The same logic can explain why Teslas crash so often. You turn on all the assists, and eventually forget how to change gears.
Try programming for a day without syntax highlighting or auto-completion, and experience how pathetic you feel without them. If you’re like me, you’ll discover that those “assistants” have sapped much of your knowledge by eliminating the need to memorize even embarrassingly simple tasks.
That’s…how the world works. We move on. We aren’t programming computers by flipping toggle switches or moving patch cables around anymore either.
I’ve never had AI create working code anyway.
But it will generally point me in the right direction. It’s useful for:
- Helping get your train of thought back in the right direction
- Automating what would be a lot of boilerplate/repetitive coding. Just beware you will still need to check it over.
You need to be skilled to spot the mistakes it will definitely make.
You mean I can go from being a terrible programmer to merely a bad one?
Our computer science professor in some programming course at university told us we were not supposed to take advice from the internet or answers from Stack Overflow for half a year… Until we learned the ropes. And could asses for ourselves what’s right and what is wrong. (And I believe that was some C/C++ course where you get lots of opportunuties to do silly things that might somehow work but for all of the wrong reasons.)
I think he was right. There is lots of misinformation out there that isn’t a proper design pattern. And with copy-pasting stuff, you don’t necessarily learn anything. Whereas learning with some method is efficient and works.
And I’m pretty sure I’m not super intelligent, but all of that isn’t really hard. I mean if someone codes regularly, they might as well learn how to do it properly. It takes a bit of time initially… But you get that time back later on. Though… I’d let AI write some boilerplate code. Or design a website if I’m not interested at all how the HTML and CSS works… I think that’s alright to do.
The real learning comes from debugging the garbage code you copied from stack overflow
Debugging and being able to interpret documentation when it exists.
But good lord, the amount of programmers I work with that never use an IDE debugger is unreal. I get that you don’t have to, but Jesus Christ, if yout not getting an expected result, it’s way fucking faster to step through the code and see where the data changes then to slap logging into every line and attempt to read the output.
I mean it also contains great stuff. Niche workarounds, ways to do something more efficiently than some standard library function does.
You just need a means of telling apart the good and the bad. Because there’s also people smashing their forehead on the keyboard until it happens to be something that compiles. And people repeating urban legends and outdated info. You somehow need background knowledge to tell which is which. AI didn’t invent phrasing some nonesense with full conviction. It is very good at doing exactly that, but we humans also have been doing that since the beginning of time.
Agree on the application side, but when it comes to the test suite, I’m definitely gonna consider letting an AI get that file started and then I’ll run through, make sure the assertions are all what I would expect and refactor anything that needs it.
I’ve written countless tests in my career and I’m still gonna write countless more, but I’m glad I can at least spend less time on laborious repetition now and more time on the part of the job I actually enjoy which is actually solving problems.
Things like unit tests I just have AI do it all now. Since running the test tells you your coverage you can verify if it got everything or not.
Not a coder. I can understand most python code and powershell scripts that others have done, but I don’t remember syntax, if I need to make something from scratch. Doing that involves ton of googling and reading awful documentation that still leaves some things out. I do this maybe twice a year.
For someone like me AI coding is a god sent.
doing that involves a ton of googling and reading awful documentation
Yes. That is programming.
To most of us, the syntax is the easy part to remember, and our IDEs take care of most of it. Being able to bang our heads through the documentation and experiment with libraries is pretty much what our jobs are.
AI coding is basically a shortcut to some of the stuff we have to repeat with slight changes in our software. It’s also useful for setting up more complex code that we know we’ll have to tweak.
Expecting it to produce something with the desired results is a recipe for disaster. It’s basically a cheaper outsourcing method that can’t actually compile and run it’s code before giving it to you.
If you’re someone who has no actual interest in learning to code, and instead see AI as more of a freelancer—telling it stuff like “make a kart racer game,” and “that sucks, make it better”—then none of this really applies to you.
Well I’m already a bad programmer, at least I save time /j
Just because you are “bad programmer” does not mean you are a bad programmer.
we should use 0, 1 and 2 instead of binary just to represent truer statements like this one
came here to post this
I’d rather be a bad programmer that gets stuff done than a good programmer who’s just jerking off about proper design
t. good programmer
Proper design will save an epic shit ton of money when it inevitably needs to be changed or fixed.
