this post was submitted on 15 Sep 2024
893 points (98.1% liked)
Technology
59187 readers
2246 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
If I was still in a senior dev position, I’d ban AI code assistants for anyone with less than around 10 years experience. It’s a time saver if you can read code almost as fluently as you can read your own native language but even besides the A.I. code introducing bugs, it’s often not the most efficient way. It’s only useful if you can tell that at a glance and reject its suggestions as much as you accept them.
Which, honestly, is how I was when I was first starting out as a developer. I thought I was hot shit and contributing and I was taking half a day to do tasks an experienced developer could do in minutes. Generative AI is a new developer: irrationally confident, not actually saving time, and rarely doing things the best way.
I've found they're great as a learning tool where decent docs are available. Or as an interactive docs you can ask follow up questions to.
We mostly use c# and it's amazing at digging into the MS docs to pull out useful things from the bcl or common patterns.
Our new juniors got up to speed so fast by asking it to explain stuff in the existing codebases. Which in turn takes pressure off more senior staff.
I got productive in vuejs in a large codebase in a couple days that way.
Using to generate actual code is insanely shit haha It is very similar to just copy pasting code and hacking it in without understanding it.
You make a good point about using it for documentation and learning. That’s a pretty good use case. I just wouldn’t want young developers to use it for code completion any more than I’d want college sophomores to use it for writing essays. Professors don’t have you write essays because they like reading essays. Sometimes, doing a task manually is the point of the assignment.
What setup are you using for junior devs to be able to query your codebase?
I was talking more generally about LLMs here