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by switchbak 830 days ago
I see a whole lot of potential in these tools, and in some domains they are starting to deliver on some of the promise. But by and large I agree with this statement - they're actually costing me time because I have to do the research to see where they went wrong. I'm better off learning it properly and idiomatically from scratch right now.
1 comments
willsmith72 830 days ago
I don't get this at all. What kind of code are you writing that you have to literally go and research what it spat out?

In my experience 90% of code is 90% the same as another piece of code in the same repo, with small differences, and copilot will make you fly writing that code.

If you can't read the output code, does it mean the rest of your codebase is similarly unreadable?

The complexity in a codebase or a system is usually from different parts integrating or an overall architecture, but that's totally different to an individual function

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switchbak 823 days ago
"What kind of code are you writing that you have to literally go and research what it spat out" - so in a recent case I was trying to work with Elasticsearch. I'm not an expert in that, so I asked it to do some things. It hallucinated a bunch, and I ended up having to dive in and learn it deeply anyway.

In that case I think I was better off not relying on the tool. I do find it nice to steer me in a direction, but the things I use tend to be niche enough that I don't get the benefit many others do.

I also have a feeling you and I are using it in different capacities.

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onel 829 days ago
This can happen when you are working with new codebases or APIs. For example, recently I tried to build this small gnome extension [0] but I had 0 experience with the API. So I tried chat gpt.

Even though the structure of the code in the file was ok, it called some APIs that did not exist, it created a new var `this._menu` for the dropdown that was not needed (this.menu already exists) and in the end I still had to go through gnome extensions docs to figure out how to do it right.

Overall I don't regret using it but the experience wasn't magical, as I guess we all want it.

[0]: https://github.com/onel/keyboard-cat-defense

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