• @asmodee59@lemmy.world
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    61 hour ago

    Who are those guys they keep asking this question over and over ? And how are they not able to use such a simple tool to increase their productivity ?

  • ggppjj
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    173 hours ago

    It introduced me to the basics of C# in a way that traditional googling at my previous level of knowledge would’ve made difficult.

    I knew what I wanted to do and I didn’t know what was possible or how to ask without my question being closed as a duplicate with a link to an unhelpful post.

    In that regard, it’s very helpful. If I had already known the language well enough, I can see it being less helpful.

    • @UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world
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      2 hours ago

      Great for Coding 101 in a language I’m rusty with or otherwise unfamiliar.

      Absolutely useless when it comes time to optimize a complex series of functions or upgrade to a new version of the .NET library. All the “AI” you need is typically baked into Intellisense or some equivalent anyway. We’ve had code-assist/advice features for over a decade and its always been mid. All that’s changed is the branding.

    • Semi-Hemi-Lemmygod
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      73 hours ago

      This is what I’ve used it for and it’s helped me learn, especially because it makes mistakes and I have to get them to work. In my case it was with Terraform and Ansible.

      • ggppjj
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        2 hours ago

        Haha, yeah. It really loves to refactor my code to “fix” bracket list initialization (e.g. List<string> stringList = [];) because it keeps not remembering that the syntax has been valid for a while.

        It’s newest favorite hangup is to incessantly suggest null checks without asking if it’s a nullable property that it’s checking first. I think I’m almost at the point where it’s becoming less useful to me.

  • @alienanimals@lemmy.world
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    83 hours ago

    The writer has a clear bias and a lack of a technical background (writing for Techies.com doesn’t count) .

    You don’t have to look hard to find devs saving time and learning something with AI coding assistants. There are plenty of them in this thread. This is just an opinion piece by someone who read a single study.

    • @kureta@lemmy.ml
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      42 hours ago

      if you are already competent and you are aware that it doesn’t necessarily give you correct information, the it is really helpful. I know enough to sense when it is making shit up. Also it is, for some scenarios, faster and easier then looking at a documentation. I like it personally. But it will not replace competent developers anytime soon.

  • @Zoots@lemmy.world
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    -151 minutes ago

    Judging this article by it’s title (refuse to click). Calling BS. ChatGPT has been a game changer for me personally

  • Choco1ateCh1p
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    84 hours ago

    Every now and then, GitHub Copilot saves me a few seconds suggesting some very basic solution that I am usually in the midst of creating. Is it worth the investment? No, at least not yet. It hasn’t once “beaten” me or offered an improved solution. It (more frequently than not) requires the developer to understand and modify what it proposes for its suggestions to be useful. Is is a useful tool? Sure, just not worth the price yet, and obviously not perfect. But, where I’m working is testing it out, so I’ll keep utilizing it.

  • @histic@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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    54 hours ago

    Garbage in garbage out is how they all work if you give it a well defined prompt you can get exactly what you want out of it most of the time but if you just say fix this problem it’ll just fix the problem ignoring everything else

  • @Landless2029@lemmy.world
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    2011 hours ago

    Everyone keeps talking about autocomplete but I’ve used it successfully for comments and documentation.

    You can use vs code extensions to generate and update readme and changelog files.

    Then if you follow documentation as code you can update your Confluence/whatever by copy pasting.

    • Dremor
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      54 hours ago

      I also use it a lot for unit tests. It helps a lot when you have to write multiple edge cases, and even find new one at times. Like putting a random int in an enum field (enumField = (myEnum)1000), I didn’t knew you could do that…

      • @Landless2029@lemmy.world
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        34 hours ago

        Yeah. I’ve found new logic by asking GPT for improvements on my code or suggestions.

        I cut the size of a function in half once using a suggested recursive loop and it blew my mind.

        Feels like having a peer to do a code review on hand at all times.

    • @dubyakay@lemmy.ca
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      36 hours ago

      I run code snippets by three or four LLMs and the consensus is never there. Claude has been the worst for me.

      • @CaptSneeze@lemmy.world
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        25 hours ago

        Which one has been best? I’m only a hobbyist, but I’ve found Claude to be my favorite, and the best UI by a mile.

  • @VonReposti@feddit.dk
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    2514 hours ago

    While I am not fond of AI, we do have access to it at work and I must admit that it saves some time in some cases. I’m not a developer with decades of experience in a single language, so something I am using AI to is asking “Is it possible to do a one-liner in language X where it does Y?” It works very well and the code is rarely unusable, but it is still up to my judgement whether the AI came up with a clever use of functions that I didn’t know about or whether it crammed stuff into a single unreadable line.

  • Greg Clarke
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    4017 hours ago

    Generative AI is great for loads of programming tasks like helping create regular expressions or syntax conversions between languages. The main issue I’ve seen in codebases that rely heavily on generative AI is that the “solutions” often fix today’s bug while making future debugging more difficult. Generative AI makes it easy to go fast in the wrong direction. Used right it’s a useful tool.

    • @dgmib@lemmy.world
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      137 minutes ago

      Just beware, sometimes the AI suggestions are scary good, some times they’re batshit crazy.

      Just because AI suggests it, doesn’t mean it’s something you should use or learn from.

    • @Warl0k3@lemmy.world
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      3219 hours ago

      Its basically a template generator, which is really helpful when you’re generating boilerplate. It doesn’t save me much if any time to refactor/fill in that template, but it does save some mental fatigue that I can then spend on much more interesting problems.

      It’s a niche tool, but occasionally quite handy. Without leaps forward technically though, it’s never going to become more than that.