Programming

Definitely depends on the sub-sector of the industry you're in. There's no shortage of stories of people who swear by it, or who are having it forced on them by management.

Me personally' I've never wanted or been pressured to use it, and I work for a company with "AI" in the damn name. To be fair, though, this company was around doing general machine-learning stuff before the current LLM craze exploded. Also, I work with a small team that was only bought by this company a few years ago, and thus far has been allowed to remain practically independent. Also also, the business domain my team works in is finance and accounting, where there's bot much practical application for ML, and where you REALLY can't afford to fuck around and find out, with business data.

Yes. But I'm not paying for premium like some of my cowokres. I use it to avoid the grunt work, and to avoid things I know I'd have to google.

I used some coworkers account for a while and auto complete is amazing. I it guesses wrong you just keep tipping as usual. If its right, hit tab and saves you like 20 seconds.

On the other hand I have cokowkers that do not check the chatgpt output and the PRs make no sense. Example: instead of making a variable type any (which is forbidden in our codebase) they did

Let a : date|number|string|object|(...) = fetchData()

Not a programmer, but I used it at my last job to get over humps where I was stuck on PowerShell scripts. AI can show you a path you didn't know or hadn't thought about. The developers seemed to be using it the same way. Great tool if you don't completely lean on it and you know enough to judge the output.

I used supermaven (copilot competitor) for awhile and it was sorta ok sometimes, but I turned it off when I realized I’d forgotten how to write a switch case. Autocomplete doesn’t know your intent, so it introduces a lot of noise that I prefer to do without.

I’ve been trying out Claude code for a couple months and I think I like it ok for some tasks. If you use it to do your typing rather than your thinking, then it’s pretty decent. Give it small tasks with detailed instructions and you generally get good results. The problem is that it’s most tempting to use when you don’t have the problem figured out and you’re hoping it will, but thats when it gives you overconvoluted garbage. About half the time this garbage is more useful than starting from scratch.

It’s good at sorting out boilerplate and following explicit patterns that you’ve already created. It’s not good at inventing and implementing those patterns in the first place.

I've had good luck having it write simple scripts that I could easily handle myself. For example, I needed a script to chop a directory full of log files up into archives, with some constraints. That sort of thing.
I haven't tried it on anything more substantial.
This was using Copilot because I haven't found a good coding model that will run locally on 16GB VRAM.

I use it sparingly and only to automate things I know how to do very well, so reviewing its work become easier.

Some definitely are. But I think a lot aren't. Hell, a lot of programmers still don't even use an IDE.

I don't know why it would make you ill.

I use it now and again but not integrated into an ide and not to write large bits of code.

My uses are like so

Rewrite this rant to shut the PO/PM up. Explain why this is a waste of time

Convert this excel row into a custom model.

Given these tables give me the sql to do xyz.

Sometimes for troubleshooting an environment issue

Do I need it , no. But if it saves me some time on bullshit tasks then thats more time for me

I've been using phind as a technical-focused AI search engine, which is a great addition to my toolset.

I'm mindful of using it vs searching [ref docs etc], not only in the kind of search and answer I'm looking for but also energy consumption impact, but it's definitely very useful. I'm a senior dev though, and know what to expect and I am able to assess plausibility, and phind provides sources I can inspect too.

As for code assistance, I find it plausible that it can be useful, even if from my personal experience I'm skeptical.

I watched an Microsoft talk from two devs, which was technically sound and plausible in that it was not just marketing but they talked about their experience, including limits of AI, and where they had to and to what degree they had to deal with hallucinations and cleanup. They talked about where they see usefulness in AI. They were both senior, and able to assess plausibility, and do corrections where necessary. What I remember; they used it to bounce ideas back and forth, to do an implementation draft they then go over and complete, etc.

Microsoft can do the investment of AI setup, code sharing to model, AI instructions/meta-description setup investment, etc.

My personal experience was in using copilot for Rust code, for Nushell plugins. I'm not very familiar with Rust, and it was very confusing, and with a lot of hallucinations.

The PR descriptions CodeRabbit did were verbose and not useful for smaller PRs I made. That has been a while ago.

At work we have a voluntary work group exploring AI. The whole generate your whole app kind of thing seems plausible for UI prototypes. But nothing more. And for that it's probably expensive.

I'm not sure how much the whole thing does or can do for efficiency. Seems situational - in terms of environment, setup, capabilities, and kind of work and approach.

My AI Skeptic Friends Are All Nuts - https://fly.io/blog/youre-all-nuts/

It's good for what it's good, and bad for what it's bad.

If you only use it for what is good I would suppose it would be easy to be more productive. Sometimes is faster to ask an LLM than trying to surf through pages of SO "repeated question" to get an answer.

I use mostly for things like that, questions, translation between languages (for instance having some working code in one language that you want to quickly translate to other language), boiler plate of well known algorithms and functions.

For full programming development I've no luck to make it work. And trusting it to refactor all your code would be something hilarious.

I sometime describe it as an intern. Its useful but many of the things its useful for replicates things that addons in the ide did anyway. Its also handy for web searches to be a bit quicker. Ultimately I don't see it going away.

I'm okay with AI-powered autocomplete, or with AI-powered mock project generator. Anything beyond that seems like the management's misguided attempt at ~~having more meetings~~raising productivity.

I'm not using AI, and I rarely use IDE, because ugh, code editor is not fullscreen, and I don't need a separate panel to navigate project tree and edit makefiles, I can perfectly use the shell for that, and I don't even need to wiggle the mouse like some graphics designer to debug my code.

Programmers are promoted to architects who write high-level specs with a subordinate to do the leg work (AI). I think the hate is because not everyone is good at planning and some people are better at perfecting implementation details, and AI isn't helpful there.