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by zeroCalories 906 days ago
They won't replace anyone yet, but you're sleeping on AI if you think it's not super helpful. For programming it has pretty much replaced Google for me, as I can ask very detailed questions that are specific to my code. Of course you should always double check the work, but it has definitely made me more productive.
2 comments
hotpotamus 906 days ago
I did have a bit longer comment typed out but didn't follow through on it. That is to say that yes, for common code (or as a developer told me, stuff you've written before and just can't be bothered to find again), it can knock stuff out in seconds that might take me a few hours, so in that sense it is very impressive. But that's just writing code that's been written many times already, and I'm not a developer anyway. I think it shows that in truth, few of the issues we solve are novel.
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zeroCalories 906 days ago
You're not supposed to ask it to implement something novel or large scale. You ask it how to use an api, or to refactor some code with a new class you made. You stack these up, and you can be way more productive than the person doing the equivalent of manual labor.
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hotpotamus 905 days ago
It's a free text box, you can ask it anything you want, but yes; the answers to large scale questions have been quite lacking in my experience. But as a systems guy rather than a developer, those tend to be the actual problems that I have.
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sanderjd 905 days ago
Yeah the "check the work" thing is key. I think the reason these work so well as coding assistants is that we already have really mature tools for checking the work: compilers, static analyzers, test suites, etc.

It's not like writing a history paper where you can write "Napoleon was a French general who conquered Europe in 1987" and just be wrong in a way that requires cross-checking facts. Computers are less forgiving of things that are wrong.

But I do feel like I see incorrect documentation proliferating a bit more, and I'm curious whether we'll see an up-tick in more subtle bugs that is wrong but not so wrong that it is rejected early on. I haven't personally seen that in my work yet. I do also see more code that I don't like during code reviews, that I'm sure was spat out by an AI, but often I conclude that my preference isn't really "right" or even better, but just a preference that doesn't really matter.

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