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As others have mentioned, unless you have a strong conscience and really know what you're doing, it's far too tempting to just accept AI-generated suggestions w

As others have mentioned, unless you have a strong conscience and really know what you're doing, it's far too tempting to just accept AI-generated suggestions without really thinking, and IMHO losing that understanding is a dangerous path to go down. AI can only increase quantity, not quality. The industry desperately needs far more of the latter. Related: https://navendu.me/posts/ai-generated-spam-prs/ https://navendu.me/posts/ai-generated-spam-prs/

bamboozled 2y ago
It's a concern I have too, when I get tired, I start to just delegate to co-pilot suggestions as I get desperate, if I didn't have co-pilot, I'd probably just log off for the day. I actually don't really use copilot as I didn't find it that helpful, so I don't really have the problem anymore, but I could see it was a danger. Bit like driving when tired.
- RogerL 2y ago
  I look at is as asking an intern to do some work that I don't have time for. Do I have to check their work? Yes. Might I have to correct and guide the outcome? Again, yes. Am I going to ask them to implement something novel and groundbreaking? Not really, that'd be a disaster unless they are a prodigy. None of that removes my capacity, or any kind of danger.
  - darkerside 2y ago
    It's funny, the slowness of the intern is probably a feature. You delegate, and you don't have to deal with it until you are refreshed. With AI, you delegate, and then you need to review in the next minute while you are still exhausted.
  - jazzyjackson 2y ago
    if you don't have time to do work then you don't have time to mentor an intern doing that work if you're just delegating work you don't have an intern, you have an undercompensated employee
  - bamboozled 2y ago
    I find this absolutely nothing like delegating to an intern personally. Interns usually do their best because they will be held accountable if they don't. Copilot doesn't give a shit about that.
    - jazzyjackson 2y ago
      thank you for mentioning this I don't know how to articulate it, but wherever I hear the financial analysts talking about how much work AI is going to do for us, I just have this spidey-sense that they're severely underestimating the social aspect of why anyone tries to achieve a good outcome they think they can just spend 100,000$ on GPUs and get 10x the output of someone buying a house and raising kids getting paid a 6 figure salary
elif 2y ago
Not to be rude but I have a hard time relating. Code is its own meaning, and to read it is to understand it. The only way you can use code you don't "understand" is to lack understanding of the language you are using.
- replyifuagree 2y ago
  In my almost 30 years in the industry I've run into plenty of people who claimed they knew what code did by reading it, but in practice every single one of them turned out to be only another human flummoxed by unexpected runtime behavior. Maybe you're the exception!
- dilawar 2y ago
  I never found my experience that simple. Even at times when I was paying attention which is always in short supply when you need it most. Libraries are biggest pain point. You don't know what a function really doing unless you have used it before yourself. Docs are not always helpful even when you read them. Lot of assumptions that may not be totally wrong but not right also. In c++, using [] on a map to access an element is really really dangerous if you haven't read the docs carefully and assumes that it does what you believe it should do.
  - vitus 2y ago
    > using [] on a map to access an element is really really dangerous if you haven't read the docs carefully and assumes that it does what you believe it should do It's not that bad, as it just inserts a default-constructed element if it's not present. What would you expect it to do, such that it returns a reference of the appropriate type (such that you can write `map[key] = value;`)? Throw an exception? That's what .at() is for. I totally agree that the C++ standard library is full of weird unintuitive behavior, and it's hard to know which methods will throw exceptions vs have side effects vs result in undefined behavior without reading documentation, but map::operator[] is fairly tame. Meanwhile, operator[] to access an element of a vector will result in a buffer overflow if not appropriately bounds-checked.
    - 2y ago
dietr1ch 2y ago
At work I already had teammates who would grant LGTM to code they barely read, but looked fine after reading the description and hopefully also skimming over the code. I feel that this path of least resistance/effort will also apply to things that an LLM spit as those are highly likely to look correct on the surface level.
protortyp 2y ago
I felt this on myself as well when I tried to use copilot. Especially when it was later in the day. I still use it for some boilerplate code / building visualizations that feels like boilerplate, but turned it off for any real important code. Atm I find most value in AI in discussing design decisions and to evaluate alternative approaches to mine. There it really had a huge positive impact on my workflow
willsmith72 2y ago
I disagree. I don't want to go into the docs to understand specific syntax or options of a library. Just let me write in natural language what I want and give me the result If I can't tell based on the code what it's supposed to do, then it's a shitty library or api.
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WalterSear 2y ago
> As others have mentioned, unless you have a strong conscience and really know what you're doing I don't have a strong conscience - I just don't trust it to do anything right.
AlexandrB 2y ago
> AI can only increase quantity, not quality. Just in time to make every software product eat up even more CPU and RAM to do simple things.

bamboozled 2y ago

It's a concern I have too, when I get tired, I start to just delegate to co-pilot suggestions as I get desperate, if I didn't have co-pilot, I'd probably just log off for the day. I actually don't really use copilot as I didn't find it that helpful, so I don't really have the problem anymore, but I could see it was a danger. Bit like driving when tired.

RogerL 2y ago
I look at is as asking an intern to do some work that I don't have time for. Do I have to check their work? Yes. Might I have to correct and guide the outcome? Again, yes. Am I going to ask them to implement something novel and groundbreaking? Not really, that'd be a disaster unless they are a prodigy. None of that removes my capacity, or any kind of danger.
- darkerside 2y ago
  It's funny, the slowness of the intern is probably a feature. You delegate, and you don't have to deal with it until you are refreshed. With AI, you delegate, and then you need to review in the next minute while you are still exhausted.
- jazzyjackson 2y ago
  if you don't have time to do work then you don't have time to mentor an intern doing that work if you're just delegating work you don't have an intern, you have an undercompensated employee
- bamboozled 2y ago
  I find this absolutely nothing like delegating to an intern personally. Interns usually do their best because they will be held accountable if they don't. Copilot doesn't give a shit about that.
  - jazzyjackson 2y ago
    thank you for mentioning this I don't know how to articulate it, but wherever I hear the financial analysts talking about how much work AI is going to do for us, I just have this spidey-sense that they're severely underestimating the social aspect of why anyone tries to achieve a good outcome they think they can just spend 100,000$ on GPUs and get 10x the output of someone buying a house and raising kids getting paid a 6 figure salary

elif 2y ago

Not to be rude but I have a hard time relating. Code is its own meaning, and to read it is to understand it. The only way you can use code you don't "understand" is to lack understanding of the language you are using.

replyifuagree 2y ago
In my almost 30 years in the industry I've run into plenty of people who claimed they knew what code did by reading it, but in practice every single one of them turned out to be only another human flummoxed by unexpected runtime behavior. Maybe you're the exception!
dilawar 2y ago
I never found my experience that simple. Even at times when I was paying attention which is always in short supply when you need it most. Libraries are biggest pain point. You don't know what a function really doing unless you have used it before yourself. Docs are not always helpful even when you read them. Lot of assumptions that may not be totally wrong but not right also. In c++, using [] on a map to access an element is really really dangerous if you haven't read the docs carefully and assumes that it does what you believe it should do.
- vitus 2y ago
  > using [] on a map to access an element is really really dangerous if you haven't read the docs carefully and assumes that it does what you believe it should do It's not that bad, as it just inserts a default-constructed element if it's not present. What would you expect it to do, such that it returns a reference of the appropriate type (such that you can write `map[key] = value;`)? Throw an exception? That's what .at() is for. I totally agree that the C++ standard library is full of weird unintuitive behavior, and it's hard to know which methods will throw exceptions vs have side effects vs result in undefined behavior without reading documentation, but map::operator[] is fairly tame. Meanwhile, operator[] to access an element of a vector will result in a buffer overflow if not appropriately bounds-checked.
  - 2y ago

dietr1ch 2y ago

At work I already had teammates who would grant LGTM to code they barely read, but looked fine after reading the description and hopefully also skimming over the code. I feel that this path of least resistance/effort will also apply to things that an LLM spit as those are highly likely to look correct on the surface level.

protortyp 2y ago

I felt this on myself as well when I tried to use copilot. Especially when it was later in the day. I still use it for some boilerplate code / building visualizations that feels like boilerplate, but turned it off for any real important code. Atm I find most value in AI in discussing design decisions and to evaluate alternative approaches to mine. There it really had a huge positive impact on my workflow

willsmith72 2y ago

I disagree. I don't want to go into the docs to understand specific syntax or options of a library. Just let me write in natural language what I want and give me the result If I can't tell based on the code what it's supposed to do, then it's a shitty library or api.

deleted 2y ago

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WalterSear 2y ago

> As others have mentioned, unless you have a strong conscience and really know what you're doing I don't have a strong conscience - I just don't trust it to do anything right.

AlexandrB 2y ago

> AI can only increase quantity, not quality. Just in time to make every software product eat up even more CPU and RAM to do simple things.