I interviewed someone who used AI (CoPilot, I think), and while it somewhat worked, it gave the wrong implementation of a basic algorithm. We pointed out the mistake, the developer fixed it (we had to provide the basic algorithm, which was fine), and then they refactored and AI spat out the same mistake, which the developer again didn’t notice.
AI is fine if you know what you’re doing and can correct the mistakes it makes (i.e. use it as fancy code completion), but you really do need to know what you’re doing. I recommend new developers avoid AI like the plague until they can use it to cut out the mundane stuff instead of filling in their knowledge gaps. It’ll do a decent job at certain prompts (i.e. generate me a function/class that…), but you’re going to need to go through line-by-line and make sure it’s actually doing the right thing. I find writing code to be much faster than reading and correcting code so I don’t bother w/ AI, but YMMV.
An area where it’s probably ideal is finding stuff in documentation. Some projects are huge and their search sucks, so being able to say, “find the docs for a function in library X that does…” I know what I want, I just may not remember the name or the module, and I certainly don’t remember the argument order.
AI is fine if you know what you’re doing and can correct the mistakes it makes (i.e. use it as fancy code completion)
I’m not a developer and i havent touched code for over 10 yrs, but when i heard about my company pushing AI tools on the devs, i thought exactly what you said. It should be a tool for experienced devs who already know what they’re doing…
Lo and behold they did the opposite… They fired all the senior people and pushed AI on the interns and new grads… and then expected AI to suddenly make the jr devs work like the expensive Sr devs they just fired…
AI is like having an intern you can delegate to. If you give it a simple enough task with clear direction, it can come up with something useful, but you need to check.
I interviewed someone who used AI (CoPilot, I think), and while it somewhat worked, it gave the wrong implementation of a basic algorithm. We pointed out the mistake, the developer fixed it (we had to provide the basic algorithm, which was fine), and then they refactored and AI spat out the same mistake, which the developer again didn’t notice.
AI is fine if you know what you’re doing and can correct the mistakes it makes (i.e. use it as fancy code completion), but you really do need to know what you’re doing. I recommend new developers avoid AI like the plague until they can use it to cut out the mundane stuff instead of filling in their knowledge gaps. It’ll do a decent job at certain prompts (i.e. generate me a function/class that…), but you’re going to need to go through line-by-line and make sure it’s actually doing the right thing. I find writing code to be much faster than reading and correcting code so I don’t bother w/ AI, but YMMV.
An area where it’s probably ideal is finding stuff in documentation. Some projects are huge and their search sucks, so being able to say, “find the docs for a function in library X that does…” I know what I want, I just may not remember the name or the module, and I certainly don’t remember the argument order.
I’m not a developer and i havent touched code for over 10 yrs, but when i heard about my company pushing AI tools on the devs, i thought exactly what you said. It should be a tool for experienced devs who already know what they’re doing…
Lo and behold they did the opposite… They fired all the senior people and pushed AI on the interns and new grads… and then expected AI to suddenly make the jr devs work like the expensive Sr devs they just fired…
Wtf
Yeah, it makes no sense. AI is at best a replacement for junior devs and interns.
AI is like having an intern you can delegate to. If you give it a simple enough task with clear direction, it can come up with something useful, but you need to check.