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I'm a junior, and I have Codeium installed in VSCode. I've found it very distracting most of the times, I don't really understand why so many people uses this k

I'm a junior, and I have Codeium installed in VSCode. I've found it very distracting most of the times, I don't really understand why so many people uses this kind of assistants. I find stuff like Phind useful, in the sense that sometimes something happens that I don't understand, and 60% of the times Phind actually helps me to understand the problem. Like finding trivial bugs that I didn't spot because I'm tired, dumb, etc. On the other hand, with Codeium, I guess it may be useful when you're just churning boilerplate code for some framework, but in my little expericence (writing scrapers and stupid data pipelines & vanilla JS + HTML/CSS) cycling through suggestions is very irritating, specially because many times it doesn't work. Most of the times for stupid reasons, like lacking an argument or something like that, but then it's time you have to spend debugging it. Another problem I have is that I find there's a common style of JS which consist in daisy-chaining a myriad of methods and anonymous functions, and I really struggle with this. I like to break stuff into lines, name my functions and variables, etc. And so many times code suggestions follow this style. I guess it's what they've been trained on. Codeium is supposed to learn from this, and sometimes it does, to be fair. But what I worry the most is that, If I'm a junior and I let this assistants do the code for me ¿How the hell I'm supposed to learn? Because giving Phind context + questions helps me learn or gives me direction to go on find it by myself in the internet, but if the only thing I do is press tab, I don't know how the hell I'm supposed to learn. I found a couple days ago that many people (including devs) are not using LLMs to get better but it's just a substitute of their effort. Isn't people afraid of this? Not because companies are going to replace you, but it's also a self-reflection issue. Coding is not the passion of my life, addmitedly, but I like it. I like it because it helps me to make stuff happen and to handle complexity. If you can't understand what's happening you won't be able to make stuff happen and much less to spot when is complexity going to eat you.

withinboredom 3y ago
I think probably the best use of AI, so far, was when I went into a controller and told it to generate an openAPI spec ... and it got it nearly right. I only had to modify some of the models to reflect reality. BUT (and this is key), I've hand-written so many API specs in my career that 1) I was able to spot the issues immediately, and 2) I could correct them without any further assistance (refining my prompt would have taken longer than simply fixing the models by hand). For stuff where you know the domain quite well, it's amazing to watch something get done in 30s that you know would have taken you the entire morning. I get what you're saying though, I wouldn't consider asking the AI to do something I don't know how to do, though I do have many conversations with the AI about what I'm working on. Various things about trade-offs, potential security issues, etc. It's like having a junior engineer who has a PHD in how my language works. It doesn't understand much, but what it does understand, it appears to understand it deeply.
- staunton 3y ago
  > I wouldn't consider asking the AI to do something I don't know how to do My experience has been the opposite so far. I benefit much more from such tools when I can easily check if something works correctly and would have to learn/look up a lot of easy and elementary stuff to do it from scratch. For example, adding to some existing code in a language I don't know and don't have time or need to learn (I guess not many people are often in that situation). I get a lot of hints for what methods and libraries are available, I don't have to know the language syntax, for easy few-line snippets (that do standard things and which I can test separately) the first solution usually just works. This is deliberately passing on an opportunity for deeper and faster learning, which is a bad idea in general, but sometimes the speed trade-off is worth it. On the other hand, for problems where I know how to solve them, getting some model to generate the solution I want (or at least one I'm happy with) tends to be more work than just doing it myself. I probably could improve a lot in how I use the available tools. Haven't had that much opportunity yet to play with them...
jacquesm 3y ago
> Coding is not the passion of my life, addmitedly, but I like it. It may not be the passion of your life but I haven't seen anybody articulate better (in recent memory) what they want to get out of coding and how they evaluate their tools. Keep at it, don't change and you'll go places, you are definitely on the right path.
tpmoney 3y ago
The tool and design of the tool matters a lot. I've used Codeium in VSC and GH Copilot in Intellij, and the experience (and quality) of the GH + Intellij paring is much better than Codeium + VSC. My biggest use for AI assistants has been speeding up test writing and any "this but slightly different" repetitive changes to a code base (which admittedly is also a lot of test writing). At least in intellij + GH, things like, a new parameter that now needs to be accounted for across multiple methods and files is usually a matter of "enter + tab" after I've manually typed out the first two or three variants of what I'm trying to do. Context gives it the rest. In VSC with Codeium, the AI doesn't seem quite as up to snuff, and the plugin is written in such a way that its suggestions and the keys for accepting them seem to get in the way a lot. It's still helpful for repetitive stuff, but less so for providing a way of accomplishing a given goal.
mvdtnz 3y ago
> Another problem I have is that I find there's a common style of JS which consist in daisy-chaining a myriad of methods and anonymous functions, and I really struggle with this. I like to break stuff into lines, name my functions and variables, etc. I think your whole comment is excellent but I just wanted to tell you, you're on the right track here. Certain developers, and in particular JS developers, love to chain things together for no benefit other than keeping it on one line. Which is no benefit at all. Keep doing what you're doing and don't let this moronic idiom infect your mind.
- xanderlewis 3y ago
  Sometimes making something a one-liner is itself a benefit for readability. Especially if you’re used to reading it. But admittedly it’s very easy (and can be tempting) to take it too far…
- zeroonetwothree 3y ago
  The downside of extra variables used only once is that as a reader of the code I have to think about whether they might be used again.
  - mvdtnz 3y ago
    I know what you mean, but in this situation it shouldn't be a major problem. These would be variables scoped locally and one would hope that this scope would not be more than about a page of code, and hopefully much less. Also - one would hope that local variables are not being re-used!
- vjerancrnjak 3y ago
  This is just another coding style. After 1-2 weeks you get used to whatever you're reading. Try it and you'll see. It's the high-level code that can become an issue (structuring the state of your program, using dependency injection incorrectly, having a convoluted monad transformer stack, putting very specifically typed effects in your Reader etc.). If you make mistakes there, you will struggle to read, write and reuse code, and even then, not all is lost. If there's bad structure you can most often transform it into a good one. When there's no structure, that's a problem. Seeing .map.filter becomes a quick pattern match. You know what's happening there. It does not matter if it's a named variable or just part of a long a.map .filter .reduce .map chain. I agree, if your goal is to hire a lot of people, then you might want a style that does not strain the pattern matching abilities too much. We can compare which style is the best for that. Nothing stops you from extracting a sequence from a long chain into a function to reuse it elsewhere. pipe( object, map, filter, ... ) Many languages today allow declaring functions inside functions. I'd argue that in that case it's better you declare functions as close as possible to the place where you'll call them, which can be inside another function.
kromem 3y ago
While I can't speak to Codeium, you might want to try Copilot in a more mature codebase that reflects your style of composition. The amazing part for me with the tech is when it matches my style and preferences - naming things the way I want them, correctly using the method I just wrote in place of repeating itself, etc. I haven't used it much in blank or small projects, but I'd imagine I'd find it much less ideal if it wasn't so strongly biased towards how I already write code given the surrounding context on which it draws.

withinboredom 3y ago

I think probably the best use of AI, so far, was when I went into a controller and told it to generate an openAPI spec ... and it got it nearly right. I only had to modify some of the models to reflect reality. BUT (and this is key), I've hand-written so many API specs in my career that 1) I was able to spot the issues immediately, and 2) I could correct them without any further assistance (refining my prompt would have taken longer than simply fixing the models by hand). For stuff where you know the domain quite well, it's amazing to watch something get done in 30s that you know would have taken you the entire morning. I get what you're saying though, I wouldn't consider asking the AI to do something I don't know how to do, though I do have many conversations with the AI about what I'm working on. Various things about trade-offs, potential security issues, etc. It's like having a junior engineer who has a PHD in how my language works. It doesn't understand much, but what it does understand, it appears to understand it deeply.

staunton 3y ago
> I wouldn't consider asking the AI to do something I don't know how to do My experience has been the opposite so far. I benefit much more from such tools when I can easily check if something works correctly and would have to learn/look up a lot of easy and elementary stuff to do it from scratch. For example, adding to some existing code in a language I don't know and don't have time or need to learn (I guess not many people are often in that situation). I get a lot of hints for what methods and libraries are available, I don't have to know the language syntax, for easy few-line snippets (that do standard things and which I can test separately) the first solution usually just works. This is deliberately passing on an opportunity for deeper and faster learning, which is a bad idea in general, but sometimes the speed trade-off is worth it. On the other hand, for problems where I know how to solve them, getting some model to generate the solution I want (or at least one I'm happy with) tends to be more work than just doing it myself. I probably could improve a lot in how I use the available tools. Haven't had that much opportunity yet to play with them...

jacquesm 3y ago

> Coding is not the passion of my life, addmitedly, but I like it. It may not be the passion of your life but I haven't seen anybody articulate better (in recent memory) what they want to get out of coding and how they evaluate their tools. Keep at it, don't change and you'll go places, you are definitely on the right path.

tpmoney 3y ago

The tool and design of the tool matters a lot. I've used Codeium in VSC and GH Copilot in Intellij, and the experience (and quality) of the GH + Intellij paring is much better than Codeium + VSC. My biggest use for AI assistants has been speeding up test writing and any "this but slightly different" repetitive changes to a code base (which admittedly is also a lot of test writing). At least in intellij + GH, things like, a new parameter that now needs to be accounted for across multiple methods and files is usually a matter of "enter + tab" after I've manually typed out the first two or three variants of what I'm trying to do. Context gives it the rest. In VSC with Codeium, the AI doesn't seem quite as up to snuff, and the plugin is written in such a way that its suggestions and the keys for accepting them seem to get in the way a lot. It's still helpful for repetitive stuff, but less so for providing a way of accomplishing a given goal.

mvdtnz 3y ago

> Another problem I have is that I find there's a common style of JS which consist in daisy-chaining a myriad of methods and anonymous functions, and I really struggle with this. I like to break stuff into lines, name my functions and variables, etc. I think your whole comment is excellent but I just wanted to tell you, you're on the right track here. Certain developers, and in particular JS developers, love to chain things together for no benefit other than keeping it on one line. Which is no benefit at all. Keep doing what you're doing and don't let this moronic idiom infect your mind.

xanderlewis 3y ago
Sometimes making something a one-liner is itself a benefit for readability. Especially if you’re used to reading it. But admittedly it’s very easy (and can be tempting) to take it too far…
zeroonetwothree 3y ago
The downside of extra variables used only once is that as a reader of the code I have to think about whether they might be used again.
- mvdtnz 3y ago
  I know what you mean, but in this situation it shouldn't be a major problem. These would be variables scoped locally and one would hope that this scope would not be more than about a page of code, and hopefully much less. Also - one would hope that local variables are not being re-used!
vjerancrnjak 3y ago
This is just another coding style. After 1-2 weeks you get used to whatever you're reading. Try it and you'll see. It's the high-level code that can become an issue (structuring the state of your program, using dependency injection incorrectly, having a convoluted monad transformer stack, putting very specifically typed effects in your Reader etc.). If you make mistakes there, you will struggle to read, write and reuse code, and even then, not all is lost. If there's bad structure you can most often transform it into a good one. When there's no structure, that's a problem. Seeing .map.filter becomes a quick pattern match. You know what's happening there. It does not matter if it's a named variable or just part of a long a.map .filter .reduce .map chain. I agree, if your goal is to hire a lot of people, then you might want a style that does not strain the pattern matching abilities too much. We can compare which style is the best for that. Nothing stops you from extracting a sequence from a long chain into a function to reuse it elsewhere. pipe( object, map, filter, ... ) Many languages today allow declaring functions inside functions. I'd argue that in that case it's better you declare functions as close as possible to the place where you'll call them, which can be inside another function.

kromem 3y ago

While I can't speak to Codeium, you might want to try Copilot in a more mature codebase that reflects your style of composition. The amazing part for me with the tech is when it matches my style and preferences - naming things the way I want them, correctly using the method I just wrote in place of repeating itself, etc. I haven't used it much in blank or small projects, but I'd imagine I'd find it much less ideal if it wasn't so strongly biased towards how I already write code given the surrounding context on which it draws.