It’s helpful when you want to try to figure out an error or even just write a few lines of boiler plate code quickly without needing to look through library documentation.

I’m mostly in the “fuck AI” camp. As is my eldest son. The other day I messaged him and said “I hate to say this, but I just had a helpful interaction with AI.”

Python has importlib. I’ve used it many times, particularly when laying DB libraries conditionally.

I was in a situation where I needed to load arbitrary python code from an arbitrary location. I was sure I could use importlib to do this, but couldn’t sort it out. Nine of my search results turned to anything that moved me in the right direction. Finally I asked copilot. Not only did it get me where I needed to go but when I told it “I got this error when doing this thing.” It told me I was a moron and why.

Needless to say I got my weird problem sorted.

AI still sucks though.

For retards like me. It helps a little. But AI sucks a lot of time. Like a dev could probably not use it for new code because it hasn’t done that before.

I don’t want to be productive.

I want to do the least amount of work possible while still getting paid.

AI coding assistance is good for the same stuff you would have put through a tool assisted service previously anyway. Regex and other forms of complex pattern matching are way easier for a computer than a human. The only difference now is that you can just write out the problem plainly instead of in tiny chunks.

I recently had to write a script to parse an nginx log for unique entries with very specific criteria that could vary depending on other criteria, and then do some crap to manipulate that data and use portions of it for API calls to other more complicated shit. Figuring out how to properly parse that data manually would be mind numbing. AI does it instantly.

That’s not to say that the entire concept as a marketing ploy isn’t complete bullshit, but if it were just used for the crap it’s good at, it would actually be a net benefit to society.

AI has simply weaponized copy/pasting stack overflow answers without reading them.

Not only was it not that useful to me, it decreased the most fun part of programming (writing code) and increased the least fun part of programming (reviewing code), so it overall gave me a worse experience.

I’m a software developer. What it does do is help you out for beginning level work, half remembering methods sometimes works out.

What it’s really good at is templates. Like build a simple MVC based on this table kinda deal. It saves a ton of boilerplate time in a semi intelligent way. What it’s really bad at is anything remotely complicated because it will forget/error out/ rely on libraries that do not exist. I have other thoughts on the actual companies and the spam they say is AI but that’s another convo.

The #1 thing Ive used AI for is commenting my code. It is pretty good at following my format and generating code documentation, based on my existing code.

It’s also really good at helping me think of a good name for something, if there’s a specific word on the tip of my tongue. “Whats the word for when you do the thing with the thingy?” “It sounds like you are looking for (word)”

Also its really good for helping me find the name of specific algorithms for use cases.

“Is there a known algorithm I can look up that can fenangle a dinger?”

“You might be looking for the Ferg Dergeson Flemming algorithm, which is a popular way to fenangle dingers”

Then Ill look it up and it is, indeed, like the best way to fenangle a dinger and I’m like “well holy shit, this is a solved problem turns out, I shoulda known”

🤣 lmao