Cross posted from: https://lemm.ee/post/35627632
this post was submitted on 27 Jun 2024
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My dad's re-learning Python coding for work rn, and AI saves him a couple of times; Because he'd have no idea how to even start but AI points him in the right direction, mentioning the correct functions to use and all. He can then look up the details in the documentation.
You don't need AI for that, for years you asked a search engine and got the answer on StackOverflow.
And before stack overflow, we used books. Did we need it? No. But stack overflow was an improvement so we moved to that.
In many ways, ai is an improvement on stack overflow. I feel bad for people who refuse to see it, because they're missing out on a useful and powerful tool.
It can be powerful, if you know what you are doing. But it also gives you a lot of wrong answers. You have to be very specific in your prompts to get good answers. If you are an experience programmer, you can spot if the semantics of the code an ai produces is wrong, but for beginners? They will have a lot of bugs in their code. And i don't know if it's more helpful than reading a book. It surely can help with the syntax of different programming languages. I can see a future where ai assistance in coding will become better but as of know, from what i have seen, i am not that convinced atm. And i tested several, chatgpt (in different versions), github co-pilot, intellij ai assitant, claude 3, llama 3.
And if i have to put in 5 or more long, very specific sentences, to get a function thats maybe correct, it becomes tedious and you are most likely faster to think about a problem in deep and code a solution all by yourself.
Everyone has lots of bugs in their code, especially beginners. This is why we have testing and qa and processes to minimize the risk of bugs. As the saying goes, "the good news about computers is that they do what you tell them to do. The bad n was is that they do what you tell them to do."
Programming is an iterative process where you do something, it doesn't work, and then you give it another go. It's not something that senior devs get right on the first try, while beginners have to try many times. It's just that senior devs have seen a lot more so have a better understanding of why it probably went wrong, and maybe can avoid some more common pitfalls the first time around. But if you are writing bug free code in your first pass, well you're a way better programmer than anyone I've met.
Ai is just another tool to make this happen. Sure, it's not always the tool for the job, just like IoC is not always the right tool for the job. But it's nice to have it and sometimes it makes things much easier.
Like just now I was debugging a large SQL query. I popped it into copilot, asked if to break it into parts so I could debug. It gave a series of smaller queries that I then used to find the point where it fell apart. This is something that would have taken me at least a half hour of tedious boring work, fixed in 5 minutes.
Also for writing scripts. I want some data formatted so it was easier to read? No problem, it will spit out a script that gets me 90% of the way there in seconds. Do I have to refine it? Absolutely. But if I wrote it myself, not being super prolific with python, it would have taken me a half hour to get the structure in place, and then I still would have had to refine it because I don't produce perfect code the first time around. And it comments the scripts, which I rarely do.
What also amazes me is that sometimes it will spit out code and I'll be like "woah I didn't even know you could do that" and so I learned a new technique. It has a very deep "understanding" of the syntax and fundamentals of the language.
Again, I find it shocking that experienced devs don't find it useful. Not living up to the hype I get. But not seeing it as a productivity boosting tool is a real head scratcher to me. Granted, I'm no rockstar dev, and maybe you are, but I've seen a lot of shit in my day and understand that I'm legitimately a senior dev.