A new Coddy Developer Survey found that four in five developers, 80%, say their use of AI has felt more like a dependence than an advantage.
A new Coddy Developer Survey found that four in five developers, 80%, say their use of AI has felt more like a dependence than an advantage.
Except I have plenty of experience dealing with this from humans. (Mainly from the aforementioned new managers, because being wrong with confidence seems to be a key trait to get promoted.) It’s been my experience that when you tell an AI “I just tried that and it didn’t work”, it will accept that more readily than a human would.
Every bit of AI-generated code that I use, even in the smallest and most meaningless context, has to pass my own review first. I have to understand every line, and if I don’t I will ask the bot to explain what it did. By the time I am done with it, I can stand behind it just as if I wrote it all myself. I might note that I got AI help, but if my name is on the commit I will not pass the buck on any errors.
This is how you use AI correctly
Then why not just write the fucking code yourself at that point? This is like putting training wheels on a tricycle.
The same reason pair programming exists. You get a better outcome when you have someone (or these days, something) to validate and implement with.
Did you forget pair programming and pair planning exist?
one of the programs that we use everyday at work recently added an AI coding tool. I was going to announce it to the team when I noticed with the usual disclaimers about ensuring you know what the macros are doing, but then just deleted my message.
we’re not a team of programmers, and there’s only one or two people on my team that I would trust to write code that could potentially cause us days of rework and tons of thousands of dollars lost to the company.
those other people don’t need an AI coding tool, because they can’t code in the first place, and those aren’t the people that I want modifying thousands of files at once when I know that they barely review the work they’re doing manually already and I have tools in place to semi-automate that review for them.