[brookst]

Have you ever hired a junior dev? How is their quality? Does that mean we should never use junior devs?

The problem with chatGPT usage is not imperfect code. The problem, when there is one, is not treating its code the way one would treat a human’s.

[rimunroe]

> Does that mean we should never use junior devs?

No, because junior devs usually improve over time.

I've tried Copilot and a few other AI codegen tools. Aside from producing overall low quality/nonworking code, the only times they seem to get better long-term are when a new update to the model comes out.

[linuxftw]

copilot is straight trash compared to ChatGPT 4. It's not even a contest.

[rimunroe]

I should have been clear but ChatGPT was one of the "other AI codegen tools" I mentioned, especially as it's the one I used most recently. I tried it for a month or so but then canceled my subscription. I got some use out of it for answering questions for friends who were learning CS for the first time in languages I didn't know, but I didn't get much else from it which felt like it was high enough quality that it really saved me time or effort.

Edit:

And to contrast with junior developers: I find pairing with them something that makes me not only help me figure out the requirements of the things we're working on--which admittedly ChatGPT does do, but I think that's mostly by virtue of rubber ducking--but it helps me figure out approaches I wouldn't have thought of before, or encourages me to write more maintainable code by seeing when another person's eyes start glazing over.