this post was submitted on 21 Oct 2024
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I haven't been in development for nearly 20 years now, but I assumed it worked like that:
You generate unit tests for a very specific function of rather limited magnitude, then you let AI generate the function. How could this work otherwise?
Bonus points if you let the AI divide your overall problem into smaller problems of manageable magnitudes. That wouldn't involve code generation as such...
Am I wrong with this approach?
I tend to write a comment of what I want to do, and have Copilot suggest the next 1-8 lines for me. I then check the code if it's correct and fix it if necessary.
For small tasks it's usually good enough, and I've already written a comment explaining what the code does. It can also be convenient to use it to explore an unknown library or functionality quickly.
"Unknown library" often means a rather small and sparely documented and used library tho, for me. Which means AI makes everything even worse by hallucinating.
I meant a library unknown to me specifically. I do encounter hallucinations every now and then but usually they're quickly fixable.
It's made me a little bit faster, sometimes. It's certainly not like a 50-100% increase or anything, maybe like a 5-10% at best?