As someone who uses ChatGPT and Claude daily, but cancelled my Copilot subscription after a year of use because it intimately just wasn’t that helpful to me and didn’t provide enough benefit over doing it by hand, I kind of sort of agree. Maybe not entirely, but I can’t shake the feeling that there might be some truth in it.
The code that AI generates for me is rarely good. It’s possible to get good code out of it, but it requires many iterations of careful review and prompting, but for most cases, I can write it quicker by hand. Where it really shines for me in programming and what I still use ChatGPT and Claude for is rubber ducking and as an alternative to documentation (eg “how do I do x in css”).
Besides the code quality being mediocre at best and outright rubbish at worst, it’s too much of a “yes man”, it’s lazy (choose between A and B: why not a hybrid approach? That’s… not what I asked for), and it doesn’t know how to say “I don’t know”.
I also feel it makes you, the human programmer, lazy. We need to exercise our brains, not delegate too much to a dumb computer.
I kinda feel like this isn't talked about enough, my main concern right from the beginning was that new programmers would rely on it too much and never improve their own abilities.
I know c++ dart golang java html css javascript typescript lua react vue angular angularjs c# swift sql in various dialects including mysql and postgres, and have worked professionally in all these regards. I love to challenge myself. In fact, if I done something before, I find it boring.
So copilot helps me because I always find something new to do, something I don't understand, something I'm not good at.
So yes, I'm confident I'm competent. But I always do things I'm not good at for fun. So it helps me become well rounded.
So your assertion it only helps me because I'm incompetent is true and false. I'm competent, I just like to do new stuff.
I mean it does, sometimes, but usually it's either boilerplate or something you don't care about. Boilerplate is mostly managed very well by most well-known IDEs. And neither them nor CoPilot are offering good algorithmic code... OK, I'll grant you the "most of the time, not never" thing.
This statement would have been a huge red flag for me, if I had interviewed you. Don't get me wrong, you could use and program in 10 languages. Maybe you can be proficient in many at different times of your life. But know them at once? No.
Granted there are languages where typing takes much more time, like Java and C# but... eh. They are quite overdue for finding better syntax anyway! :)
I think the unfortunate reality is that this makes up a shockingly large amount of software engineering. Take this object and put it into this other object, map this data to that data, create these records and move them into this object when then goes into that other object.
A competent engineer architects their systems to make their tools as effective as possible, so maybe your idea of competent is "first order" and you need higher order conception of a good software engineer.
Take a SQL schema, and ask AI to generate crud endpoints for the schema, then sit down and code it by yourself. Then try generating client side actions and state management for those endpoints. Time yourself, and compare how long it takes you. Even if you're fast and you cut and paste from template work and quickly hand edit, the AI will be done and on a smoke break before you're even a quarter of the way through.
Ask the AI to generate correctly typed seed data for your database, using realistic values. Again, the AI will be done long before you.
Try porting a library of helper functions from one language to another. This is another task where AI will win handily
Also, ask AI to write unit tests with mocks for your existing code. It's not amazing at integration tests but with mocks in play it slays.
I appreciate it.
It is true it is faster than humans at some tasks, but the remaining tasks were most of the time, you can't gain more than 11% speedup by speeding up 10% of the work.
So humans do better than them in at least 80% of all code everywhere, if not 95% even? Cool, good to know.
Care to provide some examples to back your otherwise extraordinary claim btw?
I just can't make peace with the fact that I inhabit the same planet as people who can't make elementary distinctions.
Fortunately, as pdimitar pointed out, so far it is an ineffective scam that mostly produces LoC.
