AI is great for looking stuff up but rubbish at figuring stuff out. If you want some code to do X and the AI can find it, you’re done. If you want code that does X and Y and smushes them together to get a Z, if nobody’s written that exact code then you’re out of luck, and the worst case solution that AI far too frequently offers is something that loosely approximates what you asked for instead of just saying it doesn’t know.
The mistake too many people make with AI is conflating looking up with working out. AI is most definitely NOT doing the latter. It’s a decent search engine, that’s all.
I have gone round and round in circles with AI, with a short list of 5-6 items I want the code to do, and it always misses at least one of them out. “OK but you didn’t do 5” “Oh, my mistake! Here’s some code that does 5” “OK, but now it doesn’t do 1.” “Oops, here’s some code that does 1.” “Right, now it doesn’t do 3 or 4, and 5 is wrong” “Thanks for the clarification! Here’s some code that fixes 3, 4 and 5” “OK but now it doesn’t do 2” “My mistake! Here’s some code that does 2” “OK but now it doesn’t do 5 again”. And I was really quite persistent with it, going way beyond this short snapshot of the conversation.
So here’s my valid reason for not using AI to write my code. Simple: it can’t.
AI is great for looking stuff up but rubbish at figuring stuff out. If you want some code to do X and the AI can find it, you’re done. If you want code that does X and Y and smushes them together to get a Z, if nobody’s written that exact code then you’re out of luck, and the worst case solution that AI far too frequently offers is something that loosely approximates what you asked for instead of just saying it doesn’t know.
The mistake too many people make with AI is conflating looking up with working out. AI is most definitely NOT doing the latter. It’s a decent search engine, that’s all.
I have gone round and round in circles with AI, with a short list of 5-6 items I want the code to do, and it always misses at least one of them out. “OK but you didn’t do 5” “Oh, my mistake! Here’s some code that does 5” “OK, but now it doesn’t do 1.” “Oops, here’s some code that does 1.” “Right, now it doesn’t do 3 or 4, and 5 is wrong” “Thanks for the clarification! Here’s some code that fixes 3, 4 and 5” “OK but now it doesn’t do 2” “My mistake! Here’s some code that does 2” “OK but now it doesn’t do 5 again”. And I was really quite persistent with it, going way beyond this short snapshot of the conversation.
So here’s my valid reason for not using AI to write my code. Simple: it can’t.