Counter article: https://jadarma.github.io/blog/posts/2024/11/does-github-copilot-improve-code-quality-heres-how-we-lie-with-statistics/ about the original statistics article from Github this talk and blog post is about: https://github.blog/news-insights/research/does-github-copilot-improve-code-quality-heres-what-the-data-says/
If you rather like a reactionary video commentary to the article from The Primeagen: https://youtu.be/IxYN7DKefmI or watch on Invidious, a privacy focused web YouTube client without using YouTube directly: https://inv.nadeko.net/watch?v=IxYN7DKefmI
I’m neither a professional programmer nor a user of Ai but…
Do you think your experience, I’m guessing a pre-ai trained programmer, is reflective of post-ai trained programmers?
Will the inevitable reliance on AI in learning and training, will creativity of new programmers drop? Is that even a problem?
I am a professional programmer and a user of AI.
With current AI, it’s going to have absolutely no effect on “creativity of new programmers”. I would say it would even help with that since it greatly lowers the barrier to entry for programming. One of the things it is actually quite good at is explaining basic concepts, which can often be hard to google.
The thing it isn’t good at - yet - is writing complete programs. Especially if they aren’t very common domains like CRUD or parsers. So you still need to know how to program.
At the moment it’s kind of like you’ve got a friend who has read a ton of stuff but isn’t very clever or reliable. Amazing for finding things, looking things up, doing grunt auto-complete work, etc. But you can’t ask them to write an SPI driver for a radio module or whatever.
Maybe in future they’ll get to the point where they can reliably do the kinds of complex tasks that most professional programmers do, but I think that will take a while (and probably be close to AGI by that point).
Thanks for the detailed response!
In its current state I don’t think learning programming with the help of AI will be much different. For that AI makes too many mistakes. You have to check its grunt work output (which is still faster than writing it yourself). You also cannot trust its explanations, because it hallucinates too often. AI can nudge you in the right direction and can mostly help you, but often enough it can’t and you’ll have to research yourself. @[email protected]’s ‘idiot friend’ metaphor fits very well.