Hacker News Reader

Comment by _bohm | Hacker News Reader

Could you explain your reasoning? You expect that these tools will create more work to get from point A to point B rather than less?

View on HN

It wouldn't be unreasonable to expect just that. Overall, producing code quicker is probably not something we need. It's plenty quick to type code. What's slow is finding good designs. I think more often than not, we jump to the coding part too early and build things too soon. This creates problems that are hard to fix after the fact.

The easier it is to produce code, the more code will be produced. The more code is produced, the more complex and short-sighted the architecture will be as a result.

This is much older than AI. You can take a one-person task that takes two weeks to perform, assign it to a five person team, and they'll solve it by producing 25 times the code.

We create abstractions to cope with the noise of a large code base, but in doing so, we also create a noisier and more complex code base that needs more abstractions.

Managing complexity was once the job description

Yeah I think there's a lot of sense in that. I think it's likely that the ability to use these tools in a disciplined fashion will grow to be a significant differentiator between more effective and less effective programmers. The former taking a considered approach to design and then using the tools where they're a real force multiplier e.g., writing unit tests, and the latter prompting them to spit out large swaths of code they would have previously written by hand: "write an endpoint that does X".

In short: because there will be "current junk pull requests" (see microchanges for readme) but increased x100, if you want to use AI at least write description by yourself, orelse there os no point in your pr as authors might make it themselves

I see. My impression based on this press release is that GitHub is planning on marketing this more to teams using their paid plan though. It seems like this would be a non-issue for organizations using private repositories?

> As we continue to design, test, and build features that fall into the GitHub Copilot X vision, we are also taking the time to determine the best way to provide them to our customers, which may include changes to Copilot for Business and Copilot for Individuals.

so we'll see :)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com