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Comment by xwdv | Hacker News Reader

I find the best use of coding AI is for shitty little inconsequential apps. I could imagine a startup founder using it to feel like they are saving a lot of money on engineering costs by using it for an MVP.

You will likely never use coding AI for things like embedded systems, financial software, manufacturing, flight computers, operating systems, software for managing networked infrastructures, various domain specific AI…

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Agreed 100%. Implementing the correct algorithm/business logic is more important than spitting out junk that you don't really understand or won't pass code review.

The act of writing code is probably the easiest part of my job and I still haven't really seen these tools excel at that outside of toy examples.

On the other hand, I am pretty excited for AI code tools that me why my code is shitty beyond static analysis, linters, etc.

That's my experience as well. I've tried Tabnine and Copilot and they're both useful as fancy line autocompleters when you know what you want to type. However they're unreliable to write code directly from business logic. They'll usually write code that _seems_ to be doing the right thing but with very subtle bugs because they don't understand the intent of the function and just try to mimic what's already there.

If anything that's what makes them more dangerous. I tried Copilot for a month and ended my subscription. It will write a SQL query with all the expected keywords in there: a WHERE for a filter, an ORDER BY for a sort, but the way it combines these things, especially recursive queries, is almost always wrong except the most trivial queries which I would have written by hand in no time anyway.

chatGPT is even worse. The less popular a python package is, the more bullshit is in the chatGPT answer. I don't know how many times now it has literally made up functionality that isn't there in a library. At least that obviously doesn't work.

I am going to try it with R though. Maybe that is the real power. Using it to write a language you hate and only the output matters with no regard to how you got there.

Anything in production though that has users is insane.

I can picture a type of adversarial situation with a generator intentionally trying write bugs to fool a discriminator.

We can't forget that what we have now basically is the MVP of code generation.

We are at the deep dream stage in AI art compared to Stable Diffusion. Deep dream art was pretty much a one off parlor trick. Not a single artist in the world was upset by it.

Any industry where functional safety's a factor will be safe in the longterm. The rest I'm not so sure about..

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