Comment by macNchz

To this point, I use AI programming assistants pretty heavily and find very frequently that they will write extremely inefficient or oddly baroque implementations of what I’m asking for in their first pass, that appear as if they don’t have the “knowledge” or ability to do it better, but then they can be prodded to re-do it very easily. Frequently I look at some generated code and write back the most cursory feedback like “looks o(n^2) can you make more efficient” or “use pointers instead of nested loops” or “how about using X approach” and it will often produce something dramatically better than the initial effort. For now at least I think these tools are still most powerful in the hands of experts. (I am a self-taught programmer but have a fair bit of experience)