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> while thinking, designing and abstracting novel ideas into code is the hard part where AI would fall short and just waste my time. So don't use it there :)

> while thinking, designing and abstracting novel ideas into code is the hard part where AI would fall short and just waste my time. So don't use it there :) But I'm curious what kind of coding you do that you never have to do any scaffolding, refactoring, or come across any element of repetitiveness. That is where it shines imo. I find during those boring tasks it quite often just gets my intent, and I can say "yes actually that's exactly what I wanted". Which allows me to get back to the business of "thinking, designing and abstracting novel ideas" quicker.

sph 4y ago
AI is not as foolproof as many want us to believe. In my mind it's like giving a less experienced and error-prone engineer the code I'm working on to refactor. Perhaps it's because I've always been a lone wolf engineer, but I'd rather do it myself than giving quite an important task to someone less experienced than me, whether I'm writing something new (where I need to be at my best) or refactoring (where I still need to be sharp to understand why it was done a certain way to know how to improve) AI would help with extracting code into a function, or writing yet another algorithm implementation, or wiring bog standard libraries (say, cURL), but that's like foreplay and lower effort work I enjoy doing as a break from the hard stuff. And to clarify my comment about AI being an engineer with less experience than me, I'd rather be paired with an actual junior engineer, so at least I can mentor them and help them grow, than just having a machine do something that in some cases might be utterly inane, so I still have to waste time double checking its work, but totally powerless to teach and improve it.
- enlyth 4y ago
  It's not foolproof but it does guess a lot of what you had exactly in your mind, just hadn't typed down yet. If I start "enum { North", I will gladly accept the ", East, South, West }" autocomplete from Copilot, and this kind of thing, in aggregate, saves hours of your time.
  - TheUndead96 4y ago
    This is my feeling exactly, it is a semantic auto-complete. Should/can it write your core business logic? Probably not, but there is a good chance it can infer and suggest logical patterns in implementation.
- KyeRussell 4y ago
  Again, you’ve basically foregone empiricism and think that the Internet needs your uninformed reckonings about the shortcoming of a technology that you seemingly haven’t had experience with. It sounds like you’ve been at this for a while, are set in your ways, and are trying to justify it. We all get set in our ways, but stop trying to pass this off as something it’s not. I’d respect using Copilot and deciding that it didn’t provide value, but all this umming and ahhing is not that.
- saurik 4y ago
  > In my mind it's like giving a less experienced and error-prone engineer the code I'm working on to refactor. You have almost 20 years of professional experience on your resume and likely were coding before that; it is difficult for me to believe sometimes, but most programmers have nowhere near that level of experience as the field is constantly increasing in size and scope: when I was in college, Computer Science was one small major people could enter that had only momentarily become popular due to the Internet... now it makes up a third of all students at major institutions that I would have assumed should be doing more interesting research work :(. Regardless, you (and I) look at this AI as an engineer that is much less experienced than we are, and which is mostly able to code in repetitive ways with a ton of boilerplate that it sometimes gets wrong anyway; but, I think, for a remarkable number of people--even ones on this forum, where I often want to assume everyone should be an expert but in fact a lot of people just got into doing this work last week--that AI actually already has more experience than they do (and, now that they are using it so heavily to do their job, maybe ever will) and thereby makes fewer mistakes. I don't know what that feels like, but it is certainly a very different experience than we are having. Maybe in another year or two, we'll have that experience also: if the AI gets good enough to become your peer, maybe we will find it interesting to use (or maybe we will become so demoralized, having not been in the position of having to work in a team of people better than us for so long--and these AIs wouldn't even be people!!--that we give up on the art entirely). I mean, imagine for a moment what it would be like if you found yourself in awe of the AI and were learning from it... I think it explains a lot of the confusing excitement about this technology.
actsasbuffoon 4y ago
I love it for writing tests. It’s good at picking up patterns, so if I need a bunch of unit tests then I can usually write one test and let it write the rest based on the RSpec descriptions. I recently had a ticket that required refactoring some code that used net::http from Ruby’s stdlib over to using the HTTP gem. The rewrite was pretty easy to do by hand, but we had a bunch of test cases and rewriting them proved to be a bit painful because the mocks required were quite different. So I spent half an hour rewriting the first test case with the new shape of mocks. Then I commented out the remaining tests and the AI recognized what I was doing and rewrote the remaining test cases with the new mock structure in seconds. I treat AI like a junior programmer. I don’t trust it to do the hard stuff, but it’s great for scenarios where I have already established the pattern and I just need someone with basic coding proficiency to apply that pattern to a large chunk of code. It’s amazing at doing the grunt work.

sph 4y ago

AI is not as foolproof as many want us to believe. In my mind it's like giving a less experienced and error-prone engineer the code I'm working on to refactor. Perhaps it's because I've always been a lone wolf engineer, but I'd rather do it myself than giving quite an important task to someone less experienced than me, whether I'm writing something new (where I need to be at my best) or refactoring (where I still need to be sharp to understand why it was done a certain way to know how to improve) AI would help with extracting code into a function, or writing yet another algorithm implementation, or wiring bog standard libraries (say, cURL), but that's like foreplay and lower effort work I enjoy doing as a break from the hard stuff. And to clarify my comment about AI being an engineer with less experience than me, I'd rather be paired with an actual junior engineer, so at least I can mentor them and help them grow, than just having a machine do something that in some cases might be utterly inane, so I still have to waste time double checking its work, but totally powerless to teach and improve it.

enlyth 4y ago
It's not foolproof but it does guess a lot of what you had exactly in your mind, just hadn't typed down yet. If I start "enum { North", I will gladly accept the ", East, South, West }" autocomplete from Copilot, and this kind of thing, in aggregate, saves hours of your time.
- TheUndead96 4y ago
  This is my feeling exactly, it is a semantic auto-complete. Should/can it write your core business logic? Probably not, but there is a good chance it can infer and suggest logical patterns in implementation.
KyeRussell 4y ago
Again, you’ve basically foregone empiricism and think that the Internet needs your uninformed reckonings about the shortcoming of a technology that you seemingly haven’t had experience with. It sounds like you’ve been at this for a while, are set in your ways, and are trying to justify it. We all get set in our ways, but stop trying to pass this off as something it’s not. I’d respect using Copilot and deciding that it didn’t provide value, but all this umming and ahhing is not that.
saurik 4y ago
> In my mind it's like giving a less experienced and error-prone engineer the code I'm working on to refactor. You have almost 20 years of professional experience on your resume and likely were coding before that; it is difficult for me to believe sometimes, but most programmers have nowhere near that level of experience as the field is constantly increasing in size and scope: when I was in college, Computer Science was one small major people could enter that had only momentarily become popular due to the Internet... now it makes up a third of all students at major institutions that I would have assumed should be doing more interesting research work :(. Regardless, you (and I) look at this AI as an engineer that is much less experienced than we are, and which is mostly able to code in repetitive ways with a ton of boilerplate that it sometimes gets wrong anyway; but, I think, for a remarkable number of people--even ones on this forum, where I often want to assume everyone should be an expert but in fact a lot of people just got into doing this work last week--that AI actually already has more experience than they do (and, now that they are using it so heavily to do their job, maybe ever will) and thereby makes fewer mistakes. I don't know what that feels like, but it is certainly a very different experience than we are having. Maybe in another year or two, we'll have that experience also: if the AI gets good enough to become your peer, maybe we will find it interesting to use (or maybe we will become so demoralized, having not been in the position of having to work in a team of people better than us for so long--and these AIs wouldn't even be people!!--that we give up on the art entirely). I mean, imagine for a moment what it would be like if you found yourself in awe of the AI and were learning from it... I think it explains a lot of the confusing excitement about this technology.

actsasbuffoon 4y ago

I love it for writing tests. It’s good at picking up patterns, so if I need a bunch of unit tests then I can usually write one test and let it write the rest based on the RSpec descriptions. I recently had a ticket that required refactoring some code that used net::http from Ruby’s stdlib over to using the HTTP gem. The rewrite was pretty easy to do by hand, but we had a bunch of test cases and rewriting them proved to be a bit painful because the mocks required were quite different. So I spent half an hour rewriting the first test case with the new shape of mocks. Then I commented out the remaining tests and the AI recognized what I was doing and rewrote the remaining test cases with the new mock structure in seconds. I treat AI like a junior programmer. I don’t trust it to do the hard stuff, but it’s great for scenarios where I have already established the pattern and I just need someone with basic coding proficiency to apply that pattern to a large chunk of code. It’s amazing at doing the grunt work.