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Ignoring lemmyhate, are programmers really using AI to be more efficient? (sh.itjust.works)
submitted 1 year ago by to c/programming@programming.dev
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I've seen a few articles saying that instead of hating AI, the real quiet programmers young and old are loving it and have a renewed sense of purpose coding with llm helpers (this article was also hating on ed zitiron, which makes sense why it would).

Is this total bullshit? I have to admit, even though it makes me ill, I've used llms a few times to help me learn simple code syntax quickly (im and absolute noob who's wanted my whole life to learn code but cant grasp it very well). But yes, a lot of time its wrong.

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[–] 4 points 1 year ago (4 children)

Not a programmer, but I used it at my last job to get over humps where I was stuck on PowerShell scripts. AI can show you a path you didn't know or hadn't thought about. The developers seemed to be using it the same way. Great tool if you don't completely lean on it and you know enough to judge the output.

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  • [–] 3 points 1 year ago (2 children)

    I find it excels at one-off scripts. They are simple enough that every parameter and line of code fits in a small bit of memory. They are really bad at complex tasks, but they can help if you use it judiciously.

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  • [–] 4 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 child)

    I used ChatGPT to write some fairly straight forward bash scripts last week and it was mostly awful. I ended up massaging it enough to do what I needed, but I would have been better off just writing it myself and maybe asking it a couple syntax questions (although the regex I needed was one of 8 things it stumbled over)

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago*

    I'm generally much better at writing regex than ChatGPT. Though I will say, I needed the regex for ISO 3339 date format just yesterday for validation and copilot/Claude provided a more specific version than Google search. I still have to go back and double check the corporate standard as I suspect we only allow offsets from UTC and all implementations I looked at are too permissive.

    I've had middling experience with bash. The scripts I wrote are generally petty basic. Set a few variables based on the current project and then execute some gcloud or Tekton commands. And I don't write them often so it finds and fixes things I often forget like not being allowed to have spaces around =.

    I think the more externalities that need to be considered to come up with a correct answer, the less reliable ChatGPT is because there are a lot of externalities it doesn't really know to consider. Bash has a huge number of externalities that might affect the correct way of doing something.

    I should experiment with more functional languages. "Pure functions" are really good at minimizing externalities. Worth investigating.

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