this post was submitted on 09 Aug 2023
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Technology

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[–] [email protected] 21 points 1 year ago (1 children)

If I'm going to use AI for something, I want it to be right more often than I am, not just as often!

[–] [email protected] 14 points 1 year ago (2 children)

It actually doesn't have to be. For example the way I use Github Copilot is I give it a code snippet to generate and if it's wrong I just write a bit more code and the it usually gets it right after 2-3 iterations and it still saves me time.

The trick is you should be able to quickly determine if the code is what you want which means you need to have a bit of experience under your belt, so AI is pretty useless if not actively harmful for junior devs.

Overall it's a good tool if you can get your company to shell out $20 a month for it, not sure if I'd pay it out of my own pocket tho.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 year ago (1 children)

It... it was a joke. I was implying that 52% was better than me.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago

Ah ok I guess I misread that. My point is that by itself it's not gonna help you write either better or shittier code than you already do.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago

GitHub Copilot is just intellisense that can complete longer code blocks.

I’ve found that it can somewhat regularly predict a couple lines of code that generally resemble what I was going to type, but it very rarely gives me correct completions. By a fairly wide margin, I end up needing to correct a piece or two. To your point, it can absolutely be detrimental to juniors or new learners by introducing bugs that are sometimes nastily subtle. I also find it getting in the way only a bit less frequently than it helps.

I do recommend that experienced developers give it a shot because it has been a helpful tool. But to be clear - it’s really only a tool that helps me type faster. By no means does it help me produce better code, and I don’t ever see it full on replacing developers like the doomsayers like to preach. That being said, I think it’s $20 well spent for a company in that it easily saves more than $20 worth of time from my salary each month.