Interesting downvotes, especially how there are more than there are upvotes.
Do people think "junior" and "senior" here just relate to age and/or time in the workplace? Someone could work in software dev for 20 years and still be a junior dev. It's knowledge and skill level based, not just time-in-industry based.
They're tools that can help a junior engineer and a senior engineer with their job.
Given a database, AI can probably write a data access layer in whatever language you want quicker than a junior developer could.
They're also bad at that though, because if you don't know that stuff then you don't know if what it's telling you is right or wrong.
The reason it goes down a “really bad path” is that it’s basically glorified autocomplete. It doesn’t know anything.
Not quite true - GitHub Copilot in VS for example can be given access to your entire repo/project/etc and it then "knows" how things tie together and work together, so it can get more context for its suggestions and created code.
I've found it to be great at writing unit tests too.
I use github copilot in VS and it's fantastic. It just throws up suggestions for code completions and entire functions etc, and is easily ignored if you just want to do it yourself, but in my experience it's very good.
Like you said, using it to get the meat and bones of an application from scratch is fantastic. I've used it to make some awesome little command line programs for some of my less technical co-workers to use for frequent tasks, and then even got it to make a nice GUI over the top of it. Takes like 10% of the time it would have taken me to do it - you just need to know how to use it, like with any other tool.
Sounds like you just need to find a better way to use AI in your workflows.
Github Copilot in Visual Studio for example is fantastic and offers suggestions including entire functions that often do exactly what you wanted it to do, because it has the context of all of your code (if you give it that, of course).
"Using something that you're not experienced with and haven't yet worked out how to best integrate into your workflow slows some people down"
Wow, what an insight! More at 8!
As I said on this article when it was posted to another instance:
AI is a tool to use. Like with all tools, there are right ways and wrong ways and inefficient ways and all other ways to use them. You can’t say that they slow people down as a whole just because some people get slowed down.
Just like Stack Overflow then haha. It's usually either
"I copied this persons code exactly, why doesn't it work in my completely different codebase?"
or
"I copied this persons code exactly and it works in mine! I don't want to touch it in case I break it cause I don't get it"
haha
If you already know what you’re doing, AI generating code is redundant.
Nah, it can be really useful for people who do know what they're doing as it can be used to generate the "charlie work" (IASIP reference if you don't know) things like unit tests and documentation and things like that pretty damn well.
Sorry but a study of 16 developers isn't a big enough sample to get any meaningful data, especially given the massive range of skills and levels of development.
I'm a developer and I use AI - not much, but when I think it can help based on the suggestions that it gives me since it's integrated into visual studio. It doesn't slow me down, it speeds me up. It could slow you down if you rely on it to do everything, but in that case you're just a bad or lazy developer.
AI is a tool to use. Like with all tools, there are right ways and wrong ways and inefficient ways and all other ways to use them. You can't say that they slow people down as a whole just because they slow some people down.
You got them all in uncompressed 8K or something!? How on earth does it take up that much space?
Adding context is “knowing more” for a computer program.
Maybe it’s different in VS code vs regular VS, because I never get issues like what you’re describing in VS. Haven’t really used it in VS Code.