Submitted by Sorin61 t3_zrd125 in technology
What could possibly go wrong learning to program from a cesspool of bad practices with no theory or understanding behind it? Then while YOU are learning you let this be the thing that helps you with no explanation of why this is the correct code to use? Sort of the blind leading the blind.
Just like any other code completion tool, you have to understand what it's suggesting and evaluate it before accepting with the tab key.
I've only used whatever is built into VS 2022 (and sometimes Resharper), but it often suggests exactly what I was going to type anyway, especially if I'm making the same change in many different places. I don't use it for ideas, I just use it to save typing. But I already have a deep knowledge of the language, libraries, etc.
By own experience I must agree. They are great at producing very simple code or boilerplate stuff you may want to use as a starting point, but an inexperienced developer might miss a lot of the wrong stuff and introduce a myriad of issues. As a way of example it took me 15 iterations to get ChatGTP to implement a relatively simple batch at which point I’d would have rather written it myself from scratch.
Eventually, we’ll have tools where you just give the machine the exact specifications of what you want it to do and it’ll just hand you the output.
Care to elaborate? I've messed around with ChatGPT and it only had a success rate of about 50% on basic pieces of code I got it to write for my area of expertise.
It would either references function that didn't exist (how it managed that I have no idea), or output values fine... but I would find that it performed the calculations wrong. And if the concept was too novel, it was straight up wrong no matter how many times I repeated myself.
.. so how programmers work today?/s
People that don't need help are better coders than people who do?
Developers are definitely on the chopping block, way too expensive, way too scarce, job is logic based and tons of time is still wasted on small mistakes and plumbing and unclogging tasks.
The only AI that would be amazing is one that would automatically suggest accurate ways to remedy a bug. No, Im not suggesting it tell me to add a null check that it failed on. Go through the code and figure out how a scenario that should never have been null in the first place, due to the business cases, ended up null. Look at my databases, services, etc. Honesty, it wouldnt be able to without knowing the business logic, so Im confident that AI won't be replacing me in my lifetime. The AI would have to attend every meeting to determine exactly the customer wants. Could you imagine how upset the customer would be after telling a AI what they think they want, compared to what the AI produces. This is a real life problem that happens with people everyday.
I understand why they built their own editor and code completion tool based on Codex, since they wanted to be able to collect detailed data about the editing sessions, but I think doing so raises serious questions about the applicability of their results. They’re ignoring all of the UX design of a real code assistant and focusing only on the underlying model.
For example, including temperature control in the UI is just stacking the cards against the AI group. No sanely designed AI assistant would draw attention to that parameter, and there’s not much reason for it to be user configurable at all. It would be like if you were testing how well drivers performed in cars with the radio on, and you put a big dial in front of the radio group for controlling antenna position. You’re just encouraging them to waste effort on something they don’t know how to adjust properly.
Figuring out "exact specifications" is precisely why programming is tricky...
Developers' key value is their mindset for analyzing problems, and their ability to identify vagueness, contradiction, and mistakes in the given task, go back to the client, and talk through the edge cases and issues. AI might replace code monkeys who never even attempted to improve themselves, but as with every no-/low-code solution, management will quickly find that a) it's harder than it looks, as they don't have the mindset to clearly communicate the task in language the tool understands (this includes using domain-specific business jargon that the AI won't have trained on, or references to concepts prevalent in that specific company's internal email discussions), and b) a dedicated programmer has a time-efficiency bonus that makes it cheaper for them to do the work than a manager, so might as well delegate to the specialist anyway and free up time for managing other aspects of the business.
Thing is, developers are constantly creating new languages and libraries in an attempt to more concisely write their intentions in a way the computer can understand. Dropping back to human grammar loses a ton of specificity, and introduces a new sort of linguistic boilerplate.
This is just a question of time
And another click bait title to farm on the current AI buzz.
If you care to look at the study itself, first, N=47, which is not that much.
Second, they had two assignments involving encrypting and decrypting, as well as SQL.
So all that they found out is that AI is not very secure at doing encryption stuff (who could have known) and does not property check for SQL injection bugs.
Also, in the assignment given to the users, i don’t see anything like “make sure it’s safe against Injection”.
Overall, interesting study but bad title.
> especially if I'm making the same change in many different places
Have you considered that that might be a code smell?
Exactly. I'm worried about programmers using chatGPT because I've seen it produce extremely insecure code.
But here on Reddit I've already seen people say "yeah I copy paste from it so I have more time to slack off!"
I use GitHub Copilot constantly.
Producing code that is 30% worse but takes 85% less time to produce is worth it to me.
It also helps you solve bugs faster.. sometimes I legit just write a comment saying "The reason this returns 'Xyz' instead of 'Abc' is because..." and then it finishes it or "The way to make it do XYZ is:".
Oh and don't get me started on tests... for projects where I'm not forced to write tests, but would still significantly benefit from them they are a big game-changer.
They take a tiny fraction of the time, which means that I just bang them out instead of putting them off, and then can catch a ton of bugs before they arise.
Bugs are unavoidable, everyone has a backlog of bugs you burn through, usually people allocate X% of your time to new stuff and X% of your time to fixing broken stuff.
The net value-add of Copilot even after bugs etc. is enormous
And that's only today.... I remember playing with GPT 3 and similar models 2-3 years ago before they could code and they blew my mind at the time...
Seeing where Copilot is today (being able to solve virtually every algorithm problem I throw at it) is bananas... in 18 months this study will be meaningless.
At this point it's like self-driving cars -- they make mistakes every 10 miles or whatever, but humans also make similar mistakes every XXXX miles, so now it's just about closing the gap.
Sometimes code is gonna smell.
... okay a virtual stack tool would be neat. Like don't make me run the code to try to reproduce it, start building the state backwards and let me start to see what it would take to get there.
That sounds less like AI though and more like a comprehensive carefully built tool.
It does that too. It also generates thorough tests. It's truly revolutionary and will take over the industry, the gains are just way too high. You just have to be able to review and correct what it outputs, like a senior dev reviewing a PR.
That's what it does right now, I strongly encourage people try it out. I spent a few hours last night getting it to write increasingly complex web views and it was unbelievable.
You're talking about maybe 1% of developers here
It's been astounding to me, it's like the mid level dev I can order around I've never had. I will probably never go back to writing all the code myself.
I think the number of developers doing less automatable tasks is probably much greater than 1%, but yeah, the other comment seems to ignore that the human element they describe is applicable to many industries and professions. It isn't elimination but "reduction in force" of "bloat" that I am talking about
> But here on Reddit I've already seen people say "yeah I copy paste from it so I have more time to slack off!"
It's almost like reddit is a bag of items where half the time you get shit and the other half of the time you get gold. /s
Some people are completely beholden to DRY principals that that go into a fury when they hear code was repeated even if they have 0 context around it
Yeah it's amazing... being able to guide the process but not having to keep every little thing straight is excellent.
Programming literally feels like a different activity, like I'm kind of riding a higher-level wave of development.
Nah, I repeat code sometimes too. Still sets off alarm bells in my head tho
Except it doesn't even think, but produce a simulacrum of thinking that is designed to fool our heuristics without making the necessary deeper connections.
Jokes on you, my code is already terrible.
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Instead of terrible developers randomly copying code from StackOverflow with no idea of how it works, they are now copying from ChatGPT, which probably has millions of StackOverflow answers embedded in its training data.
The more things change...
Non lazy programmers are better than lazy programmer's is probably a better description.
Or plain wrong code. A friend if mine needed to check whether .NET 6 was installed via Wix Toolset. His co-worker suggested using ChatHPT. And it just took some code that detects .NET 5 and changes the 5s to 6s. Or course it would never work.
Which language are you using? I'm been trying to use it with C++ and I've found the suggestions are terrible. It will call functions with the wrong number of arguments, return values of the wrong type, or call functions/methods that don't exist.
As a source code completion aid I also find that it suggests too much code. I just want to auto complete this line but instead it will suggest several lines of code that I'd have to delete if all I want is to complete the current line.
Python, Node.js, React, HTML, vanilla JS.
My job is mainly Python back-end, my personal business is the JS stack.
For my job for example I had to write a program to do an exponential back-off retry for a flaky 3rd party API, and it nailed it instantly with just a description of what I wanted.
I definitely believe that it might be good at some languages and bad at others (e.g. I think C++ is used a lot in coding competitions and lowkey wonder if something about that may have lead to degraded quality of code).
I like the multi-line thing, tbh I wish it did it more.
It's definitely not perfect but intuitively I'd say I'm at ~40% faster (even after correcting for bugs etc.).
Does it really write documentation and tests? I had no idea
Yes you can ask it to explain sections of code or write tests for certain functions. I'd think of it as really good as solving coding busy work. If the answer is relatively obvious but tedious to do then chatgpt fits perfectly.
Well thankfully security is rarely a requirement in take home coding assessments. You know the ones that they like to throw at you right away in the interview process. Sounds like we just got a tool to fight back against bull shit interview tests. Questions like can you write fiz buzz in java script? I don't know but I bet chat gpt could do it. Hell I bet you could copy and paste most prompts into chat gpt and get halfway decent input.
This is going to be a nightmare for hiring managers and recruiters. They may have to access the skills of people the old fashioned way by actually getting to know some one. The horror...
This is true of ChatGPT as well. It looks like really convincing text, but I asked it a math question that it got confidently completely wrong. I've heard the same from professional physicists. It's dangerous because it's convincing but also completely wrong.
That’s the joke.
That’s the joke.
Ah, sorry, needs a /s...
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I asked chat GPT to produce a simple extrapolation method in matlab using Forward Finite Difference, it immediately just got the implementation wrong and it took me 5 minutes of repeated "No this line should be blah blah blah" before the code was actually usable
relying on it's probably not great to do
well, shit, so is copilot worth the 10 dollars a month?
I would personally pay $40 to $50 a month for it, yes.
Yep, but I removed it for brevity.
In my line of work, we inherit other people's messes and patch them up for extortionate hourly rates. We're the ones you call when the Indian contractor writes a bunch of gobbledegook and then bails on you. Then the focus is more on the biggest impact, lowest-effort items, not "nice to haves" like clean code.
Oh yeah, DRY is always top of mind for me. But only on new stuff, which is only part of my typical workload.
Makes sense! Thanks for the explanation.
As a developer, what do they care about the results of the code they write?
This is the capitalist bargain, where you don't own the fruits of your labor, so naturally, people don't actually care.
original_4degrees t1_j12wwdz wrote
let something else think for me. what could go wrong?