Comment by PopePompus 4 days ago
A product which will significantly improve the productivity of programmers, if nothing else. That may not be a good return on investment, but I think it is undeniable that recent AI advances have nonzero value for coding.
You’re looking at it upside down: AI is freeing you from the onerous work of writing actual code, and gives you more time to think. It’s a tool to spare you from the boring parts, the CRUD and the glue code and the correct library invocations. Programming is mostly about solving complex problems, yes, but it also involves writing tons of instructions to get the computer to go beep. With Copilot et al, you can simply spend your time on thinking instead of writing instructions.
I personally think AI is just going to become a tool that will increase the table stakes by making those using it more productive.
We've already gone through a couple of iterations of tools hyped to relieve programmers from the "tedium" of writing code. First, CASE tools with code generators, then UML was supposed to make it possible to draw diagrams telling the tool how to generate the code to implement the ideas.
Spicy autocomplete isn't going to solve the writing vs. thinking steps any better.
I don’t think that comparison is apt. I’m too young for CASE, but the problem with UML (and really all the big concepts from the XML era) has always been that it’s far too lofty in scope; generating full applications from diagrams is a pipe dream.
On the other hand, ”spicy autocomplete“ (loved that one) doesn’t promise salvation. It just finishes lines for you, one at a time. Often it just ”knows“ what you were about to type anyway. Sometimes it’s a bit off, you add a few characters, now it gets it. It’s not really magical, just… useful. These lines you don’t have to finish accumulate, and if you get into a healthy flow, it vastly speeds up the coding process.
The AI Hype tends to lean towards salvation, so I'd ask the question, "is it worth it if isn't?" For all the billions of dollars, tens of TWh of electricity, and tsunamis of carbon emissions, is this limited usefulness all we get?
Right now the programming AI that’s cheap enough for me to use is really good at fixing unbalanced parenthesis and indenting my code correctly. It more or less reduces my VIM motions by 80%. I am still doing something cool, and also still doing my laundry. Just the doing cool things part is a bit easier and less tedious. I think it makes me a fair bit more productive without robbing me of any agency.
You need AI to do basic code formatting? That’s been a feature of IDE’s and text editors for years.
Ive never met an IDE that automatically fixes unbalanced parens/braces or that auto-indents or completes bookkeeping comments like labeling SQL param indexes or something, this is stuff I’d use some VIM movement sequences before in Intellij or VS Code but now I just raise an eyebrow, it seems to intuit what I want, and then I press tab a few times ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
It’s kind of like how “learn to rank” used to eat the gains of all the specific optimizations Google used to do for search - before I used to use a bunch of plugins/workflows/explicit actions for a variety of text manipulation, now I just use tab; AI subsumed many of more specific or niche features.
Those who think AI will make them better peogrammers make me think about the kind of day to day job they have. If a prompt is going to solve your problem, are you anything more than an entry level programmer? AI will not think for you and it's clear it is garbage against complexity.