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Yeah is it becoming clear enough to some people yet that you can't replace software engineers, let alone really help them, with AI? This is only going to get wo

Yeah is it becoming clear enough to some people yet that you can't replace software engineers, let alone really help them, with AI? This is only going to get worse, not better. Copilot is such a flawed product from the start. It's not even a matter of its ability to write "good" code. The concept is just dumb. Code is necessarily consumed by people first before it's executed by a computer in a production environment. There are many ways to get a computer to do something, but the approval process by experienced humans is vastly more important than the drafting of it. Software dev is already incredibly cheap and the last place to cut costs. There is no AI threat other than the one posed by grifters trying to convince you that there is.

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dbmikus 3y ago
I use Copilot and it helps me out enough that I keep paying for it. ChatGPT is also often faster than Google or Stackoverflow for when I'm working with unfamiliar APIs.
- sublinear 3y ago
  It may get you to the first working iteration faster, but it doesn't help ship code faster.
  - dbmikus 3y ago
    If my iteration times are faster, then I ship code faster.
  - pseudosavant 3y ago
    My personal experience has been that I most certainly do ship code faster when I use ChatGPT. It is so good at building out boilerplate, explaining and scaffolding new libraries/APIs I'm not familiar with, or telling me what I'm doing wrong. I use GPT4 on the CLI via ShellGPT. Piping in `tail /var/log/nginx/error.log` and asking "What is going wrong here?" is amazing. I'll never use `man` to figure out how to use a CLI tool again either. It is painful to watch people slowly do things at work (ChatGPT isn't allowed) that ChatGPT would do so much faster. We had to write up an incident report the other day. If we had just outlined everything that had happened in some rough bullet points, it would have written 95% of the final document. If we had gotten that done quicker, we'd have been back to shipping code to production quicker.
stale2002 3y ago
I think that you are underestimating how much software engineering work is easy CRUD web development. For stuff like that, a lot of code can be automated. Sure it may not work right out of the box. But doing a prompt for generally what you want can speed up the process significantly. Even beyond just generating code, there are a lot of general things that AI helps with. Things like how if you code runs into an error, you can just ask AI what the error means as well as a possible fix. Or other questions like "What does this code do" or "where in the code case is code that manages this concept". I've replaced most of my coding with AI, using a new IDE called Cursor AI, and I don't think I could ever go back. Mere github co-pilot is actually the old tech from 2 years ago. The new stuff is way better.
- sublinear 3y ago
  Uhh yeah so anyway... in the real world, the frontend is the most volatile part. You're not automating that away either so long as there exist requirements from non-coders. As for the API side of things, CRUD only looks easy when lots of hard work has been put into it. I guess you're advocating for monolithic data, but that's not really CRUD. That's just lazy and bad.
  - stale2002 3y ago
    > in the real world I've worked at FAANG companies before making the standard X00,000$ total comp on projects with millions of users. I know how development at top companies "in the real world" works. > the frontend is the most volatile part Ok, whatever. Fortunately there are more things out there in software dev than just the one specific usecase you brought up. And its useful for that. > I guess you're advocating No, I am saying that as of right now, AI is a tool that speeds up development process significantly. And I am not talking about just generating a lot of stuff at once. There are hybrid approaches that a human can use, to use AI, as well as code themselves that are useful. And one specific example, would be that you can instantly look up an error and take suggestions for fixing it to get ideas.

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dbmikus 3y ago

I use Copilot and it helps me out enough that I keep paying for it. ChatGPT is also often faster than Google or Stackoverflow for when I'm working with unfamiliar APIs.

sublinear 3y ago
It may get you to the first working iteration faster, but it doesn't help ship code faster.
- dbmikus 3y ago
  If my iteration times are faster, then I ship code faster.
- pseudosavant 3y ago
  My personal experience has been that I most certainly do ship code faster when I use ChatGPT. It is so good at building out boilerplate, explaining and scaffolding new libraries/APIs I'm not familiar with, or telling me what I'm doing wrong. I use GPT4 on the CLI via ShellGPT. Piping in `tail /var/log/nginx/error.log` and asking "What is going wrong here?" is amazing. I'll never use `man` to figure out how to use a CLI tool again either. It is painful to watch people slowly do things at work (ChatGPT isn't allowed) that ChatGPT would do so much faster. We had to write up an incident report the other day. If we had just outlined everything that had happened in some rough bullet points, it would have written 95% of the final document. If we had gotten that done quicker, we'd have been back to shipping code to production quicker.

stale2002 3y ago

I think that you are underestimating how much software engineering work is easy CRUD web development. For stuff like that, a lot of code can be automated. Sure it may not work right out of the box. But doing a prompt for generally what you want can speed up the process significantly. Even beyond just generating code, there are a lot of general things that AI helps with. Things like how if you code runs into an error, you can just ask AI what the error means as well as a possible fix. Or other questions like "What does this code do" or "where in the code case is code that manages this concept". I've replaced most of my coding with AI, using a new IDE called Cursor AI, and I don't think I could ever go back. Mere github co-pilot is actually the old tech from 2 years ago. The new stuff is way better.

sublinear 3y ago
Uhh yeah so anyway... in the real world, the frontend is the most volatile part. You're not automating that away either so long as there exist requirements from non-coders. As for the API side of things, CRUD only looks easy when lots of hard work has been put into it. I guess you're advocating for monolithic data, but that's not really CRUD. That's just lazy and bad.
- stale2002 3y ago
  > in the real world I've worked at FAANG companies before making the standard X00,000$ total comp on projects with millions of users. I know how development at top companies "in the real world" works. > the frontend is the most volatile part Ok, whatever. Fortunately there are more things out there in software dev than just the one specific usecase you brought up. And its useful for that. > I guess you're advocating No, I am saying that as of right now, AI is a tool that speeds up development process significantly. And I am not talking about just generating a lot of stuff at once. There are hybrid approaches that a human can use, to use AI, as well as code themselves that are useful. And one specific example, would be that you can instantly look up an error and take suggestions for fixing it to get ideas.