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> What I don’t get it is how you can be a programmer in the year twenty twenty-four and not be the tiniest bit curious about a technology that’s said to be fund
by bccdee 2y ago
> What I don’t get it is how you can be a programmer in the year twenty twenty-four and not be the tiniest bit curious about a technology that’s said to be fundamentally changing how we’ll program in the future.
I'll grant you, it's entirely possible that the value proposition of LLM code assistants will eventually get good enough that I'll eat my words and adopt one. But for the moment, what I've seen doesn't really impress me: When you ask a code assistant for a big chunk of complicated code, it messes it up, and you have to play code reviewer. When you ask it to finish your line, you're paying a subscription fee so your text editor can make an API call to deliver marginally improved autocomplete. How much time does that really save me?
But people won't shut up about AI. And of course they won't—they're trying to sell something. Being able to advertise that you use AI is the main reason anyone's using it. Even if the functionality isn't that great yet, aren't you curious anyway? They're saying it'll change everything! It's marketing. I'm the opposite of curious—I'm irritated. I'm tired of people trying to sell me the "next big thing." I'll buy if and when the actual existing product genuinely appeals to me, and I'm not waiting for that to happen with baited breath.
I don't think I'm wrong to be unimpressed by the current capabilities of AI code assistants, but it's undeniably true that I've become negatively polarized against them by tech hype culture.
- ripley12 2y ago> what I've seen doesn't really impress me I suspect that most people who express this view haven't tried cutting-edge LLMs and tools recently. I've met a lot of people who tried early versions of ChatGPT and Copilot a year or 2 ago, concluded that the tools aren't impressive or useful, and haven't revisited things since. It's wild what Sonnet 3.5 can do with a tool like Aider; if you have a commit-sized piece of work in mind there's a very good chance it will get it right on the first try.