• ggppjj
    link
    fedilink
    English
    111 hour 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.

    • Semi-Hemi-Lemmygod
      link
      fedilink
      English
      452 minutes 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
        link
        fedilink
        English
        1
        edit-2
        24 seconds 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.

    • @UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      English
      1
      edit-2
      22 minutes 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.

  • @alienanimals@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    English
    448 minutes 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.

  • Choco1ateCh1p
    link
    fedilink
    English
    72 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
    link
    fedilink
    English
    52 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
    link
    fedilink
    English
    178 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
      link
      fedilink
      English
      42 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
        link
        fedilink
        English
        32 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
      link
      fedilink
      English
      34 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
        link
        fedilink
        English
        23 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
    link
    fedilink
    English
    2411 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
    link
    fedilink
    English
    4015 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.

    • @Warl0k3@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      English
      3017 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.

    • @Kualk@lemm.ee
      link
      fedilink
      English
      1
      edit-2
      2 hours ago

      We always have to ask what language is it auto-completing for? If it is a strictly typed language, then existing tooling is already doing everything possible and I see no need for additional improvement. If it is non-strictly typed language, then I can see how it can get a little more helpful, but without knowledge of actual context I am not sure if it can get a lot more accurate.

      • @MeatsOfRage@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        English
        1914 hours ago

        Hell yea. Our unit test coverage went way up because you can blow through test creation in second. I had a large complicated migration from one data set to another with specific mutations based on weird rules and GPT got me 80% of the way there and with a little nudging basically got it perfect. Code that would’ve taken a few hours took about 6 prompts. If I’m curious about a new library I can get a working example right away to see how everything fits together. When these articles say there’s no benefit I feel people aren’t using these tools or don’t know how to use them effectively.

        • @SkyeStarfall@lemmy.blahaj.zone
          link
          fedilink
          English
          55 hours ago

          Yeah, it’s useful, you just gotta keep it on a short leash, which is difficult when you don’t know what you’re doing

          Basically, it’s a useful tool for experienced developers that know what to look out for

  • Eager Eagle
    link
    fedilink
    English
    11
    edit-2
    14 hours ago

    lol Uplevel’s “”“full report”“” saying devs using Copilot create 41% more bugs has 2 pages and reads like a promotional material.

    you can download it with a 10 minute email if you really want to see for yourself.

    just some meaningless numbers.

  • @Grandwolf319@sh.itjust.works
    link
    fedilink
    English
    914 hours ago

    Yep, by definition generative AI gets worse the more specific you get. If you need common templates though, it’s almost as good as today’s google.