If it wasn’t worth actually coding in the first place, it’s not worth paying what it would cost to fix.
Professionally, I am unable to use AI due to my company not wanting to produce code that could be legally challenged.
In my spare time & projects I’ve tinkered with Github Co-pilot & Cursor.
GitHub co-pilot has been useful when I’m coding in a strongly typed and well documented language, however the benefit here is that it will suggest pretty much exactly what I wanted when producing suggestions for the rest of the line or the next 3-5 code lines. However, this is after I configured it to only offer suggestions for small chunks of code and the accept is a two key combo instead of overriding tab accept for standard autocomplete. Anything over that and it starts hallucinating like crazy. I’ve also found it useful for converting a script from one language to another (mostly bash to psh & bat, but a bit of python to JS.).
Cursor has been useful for creating a functional prototype for an idea on functional projects and it does an ok job at code tracing and explaining the design patterns used and where to inject behaviors.
That said, I stopped using cursor after my free trial ended, and the 1 year GitHub Co-pilot sub that was given to me runs up in November and I don’t plan on renewing.
I produce far better code without the tools. The gains achieved with co-pilot were nice, but in the end I felt disconnected from my code and when problems arose, I spent more time remembering where to find it. And if I really wanted to understand the design patterns used in a code base there are tools out there to do that already with great visualization outputs.
What tools do you use for visualizing design patterns in programs!
Kernighan’s Law states “Debugging is twice as hard as writing the code in the first place. Therefore, if you write the code as cleverly as possible, you are, by definition, not smart enough to debug it.”
Since no thought went into writing the code, I can only believe that no thought is required to fix. Therefore my involvement is unnecessary. Have fun!
I didn’t choose to be a developer to clean up the messes of cheapskates who tried to go around my profession.
Like the messes cheapskates make by hiring a team of Indian programmers?
Just today I hear back from a client’s India-based team that the module they were a month past delivery was finally ready to review. It fundamentally did not do what it was supposed to. They team arrogantly decided they knew better…
My experience exactly, from the last 3 companies ive worked for! And now there are no job advancement options internally because the openings have moved to India.
It’s unbelievable how people overestimate the functions of LLMs. I know people who had to flunk their students because they had ChatGPT do their essays and ended spitting out wrong info.
I just now got finished updating an escalation ticket where someone had responded with an ai hallucination
HAHAHHAHAHAHA no
Real programmers can botch their own code.
Oh no! The consequences of my own actions!
Pay me 10 times what you get paid and I’ll fix it.
ah yes that’s what 10x programmer must mean
My company has an ill-advised “try to do it with AI first” rule in place.
For senior devs, that means rejecting the first twenty AI-generated code suggestions as they’re bollocks, and then having to fix it up by hand anyway. Takes 10x as long as it should do.
For junior devs, who don’t know enough to reject the ‘bollocks first suggestion’, it means raising pull requests that take 10x as long for the seniors to review, since they have to untangle the original intention and then explain why all the code is terrible and why they need to go and fix it.
We have truly embraced 10x programming.
I’m in exactly the same boat as you, and it’s driving me insane. I asked Cursor to generate a simple JavaScript function the other day, and it gave back a 200-line mess of garbage. I ended up just writing the function myself, and was able to do the same thing in 20 lines… and it’s not like I was using some “clever” techniques that no future maintainer will ever understand, it was all just basic code.
AI is definitely generating 10x the amount of code… but not 10x the quality or productively.
Elegance is doing the same thing in fewer lines without sacrificing interpretability
Lol. Sure. What’s your rate? Multiply that by 5 or so, and I’ll consider.
Bill them in kilowatt hours and acre feet of water
Few units of measurements can claim to be as deranged as acre-feet. Truly horrifying
Fuel economy is normally expressed as “distance per volume” (mpg) or “volume per distance” (l/100km). Normalise that, it has units of area. I like to visualise that as the cross-section of a string of fuel dragging a car along, being thicker when accelerating and thinner when running down hill.
Acre-feet is a weird unit for volume, but if you know how big your reservoir is in acres then at least it’s an easy conversion to depth. And at least it’s just a conversion factor away from a sane unit that can be used for pump sizing and such.
Another nice way to visualize the area of fuel economy is just the cross section of the fuel hose going to the engine.
Nobody has any time for that, clean up your own mess.
And they say AI destroy job. It create more job apparently, because AI often generate trainwreck and real expert needed to rope in to fix the wreck.
The company does have any money left after giving it all to AI grifters and letting their garbage code sink their business. Net negative on the jobs there
