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I feel like it's similar to corporate reliance on disposable products. If you need to get something out the door and never look at it again, who cares if you know how it works or how well optimized it is.

I can barely get “AI” same-line code complete to give me anything useful. I feel like anything I gained in getting an answer faster would be lost with interest making sure line by line that what it gave me didn’t have any subtle defects or unintended consequences.

not crazy at all. i think a lot of the current discourse around it is cope and i wonder if these engineers are scrutinizing the code or just allowing the churn machine to churn. we have github copilot at work and i dont blindly let it do things because its usually wrong

Well, if it’s crazy to not use AI for programming assistance, you won’t be alone in the psych ward; I’ll be in the next padded room down the hall. On top of all the known AI usage problems, I’ve seen enough from others’ AI results in my slice of tech (database) to know it’s just not worth it.

So far I'm not too worried about AI replacing me. I view programming as a field that is (somewhat) creative, so there's always an element that AI can't do. Also from what I hear, it just isn't doing that good a job yet.

Same.

I'm dealing with that in my own job. But there is a huge difference between humans exchanging ideas to learn from each other and a corp scrapping all that info and shoving it into a blank box that gives you a correct answer sometimes, maybe. It's a moral victory, at least.

They're gonna freak in a few years when these products go bust and become either extortionately paywalled or just vanish meanwhile they've lost a lot of skills from using those shortcuts. I predict you'll be better off never having used them.

No, you're not. There's a serious rot in the industry. My experience is that for anything beyond trivial tasks it produces code with both obvious and subtle bugs. Anyone using it is doing themselves a huge disservice. Software engineers shouldn't be blindly copying code from StackOverflow either!

another representative example there's a lot of industry enthusiasm (especially among management) for using this stuff, but the results aren't exactly impressive, and it doesn't look enjoyable to work with besides, I tend to work on niche stuff where Stackoverflow regurgitation is of little help

No, I don't think so. We get Copilot for free at my workplace, so I tried it and I often found myself double-check the code it generated, so I stopped using it. My negative opinion was reinforced when AI-Code from another dev ruined a release. But my colleagues still swear by it.

I know three people who use it quite extensively for work, as well as for casual communication. I can tell when I get a email or text that is AI written, and its bad. Which makes me wonder if they are sending that, do they not see its bad? Is there code similarly bad and they don't see?

you arent crazy. Those same devs are going to be miserable in 2 years when all of a sudden their skills have atrophied and every AI tool jacks up the price 1000x because they are losing so much money.

oh big mood it's also just not how i learn things? i hate not knowing why a thing works and i just don't get being satisfied with that