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Simple, really. It's not actually helping people to code better: https://greaterdanorequalto.com/ai-code-generation-as-an-agent-of-tech-debt-creation/ https://

Simple, really. It's not actually helping people to code better: https://greaterdanorequalto.com/ai-code-generation-as-an-agent-of-tech-debt-creation/ https://greaterdanorequalto.com/ai-code-generation-as-an-age...

ActionHank 2y ago
Last junior dev I spoke to, taught themselves React, spent months building a very polished portfolio, got hired to work with a new "language" they hadn't heard of called "Angular". This dev was taking up the job because it paid well, they otherwise had a disdain for tech. If these are the people who are coming into the industry, LLMs will not help them. There is no desire to learn or understand or dig even remotely beneath the surface.
- hjkl0 2y ago
  They’ll have to learn Angular for their new job, so “no desire to learn” seems harsh and unfair
- sevensor 2y ago
  Ever since FORTRAN came on the scene, there have been tools that make disdainful, unskilled programmers more productive. I doubt this will ever change. It’s in the interest of mainstream employers to treat programmers as a fungible resource. There’s a much smaller risk to your business when you hire ten and get one or two good ones in the lot, than if you hire one good one and pay them triple. Things average out, and you’re not beholden to a few people who know their worth. As long as the pay is good enough to keep a couple of competent people around, you can rely on them to cover for the rest. Best of all, you never have to figure out which is which.
  - marcosdumay 2y ago
    You mean COBOL? FORTRAN wasn't really about lowest common competence. Anyway, about this: > It’s in the interest of mainstream employers to treat programmers as a fungible resource. It's in their interest to make programmers fungible. It's self-delusional to think they succeeded.
    - sevensor 2y ago
      No, I do mean FORTRAN. Massively lowered the bar. Not that COBOL didn’t, but it was in a different domain and slightly later as I understand it. Have you ever worked with properly old FORTRAN? Some of it is quite good, but some of it, well, it’s regrettable it was ever transferred off of paper tape.
- Jcampuzano2 2y ago
  As someone who enjoys tech, I don't really fault or look down on people who get into tech for the pay like some in our field seem to do. In basically every other field on the planet that is high paying, people go into it for the money, not for some passion - so whats different about ours? I don't really mind whether you have some innate desire to learn something, or if you're doing because its your job and your job pays you. As long as in the end you suck it up and do it.
  - JohnFen 2y ago
    I don't know that there's anything different about ours, but that's a shame. The difference (broad-brushing here) between someone who is a dev because that's their passion and someone who is a dev for the pay is the quality of their work. As our industry matured and gathered more "in it for the money" types, the overall product quality has been declining. I think that's a shame. Perhaps inevitable, but a shame nonetheless.
kredd 2y ago
It, undeniably, makes prototyping incredibly fast. I’ve been forcing myself to use Cursor for the past month, and could create a fairly functional web app, given my skills aren’t front end dev. Very sweet for one off deterministic python scripts, figuring out the UI bugs, filling up boilerplate code and especially handy with languages/frameworks you’re not that familiar with. Sure, we’re not at the “hook it up to prod codebase and ask it to make features from scratch” phase, but we didn’t have this 2 years ago either. But writing it off as completely useless? Nah. I’m more of a process oriented person, who more or less cares about code quality. And as of now, it kinda sucks for it. However if your main goal is just the result, it’s delivering good stuff.
- DanHulton 2y ago
  I mean, I didn't say it was completely useless, just that it's not making code any better. There's definitely use cases for it. Rapid, throw-away prototyping may end up being one of them. (Though I am skeptical about that, given how often the prototype ends up being the finished product, but that's neither here nor there.) If your main goal is the _short-term_ result, sure, it's delivering. In the longer term though, I still believe it to be dangerous.
- skydhash 2y ago
  If your github-fu was good, you could get the same result with copy-pasting. But then you would need to worry about licenses. It's very convenient that Copilot and the like don't disclose the licenses of their training data.
  - kredd 2y ago
    I'm curious, have you tried to use it on a week-long project? It's really not just copy pasting through GH, once you figure out the workflow. I consider myself an okayishly experienced dev (10+ years, if it even matters), and for things I've never touched (in my case, mobile/front end development), it's incredible how it sped me up.

ActionHank 2y ago

Last junior dev I spoke to, taught themselves React, spent months building a very polished portfolio, got hired to work with a new "language" they hadn't heard of called "Angular". This dev was taking up the job because it paid well, they otherwise had a disdain for tech. If these are the people who are coming into the industry, LLMs will not help them. There is no desire to learn or understand or dig even remotely beneath the surface.

hjkl0 2y ago
They’ll have to learn Angular for their new job, so “no desire to learn” seems harsh and unfair
sevensor 2y ago
Ever since FORTRAN came on the scene, there have been tools that make disdainful, unskilled programmers more productive. I doubt this will ever change. It’s in the interest of mainstream employers to treat programmers as a fungible resource. There’s a much smaller risk to your business when you hire ten and get one or two good ones in the lot, than if you hire one good one and pay them triple. Things average out, and you’re not beholden to a few people who know their worth. As long as the pay is good enough to keep a couple of competent people around, you can rely on them to cover for the rest. Best of all, you never have to figure out which is which.
- marcosdumay 2y ago
  You mean COBOL? FORTRAN wasn't really about lowest common competence. Anyway, about this: > It’s in the interest of mainstream employers to treat programmers as a fungible resource. It's in their interest to make programmers fungible. It's self-delusional to think they succeeded.
  - sevensor 2y ago
    No, I do mean FORTRAN. Massively lowered the bar. Not that COBOL didn’t, but it was in a different domain and slightly later as I understand it. Have you ever worked with properly old FORTRAN? Some of it is quite good, but some of it, well, it’s regrettable it was ever transferred off of paper tape.
Jcampuzano2 2y ago
As someone who enjoys tech, I don't really fault or look down on people who get into tech for the pay like some in our field seem to do. In basically every other field on the planet that is high paying, people go into it for the money, not for some passion - so whats different about ours? I don't really mind whether you have some innate desire to learn something, or if you're doing because its your job and your job pays you. As long as in the end you suck it up and do it.
- JohnFen 2y ago
  I don't know that there's anything different about ours, but that's a shame. The difference (broad-brushing here) between someone who is a dev because that's their passion and someone who is a dev for the pay is the quality of their work. As our industry matured and gathered more "in it for the money" types, the overall product quality has been declining. I think that's a shame. Perhaps inevitable, but a shame nonetheless.

kredd 2y ago

It, undeniably, makes prototyping incredibly fast. I’ve been forcing myself to use Cursor for the past month, and could create a fairly functional web app, given my skills aren’t front end dev. Very sweet for one off deterministic python scripts, figuring out the UI bugs, filling up boilerplate code and especially handy with languages/frameworks you’re not that familiar with. Sure, we’re not at the “hook it up to prod codebase and ask it to make features from scratch” phase, but we didn’t have this 2 years ago either. But writing it off as completely useless? Nah. I’m more of a process oriented person, who more or less cares about code quality. And as of now, it kinda sucks for it. However if your main goal is just the result, it’s delivering good stuff.

DanHulton 2y ago
I mean, I didn't say it was completely useless, just that it's not making code any better. There's definitely use cases for it. Rapid, throw-away prototyping may end up being one of them. (Though I am skeptical about that, given how often the prototype ends up being the finished product, but that's neither here nor there.) If your main goal is the _short-term_ result, sure, it's delivering. In the longer term though, I still believe it to be dangerous.
skydhash 2y ago
If your github-fu was good, you could get the same result with copy-pasting. But then you would need to worry about licenses. It's very convenient that Copilot and the like don't disclose the licenses of their training data.
- kredd 2y ago
  I'm curious, have you tried to use it on a week-long project? It's really not just copy pasting through GH, once you figure out the workflow. I consider myself an okayishly experienced dev (10+ years, if it even matters), and for things I've never touched (in my case, mobile/front end development), it's incredible how it sped me up.