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Comment by dpflan | Hacker News Reader

Without expert filtering of the suggestions, yes, disaster. Experts will benefit the most from this because they can filter incorrect suggestions and reinterpret. Novices will be more susceptible.

There is certainly ongoing research on this, expert systems have been an area of research for a while. Here is recent research relevant to this post: Do Users Write More Insecure Code with AI Assistants? (https://arxiv.org/pdf/2211.03622.pdf)

More relevant discussion, from Andrew Ng's The Batch newsletter: Check the Generated Code Generates Overconfident Coders section: (https://www.deeplearning.ai/the-batch/issue-180/)

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Indeed. Copilot is like productivity rocket fuel for me. More importantly, less typing means less strain on my hands/wrists and a longer career.

For junior developers I wouldn't recommend it, because as you say, they don't have the pattern matching to find and fix the hidden errors that copilot generates. Also, it's harder to conceptualise code that you haven't written.

I would compare it to the way that chess players use engines. Grandmasters can have an engine turned on without it being distracting, and they can tell when the engine is suggesting a good move vs a weird move, and explain what the move accomplishes.

Beginners, are generally advised to play with the engine turned off, and to instead analyse their moves afterward, because otherwise they will just play the engine moves and not learn anything.

I agree with the chess analogy, but disagree with the statement about productivity.

But most joiners will be the ones that will use it the most, trying to leapfrog their lack of experience with AI - which will provide the biggest issue imho

Whatever organization they end up at that doesn't catch cheating during the interview process deserves what they get.

This was the point that drove me to write the article in the first place. I think that there should be some kind of knowledge threshold before you can use assistants. I think the same point can be applied to why students need to know how to calculate some equation without a calculator.

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