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by wanderingbit
630 days ago
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This finding bewilders me, because my copilot (I use Sourcegraph’s Cody) has become an essential part of my dev productivity toolset. Being able to get answers to questions that would normally break me out of flow mode by simply Option + C’ing to open up a New Chat has been a productivity boost for me. Getting it to give me little snippets of code that I can use helps keep me in flow mode. Getting it to do a first pass on function comments, which I then edit, has made it much easier to get over the activation energy barrier that usually holds me back from doing full commenting. I can’t say if the bug count is higher or not. Maybe it is higher in terms of total number of bugs I write throughout my coding session. But if bug count goes up 10% then the speed with which I fix those bugs and get to a final edit of my code is 30% or 40% faster, so the bug count is not the right metric. Maybe the differentiator is that I am a solo-dev for all this work, and so the negative effects of the copilot are only experienced by me. If I were in a 10 person team, the bugs and the weird out of context code snippets would be magnified by the 9 other people, and the negative effects would be strong. But I don’t know. |
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> Like the Uplevel study, Gekht also sees AI assistants introducing errors in code. Each new iteration of the AI-generated code ends up being less consistent when different parts of the code are developed using different prompts.
> “It becomes increasingly more challenging to understand and debug the AI-generated code, and troubleshooting becomes so resource-intensive that it is easier to rewrite the code from scratch than fix it,” he says.
In particular if there's little standardization in prompting styles across the team, I could see things getting confusing.
But there are also bad incentives on teams that don't exist for solo devs: e.g. presumably you aren't shipping code solely because your manager is getting on to you about missed deadlines, without any business justifications for the hurry. AI codegen that effectively optimizes to the manager / user story seems bad for business.