to learn your ways, so I'm going to give it a chance. But one thing it has done is replaced the normal auto-completion which showed you what sort of arguments a function takes with something that is sometimes dead wrong. Like the code will not even compile with the suggested args.

It also has a knack for making me forget what I was trying to do. It will show me something like the left side picture with a nice rail stretching off into the distance when I had intended it to turn, and then I can't remember whether I wanted to go left or right? I guess it's just something you need to adjust to. Like you need to have a thought fairly firmly in your mind before you begin typing so that you can react to the AI code in a reasonable way? It may occasionally be better than what you have it mind, but you need to keep the original idea in your head for comparison purposes. I'm not good at that yet.

[–] ikidd@lemmy.world 4 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

Try Roocode or Cline with the Claude3.7 model. It's pretty slick, way better than Copilot. Turn on Memory Bank for larger projects to reduce the cost of tokens.

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[–] 2deck@lemmy.world 12 points 2 months ago (3 children)

If you're having to do repetitive shit, you might reconsider your approach.

[–] SkyeStarfall@lemmy.blahaj.zone 6 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Depending on the situation, repetitive shit might be unavoidable

Usually you can solve the issue by using regex, but regex can be difficult to work with as well

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[–] Buckshot@programming.dev 8 points 2 months ago (4 children)

It's taken me a while to learn how to use it and where it works best but I'm coming around to where it fits.

Just today i was doing a new project, i wrote a couple lines about what i needed and asked for a database schema. It looked about 80% right. Then asked for all the models for the ORM i wanted and it did that. Probably saved an hour of tedious typing.

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[–] LovableSidekick@lemmy.world 7 points 2 months ago (2 children)

Shhhh! You're not supposed to rock the AI hate boat.

[–] wise_pancake@lemmy.ca 6 points 2 months ago

I hate the ethics of it, especially the image models.

But frankly it's here, and lawyers were supposed to have figured out the ethics of it.

I use hosted Deepseek as an FU to OpenAI and GitHub for stealing my code.

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[–] ikidd@lemmy.world 7 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (4 children)

I knocked off an android app in Flutter/Dart/Supabase in about a week of evenings with Claude. I have never used Flutter before, but I know enough coding to fix things and give good instructions about what I want.

It would even debug my android test environment for me and wrote automated tests to debug the application, as well as spit out the compose files I needed to set up the Supabase docker container and SQL queries to prep the database and authentication backend.

That was using 3.5Sonnet, and from what I've seen of 3.7, it's way better. I think it cost me about $20 in tokens. I've never used AI to code anything before, this was my first attempt. Pretty cool.

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[–] mesamunefire@piefed.social 41 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Im looking forward in the next 2 years when AI apps are in the wild and I get to fix them lol.

As a SR dev, the wheel just keeps turning.

[–] xmunk@sh.itjust.works 19 points 2 months ago (3 children)

I'm being pretty resistant about AI code Gen. I assume we're not too far away from "Our software product is a handcrafted bespoke solution to your B2B needs that will enable synergies without exposing your entire database to the open web".

[–] mesamunefire@piefed.social 19 points 2 months ago (3 children)

It has its uses. For templeting and/or getting a small project off the ground its useful. It can get you 90% of the way there.

But the meme is SOOO correct. AI does not understand what it is doing, even with context. The things JR devs are giving me really make me laugh. I legit asked why they were throwing a very old version of react on the front end of a new project and they stated they "just did what chatgpt told them" and that it "works". Thats just last month or so.

The AI that is out there is all based on old posts and isnt keeping up with new stuff. So you get a lot of the same-ish looking projects that have some very strange/old decisions to get around limitations that no longer exist.

[–] abbadon420@lemm.ee 14 points 2 months ago

Holdup! You've got actual, employed, working, graduated juniors who are handing in code that they don't even understand?

[–] WrittenInRed@lemmy.dbzer0.com 7 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Yeah, I think personally LLMs are fine for like writing a single function, or to rubber duck with for debugging or thinking through some details of your implementation, but I'd never use one to write a whole file or project. They have their uses, and I do occasionally use something like ollama to talk through a problem and get some code snippets as a starting point for something. Trying to do too much more than that is asking for problems though. It makes it way harder to debug because it becomes reading code you haven't written, it can make the code style inconsistent, and a non-insignifigant amount of the time even in short code segments it will hallucinate a non existent function or implement something incorrectly, so using it to write massive amounts of code makes that way more likely.

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[–] MajorHavoc@programming.dev 8 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

without exposing your entire database to the open web until well after your payment to us has cleared, so it's fine.

Lol.

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[–] x00z@lemmy.world 40 points 2 months ago (6 children)

Not to be that guy, but the image with all the traintracks might just be doing it's job perfectly.

[–] turbodrooler@lemmy.world 30 points 2 months ago (1 children)

The one on the right prints “hello world” to the terminal

[–] Korhaka@sopuli.xyz 8 points 2 months ago

And takes 5 seconds to do it

[–] tiddy@sh.itjust.works 24 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Engineers love moving parts, known for their reliability and vigor

[–] Diurnambule@jlai.lu 6 points 2 months ago

Vigor killed me

[–] thedeadwalking4242@lemmy.world 9 points 2 months ago

Might is the important here

[–] dustyData@lemmy.world 7 points 2 months ago

It gives you the right picture when you asked for a single straight track on the prompt. Now you have to spend 10 hours debugging code and fixing hallucinations of functions that don't exist on libraries it doesn't even neet to import.

[–] Michal@programming.dev 5 points 2 months ago (1 children)

While being more complex and costly to maintain

[–] x00z@lemmy.world 6 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Depends on the usecase. It's most likely at a trainyard or trainstation.

[–] Michal@programming.dev 5 points 2 months ago

The image implies that the track on the left meets the use case criteria

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[+] IDKWhatUsernametoPutHereLolol@lemmy.dbzer0.com 23 points 2 months ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (2 children)

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[–] nihilomaster@lemmy.world 17 points 2 months ago (1 children)

When did you get diagnosed?

[–] niktemadur@lemmy.world 5 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

He's got that ol' New York City Metropolitan Area Transit Authority Blues again, momma!

[–] blind3rdeye@lemm.ee 8 points 2 months ago

OpenTTD is a good game.

[–] friend_of_satan@lemmy.world 20 points 2 months ago (1 children)

God, seriously. Recently I was iterating with copilot for like 15 minutes before I realized that it's complicated code changes could be reduced to an if statement.

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[–] RizzoTheSmall@lemm.ee 18 points 2 months ago (1 children)

I personally find copilot is very good at rigging up test scripts based on usings and a comment or two. Babysit it closely and tune the first few tests and then it can bang out a full unit test suite for your class which allows me to focus on creative work rather than toil.

It can come up with some total shit in the actual meat and potatoes of the code, but boilerplate stuff like tests it seems pretty spot on.

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[–] RustyNova@lemmy.world 15 points 2 months ago (1 children)

And of course the ai put rail signals in the middle.

Chain in, rail out. Always

!Factorio/Create mod reference if anyone is interested !<

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[–] mtchristo@lemm.ee 10 points 2 months ago

I think I would more picture planes taking off those railroads when it comes to AI. It tends to hallucinate API calls that don't exist. if you don't go check the docs yourself you will have a hard time debugging what went wrong.

[–] zerofk@lemm.ee 8 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Give it time, eventually every project looks like the right.

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[–] Gxost@lemmy.world 5 points 2 months ago (4 children)

It depends. AI can help writing good code. Or it can write bad code. It depends on the developer's goals.

[–] Sauerkraut@discuss.tchncs.de 6 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (1 children)

LLMs can be great for translating pseudo code into real code or creating boiler plate or automating tedious stuff, but ChatGPT is terrible at actual software engineering.

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[–] rocky1138@sh.itjust.works 4 points 2 months ago (1 children)

I don't understand how build times magically decrease with AI. Or did they mean built?

[–] xthexder@l.sw0.com 8 points 2 months ago

They mean time to write the code, not compile time. Let's be honest, the AI will write it in Python or Javascript anyway

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