[c0balt]

> in that every software engineer now depends heavily on copilots

That is maybe a bubble around the internet. Ime most programmers in my environment rarely use and certainly aren't dependent on it. They do also not only do code monkey-esque web programming so maybe this is sampling bias though it should be enough to refute this point.

[Raphael_Amiard]

Came here to say that. It’s important to remember how biased hacker news is in that regard. I’m just out of ten years in the safety critical market, and I can assure you that our clients are still a long way from being able to use those. I myself work in low level/runtime/compilers, and the output from AIs is often too erratic to be useful

[djeastm]

>our clients are still a long way from being able to use those

So it's simply a matter of time

>often too erratic to be useful

So sometimes it is useful.

[layer8]

Too erratic to be net useful.

[anuramat]

Even for code reviews/test generation/documentation search?

[layer8]

Documentation search I might agree, but that wasn’t really the context, I think. Code reviews is hit and miss, but maybe doesn’t hurt too much. They aren’t better at writing good tests than at writing good code in the first place.

[anuramat]

> wasn't the context

yeah, I'm just curious about the vibe in general

> good tests

are there any downsides to adding "bad tests" though? as long as you keep generated tests separate, it's basically free regression testing, and if something meaningfully breaks on a refactor, you can promote it to not-actually-slop

[OldfieldFund]

I would say that the average Hacker News user is negatively biased against LLMs and does not use coding agents to their benefit. At least what I can tell from the highly upvoted articles and comments.

[HDThoreaun]

Im on the core sql execution team at a database company and everyone on the team is using AI coding assistants. Certainly not doing any monkey-esque web programming.

[c0balt]

> everyone on the team is using AI coding assistants.

Then the tool worked for you(r team). That's great to hear and maybe gives some hope for my projects.

It has just mostly been more of a time sink than an improvement ime though it appears to strongly vary by field/application.

> Certainly not doing any monkey-esque web programming

The point here was not to demean the user (or their usage) but rather to highlight how developers are not being dependent on LLMs as a tool. Your team presumably did the same type of work before without LLMs and won't become unable to do so if there were to become unavailable.

That likely was not properly expressed in the original comment by me, sorry.