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> If you can't be bothered to deal with the easiest part of your job, writing some code, how do you expect to be trusted with the hard stuff? If writing code i

> If you can't be bothered to deal with the easiest part of your job, writing some code, how do you expect to be trusted with the hard stuff? If writing code is the easiest and least impactful thing you do as a software engineer, why does it matter if you use AI to assist with that part? Or to come at it from another angle, why is using Stack Overflow/Google in the hunt for answers and examples good, but using AI models is not good?

jpollock 2y ago
There is a lot of knowledge that devs gain by seeing how their code evolves over time. Things like "This encourages people to add features here, here and here". Without that experience, the code becomes inscrutable very quickly.
alpha_squared 2y ago
> If writing code is the easiest and least impactful thing you do as a software engineer... Not sure if I've hit a nerve, but I never said it was the least impactful. Code is the distillation of all the work that precedes it to accomplish a task. It's the easiest part, but it's essential to the final solution in most circumstances.
hattmall 2y ago
I wouldn't say using AI to write code is bad at all. The problem is that it usually doesn't work in complex situations. If you already know what you want to do, feed it very specific instructions covering most of the bases then it can save you some time for sure. The main thing is you really actually need to know what it's doing to be able to reasonably utilize the output. If you don't actually know the capabilities of the code and you are stringing together generated output then that's bad. Just like it would be bad to copy large sections of code from stackoverflow. It's also probably not going to work.
kolinko 2y ago
LLMs, when used by an inexperienced developer will produce code that has a ton of fluff and is difficult to read/change. The worry is also that if devs don’t learn to write simple code, they will plateau very fast because they will not be able to continue beyond what llms provide - this was also an issue with StackOverflow, but to a lesser degree. Having said that, I’m absolutely pro using LLMs - it’s just a matter of using them properly for either education, or code writing. For experienced devs they save a ton of work writing boilerplate code and learning new libraries, for inexperienced they help overcome initial hurdles with grammar - and can teach how things work, if junior asks. As a dev with >20yrs experience - vanilla ChatGPT produces code that has 80% too much verbosity, but with good prompts uou can cut down on that, and if you refactor what it wrote it is very useful - especially when dealing with unusual feameworks/languages. It’s also great at explaining concepts and “proper ways” to write code in new languages. It is very poor at designing novel architectures though.

jpollock 2y ago

There is a lot of knowledge that devs gain by seeing how their code evolves over time. Things like "This encourages people to add features here, here and here". Without that experience, the code becomes inscrutable very quickly.

alpha_squared 2y ago

> If writing code is the easiest and least impactful thing you do as a software engineer... Not sure if I've hit a nerve, but I never said it was the least impactful. Code is the distillation of all the work that precedes it to accomplish a task. It's the easiest part, but it's essential to the final solution in most circumstances.

hattmall 2y ago

I wouldn't say using AI to write code is bad at all. The problem is that it usually doesn't work in complex situations. If you already know what you want to do, feed it very specific instructions covering most of the bases then it can save you some time for sure. The main thing is you really actually need to know what it's doing to be able to reasonably utilize the output. If you don't actually know the capabilities of the code and you are stringing together generated output then that's bad. Just like it would be bad to copy large sections of code from stackoverflow. It's also probably not going to work.

kolinko 2y ago

LLMs, when used by an inexperienced developer will produce code that has a ton of fluff and is difficult to read/change. The worry is also that if devs don’t learn to write simple code, they will plateau very fast because they will not be able to continue beyond what llms provide - this was also an issue with StackOverflow, but to a lesser degree. Having said that, I’m absolutely pro using LLMs - it’s just a matter of using them properly for either education, or code writing. For experienced devs they save a ton of work writing boilerplate code and learning new libraries, for inexperienced they help overcome initial hurdles with grammar - and can teach how things work, if junior asks. As a dev with >20yrs experience - vanilla ChatGPT produces code that has 80% too much verbosity, but with good prompts uou can cut down on that, and if you refactor what it wrote it is very useful - especially when dealing with unusual feameworks/languages. It’s also great at explaining concepts and “proper ways” to write code in new languages. It is very poor at designing novel architectures though.