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this post was submitted on 10 Aug 2023
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Asklemmy
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not chatGPT - but I tried using copilot for a month or two to speed up my work (backend engineer). Wound up unsubscribing and removing the plugin after not too long, because I found it had the opposite effect.
Basically instead of speeding my coding up, it slowed it down, because instead of my thought process being
It would be
idk about you, but the first set of steps just seems like a whole lot less hassle then the second set of steps, especially since for anything that involved any business logic or internal libraries, I found myself using 5c far more often than the other two. And as a bonus, I actually fully understand all the code committed under my username, on account of actually having wrote it.
I will say though in the interest of fairness, there were a few instances where I was blown away with copilot's ability to figure out what I was trying to do and give a solution for it. Most of these times were when I was writing semi-complex DB queries (via Django's ORM), so if you're just writing a dead simple CRUD API without much complex business logic, you may find value in it, but for the most part, I found that it just increased cognitive overhead and time spent on my tickets
EDIT: I did use chatGPT for my peer reviews this year though and thought it worked really well for that sort of thing. I just put in what I liked about my coworkers and where I thought they could improve in simple english and it spat out very professional peer reviews in the format expected by the review form
Those different sets of steps basically boil down to a student finding all the ways they can to cheat and spending hours doing it, when they could have just used less time to study for the test.
Not saying that you're cheating, just that it's the same idea. Usually the quickest solution is to just tackle the thing head-on rather than find the lazy workaround.
What I think ChatGPT is great for in programming is ‘I know what I want to do but can’t quite remember the syntax for how to do it’. In those scenarios it’s so much faster than wading through the endless blogspam and SEO guff that search engines deal in now, and it’s got much less of a superiority complex than some of the denizens of SO too.
As a side note, whilst I don't really use AI to help with coding, I was kinda expecting what you describe, more so for having stuff like ChatGPT doing whole modules.
You see, I've worked as a freelancer (contractor) most of my career now and in practice that does mostly mean coming in and fixing/upgrading somebody else's codebase, though I've also done some so-called "greenfield projects" (entirelly new work) and in my experience the "understanding somebody else's code" is a lot more cognitivelly heavy that "coming up with your own stuff" - in fact some of my projects would've probably gone faster if we just rewrote the whole thing (but that wasn't my call to make and often the business side doesn't want to risk it).
I'm curious if multiple different pieces of code done with AI actually have the same coding style (at multiple levels, so also software design approach) or not.