This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
The main issue i have with AI coding, hasn't been the code. Its a bit ham fisted and overly naive, it is as if it's speed blind.
The main issue is that some of the code is out of date using functions that are deprecated etc, and it seems to be mixing paradigms and styles across languages in a very frustrating? way.
Yep I've got a working iOS app, a v.2 branched and on the way, with a ton of MapKit integrations. Unfortunately I'm getting depreciation errors and having to constantly remind the AI that it's using old code, showing it examples of new code, and then watching it forget as we keep talking.
Still, I have a working iOS app, which only took a few hours. When Jack Dorsey said he'd vibe coded his new app in a long weekend, I'm like, hey me too.
LLMs can't forget things because they are not capable of memory.
They can hold session memory including 10+ source files, and a looong chat, but when you run into the wall, suddenly it's eating its own memory to keep going, rather than forcing me to reset the session. Which is interesting, like co-coding with a mild amnesiac. "Hey remember when we just did that thing 2 minutes ago?" I should have started a new session when I branched.
Having to repeatedly tweak and review AI generations is a code smell. Your gut could be telling you to start using your brain to build your code if you're at this stage.
This does not seem surprising to me:
"Overall, the developers in the study accepted less than 44 percent of the code generated by AI without modification. A majority of the developers reported needing to make changes to the code generated by their AI companion, and a total of 9 percent of the total task time in the "AI-assisted" portion of the study was taken up by this kind of review."
It sounds about right. The AI should be acting as an assistant. The big question to me is if the code that comes out 19% slower is at all of higher quality. Since the coder is doing more correction and review does it act a bit like a second set of eyes or a pho sort of collaboration. If so it could still be helpful. Granted my experience so far is that most of what it does can be done with plugins to an ide but like it is sorta handy to have it all set and going after an installation without having to find and start using the plugins. Im still worried about energy usage with these things but hoping that can be worked out and honestly im not sure if the energy usage for something integrated with an ide or such is as bad.
Ad a fairly senior developer, I'm not at all surprised. AI speeds me up in some circumstances like writing boilerplate; things like kubernetes manifests. It does not speed up my coding, but it does help me explore options, expand my knowledge, and point me down the right track on new methods and packages. It also lets me do things I wouldn't normally bother with, but which are good practice like finding edge cases for unit tests, packaging for multiple architectures, writing scripts to profile my code, etc.
Essentially, I'm likely slower writing code with AI assistance but I think the code is higher quality because it let's me quickly assess many options and implement best practices that are normally tedious to implement manually.
I almost never accept code AI has written without modification, but I think I gain a lot from its use.
pho
faux
Maybe they're making soup
I like to think typos like that confirm my humanity :)
shhh don’t let the bots in on our secret
also now I’m hungry for phở
With enough training data from me and chatbots will spell like shit. Bad grammar as well.
The future has not been written. There is no fate but what we make for ourselves.
Great as an assistant for boring tasks. Still needs checking.
Can also help suggest improvements, but still needs checking.
Have to learn when to stop interacting with it and do it yourself.
A "junior" project manager at my company vibe coded an entire full stack web app with one of those LLM IDEs. His background is industrial engineering and claims to have basically no programming experience.
It "works", as in, it does what it's meant to, but as you can guess, it relies on calls to LLM APIs where it really doesn't have to, and has several critical security flaws, inconsistencies in project structure and convention, and uses deprecated library features.
He already pitched it to one of our largest clients, and they're on board. They want to start testing at the end of the month.
He's had one junior dev who's been managing to keep things somewhat stable, but the poor dude really had his work cut out for him. I only recently joined the project because "it sounded cool", so I've been trying to fix some flaws while adding new requested features.
I've never worked with the frameworks and libraries before, so it's a good opportunity to upskill, but god damn I don't know if I want my name on this project.
A similar thing is happening with my brother at a different company. An executive vibe coded a web application, but this thing absolutely did not work.
My brother basically had one night to get it into a working state. He somehow (ritalin) managed to do it. The next day they presented it to one of their major clients. They really want it.
These AI dev tools absolutely have a direct negative impact on developer productivity, but they also have an indirect impact where non-devs use them and pass their Eldritch abominations to the actual devs to fix, extend and maintain.
Two years ago, I was worried about AI taking dev jobs, but now it feels like, to me, we'll need more human devs than ever in the long run.
Like, weren't these things supposed to exponentially get better? Like, cool, gh copilot can fuck up my project files now.
These AI dev tools absolutely have a direct negative impact on developer productivity, but they also have an indirect impact where non-devs use them and pass their Eldritch abominations to the actual devs to fix, extend and maintain.
Sounds like the next evolution of the Excel spreadsheet macro. Or maybe it's convergent evolution toward the same niche. (I still have nightmares about Excel spreadsheet macros.)
I don't doubt this is true. I've been playing with an A.I and some fairly simple python scripts and it's so tedious to get the A.I. to actually do something to the script correctly. Learning to prompt is a skill all it's own.
In my experience it's much more useful for doing things like in AWS like create a Cloudformation template or look through user permissions for excess privileges or setup a backup schedule, like at scale when you have lots of accounts and users, etc.
Sounds reasonable. The time and energy ive lost on trying very confident chat gpt suggestions that doesnt work must be weeks at this point.
Sometimes its very good though and really helps, which is why its so frustrating. You never know if its going to work before you go through the process.
It has changed how me and coworkers work now also. We just talk to chat gpt instead of even trying to look something up in the docs and trying to understand it. Too slow to do that now, it feels like. There is a pressure to solve anything quickly now that chat gpt exists.
On a different note: is it just me or do images with this color scheme (that blue and black) also have a weird 3d look to them to you?
They can't read your mind. A professional painter is going to make the exact image they want in far less time and with more accuracy than repeatedly prompting a black box to make small changes.
But if you're an amateur and don't really know what you want, or you're not very picky or care about quality, then meh good enough. High level software developers know what they want. They are like painters. And at that point, the LLM isn't really solving problems for you. At best, it's putting the paint to the canvas. That is, saving you typing time.
But time spent typing is definitely not the limiting factor for productivity in software.
They can't read your mind. A professional painter is going to make the exact image they want in far less time and with more accuracy than repeatedly prompting a black box to make small changes.
and this is the exact reason why I hate IDEs that relentlessly "do things" for me.
I don't need my editor maintaining my includes or updating my lock files. I don't need them to auto complete words or fix syntax for me.
I know exactly what I'm doing. If I don't then-- AND ONLY THEN, will I lookup what I need and fix it myself.
if there's a problem with formatting a linter will pick it up. if there's a problem with syntax the runtime/compilation will pick it up. if there's a problem with content uat will pick it up.
we don't need to be MORE productive, we need to be more skilled and using tools like these only soften the mind and dull the spirit.
Slowing you down is the main benefit!
It helps you to keep more brain time on solving the actual problem, and less on boring syntax crap. Of course, then it gets the syntax crap wrong and you need to waste a lot of time fixing it.
Studies show that the electric drills drill faster than a manual, hand-cranked drill.
