this post was submitted on 20 Jun 2024
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This. Many of these tools are good at incredibly basic boilerplate that's just a hint outside of say a wizard. But to hear some of these AI grifters talk, this stuff is going to render programmers obsolete.
There's a reality to these tools. That reality is they're helpful at times, but they are hardly transformative at the levels the grifters go on about.
Copilot / LLM code completion feels like having a somewhat intelligent helper who can think faster than I can, however they have no understanding of how to actually code, but are good at mimicry.
So it's helpful for saving time typing some stuff, and sometimes the absolutely weird suggestions make me think of other scenarios I should consider, but it's not going to do the job itself.
Legitimately, this is the only use I found for it. If I need something extremely simple, and feeling too lazy to type it all out, it'll do the bulk of it, and then I just go through and edit out all little mistakes.
And what gets me is that anytime I read all of the AI wank about how people are using these things, it kind of just feels like they're leaving out the part where they have to edit the output too.
At the end of the day, we've had this technology for a while, it's just been in the form of predictive suggestions on a keyboard app or code editor. You still had to steer in the right direction. Now it's just smart enough to make it from start to finish without going off a cliff, but you still have to go back and fix it, the same way you had to steer it before.
I know engineers who make over double what I make solely because of that skill.