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ChatGPT came out in late 2022 so it has been almost 2 years since the "AI is going to change everything" wave started. Looking at myself and my coworkers I don'

ChatGPT came out in late 2022 so it has been almost 2 years since the "AI is going to change everything" wave started. Looking at myself and my coworkers I don't feel there has been an uptick in developer output in that time. We all have copilot licenses as well, I don't use mine but pair with people who do and it seems cool but not for much more beyond advanced autofill. My big concern with all this stuff is it is pushing devs away from the uncomfortable part of coding. When you approach a new area of a codebase you just have to sit in discomfort and step through the code and experiment with it until your brain gains context. Sure you can tweak something on the surface to fix a bug, but to really gain full understanding of it can take days or even weeks. Patience is one of a developers most important tools, whether its spending 30m uninterruptedly working to achieve "flow" state, or slowly stepping through a complex piece of code to see why it is failing. I worry AI is going to instill a rapid reward system that makes future devs goal just to rush to make it work. They won't have much interest in really gaining mastery over what they work on.

dasil003 2y ago
This resonates with me, but also I don’t want to presume too much about the value of the old ways of doing things. AI tools are going to drastically lower the bar of entry to programming, so it will be flooded with dilettantes, but people who can think will still apply their thinking in creative ways. It will be really interesting what happens as AI tools mature and a generation of AI-native developers figures out how to maximize them.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- skydhash 2y ago
  Maybe an unpopular opinion, but I believe that the bar of entry to programming has always been low. On Windows, some environment are just an exe away. And web dev can be done with Notepad. And there are many introductions books and video tutorials. What is hard for most people is formalism and detailing your idea as a sequence of steps, aka the programming mindset. Writing code was always easy (Before AI, we had copy-paste from the internet). But whether you're writing assembly or python, you still need the programming mindset and that's the first step. Then you need to learn software engineering (code hygiene, requirement gathering, tasks planning,...)
rerdavies 2y ago
I haven't tried copilot yet. I have tried Claude 3.5, which is unexpectedly brilliant. I use it very regularly. But almost entirely useful for writing new code, not fixing old code. I take your point with respect to understanding large existing codebases. AIs don't yet seem to deal well with strategic large-context thinking. But things are changing at such a furious pace, so that may change sometime much sooner than either of us expect. But you are right. At the present moment in time, AIs are not particularly good at that. But overall, I am much more optimistic than you are. I think AIs will save us time, so that we can spend more time on issues of overall structure that make "spending months to understand a codebase" a thing of the very distant past. I have certainly worked on codebases that require "months to understand". But I would (perhaps naively) like to think that's a symptom of a disease that codebases shouldn't have, and that modern codebases usually don't have anymore (but sometimes do).
- phonkytown 2y ago
  Co-Pilot is, surprisingly, a great competitor [in certain situations]. Imo
- rerdavies 2y ago
  Update: I did my first "find the bug" today. I fed it a thousand lines of code, described my bug, and asked Claude to fix it. It did. (putting a dropdown menu inside a button means that clicks in the menu are propagated to the button too. click on the menu item, the menu closes, but then the button gets the event as it propagates (because the menu is structurally inside the button, and re-opens the menu again. Hence why my menu wouldn't close). Wow.
- QuantumGood 2y ago
  Anecdata: Claude 3.5 sometimes nails on the first try something that I can't GPT4 (any version) to ever complete without errors. Most recently, an AHK 2.0 script concatenating some strings.

dasil003 2y ago

This resonates with me, but also I don’t want to presume too much about the value of the old ways of doing things. AI tools are going to drastically lower the bar of entry to programming, so it will be flooded with dilettantes, but people who can think will still apply their thinking in creative ways. It will be really interesting what happens as AI tools mature and a generation of AI-native developers figures out how to maximize them.

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
skydhash 2y ago
Maybe an unpopular opinion, but I believe that the bar of entry to programming has always been low. On Windows, some environment are just an exe away. And web dev can be done with Notepad. And there are many introductions books and video tutorials. What is hard for most people is formalism and detailing your idea as a sequence of steps, aka the programming mindset. Writing code was always easy (Before AI, we had copy-paste from the internet). But whether you're writing assembly or python, you still need the programming mindset and that's the first step. Then you need to learn software engineering (code hygiene, requirement gathering, tasks planning,...)

rerdavies 2y ago

I haven't tried copilot yet. I have tried Claude 3.5, which is unexpectedly brilliant. I use it very regularly. But almost entirely useful for writing new code, not fixing old code. I take your point with respect to understanding large existing codebases. AIs don't yet seem to deal well with strategic large-context thinking. But things are changing at such a furious pace, so that may change sometime much sooner than either of us expect. But you are right. At the present moment in time, AIs are not particularly good at that. But overall, I am much more optimistic than you are. I think AIs will save us time, so that we can spend more time on issues of overall structure that make "spending months to understand a codebase" a thing of the very distant past. I have certainly worked on codebases that require "months to understand". But I would (perhaps naively) like to think that's a symptom of a disease that codebases shouldn't have, and that modern codebases usually don't have anymore (but sometimes do).

phonkytown 2y ago
Co-Pilot is, surprisingly, a great competitor [in certain situations]. Imo
rerdavies 2y ago
Update: I did my first "find the bug" today. I fed it a thousand lines of code, described my bug, and asked Claude to fix it. It did. (putting a dropdown menu inside a button means that clicks in the menu are propagated to the button too. click on the menu item, the menu closes, but then the button gets the event as it propagates (because the menu is structurally inside the button, and re-opens the menu again. Hence why my menu wouldn't close). Wow.
QuantumGood 2y ago
Anecdata: Claude 3.5 sometimes nails on the first try something that I can't GPT4 (any version) to ever complete without errors. Most recently, an AHK 2.0 script concatenating some strings.