Comment by deisteve | Hacker News Reader

Comment by deisteve | Hacker News Reader

this article is just a rehashing of the same tired contrarian takes about AI-assisted coding that we've been hearing for years. 'Programmers will become lazy and reliant on AI' is not a new problem, and it's not like Copilot is somehow uniquely capable of eroding fundamental programming skills.

in reality, Copilot and other LLMs are just tools, and like any tool, they can be used well or poorly. If a programmer is relying on Copilot to do all their thinking for them, then yeah, they're probably not going to learn much. But if they're using it as a starting point to explore new ideas and learn from the code it generates, then that's a different story.

And let's not forget that AI-assisted coding is not a replacement for human judgment and critical thinking. If a programmer is not reviewing and understanding the code they're writing, then that's a problem with their workflow, not with the tool they're using.

I'd love to see some actual data on how Copilot is being used in the wild, rather than just anecdotal evidence and hand-wringing about the 'dangers' of AI-assisted coding. Until then, I'll remain skeptical of this article's claims.

Imo, there's something to be said newer devs feeling self-pressure or anxiety to use the Copilot for everything which is a massive time sink and slows skill progression.

I also don't think it's a great starting point for exploration. There's a lot more value out of learning a couple different quirky frameworks and reasoning through why they exist than there is hacking together something quickly within the bounds of what the LLM's can do.

i personally dont use Copilot so im fairly unbiased here and will admit to some of the negative points you raised:

yes you can absolutely sink time and lose efficiency

i encounter it many times, i have it generate large amount of code that seemingly does what i asked it to do

but then it takes many revisions to finally arrive at edge-case-free state

I also end up having to read through the code generated to build a mental model of what the app is doing and to gate keep future revisions.

But what makes all this worthwhile is that it saves my employer a lot of money.

For example: We've generated a large enterprise react application for roughly $100 USD within a month using all the available code gen tools out there. I'm talking the entire stack: backend, frontend, documentation.

Trying to pull that off with a real team? it would cost 1000x minimum and roughly 3 quarters, maybe the entire year.

A business won't care about the "art" side of things. They just see they can generate software at almost 99% discount.

I'm very worried about our software engineering jobs beyond 2024. It's going to massively shrink and wages are going to reflect this new cost saving that code gen provides.

Any idiot can write code, that was never the problem.

Building high quality software on the other hand takes a lot of empathy, skill and experience; neither of which is attainable for a computer.

I feel bad for the users of these discounted applications...

seems like an emotional and out of date view

It is in fact an emotional view. That doesn't make it out of date, however.

When you've lived through enough piles of barely-working garbage produced by contractors who didn't understand, or coworkers who didn't care, you'll know why they were emotional. You'll also have a suspicion that they are not yet out of date.

its out of date because the code quality is the best i've seen much better than humans can

this technology is getting better not worse. ive already been able to do without a dedicated frontend react developer. i cant be alone.

If you honestly think LLMs write better code than humans I suspect your experience is limited to people who would probably be better off doing something else.

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