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I've been using AI to solve isolated problems, mainly as a replacement of search engine specifically for programming. I'm still not convinced of these "write wh

I've been using AI to solve isolated problems, mainly as a replacement of search engine specifically for programming. I'm still not convinced of these "write whole block of code for me" type of use case. Here's my arguments against the videos from the article. 1. Snake case to camelCase. Even without AI we can already complete these tasks easily. VSCode itself has command of "Transform to Camel Case" for selection. It is nice the AI can figure out which text to transform based on context, but not too impressive. I could select one ":, use "Select All Occurrences", press left, then ctrl+shift+left to select all the keys. 2. Generate boilerplate from documentation. Boilerplate are tedious, but not really time-consuming. How many of you spend 90% of time writing boilerplate instead of the core logic of the project? If a language/framework (Java used to be, not sure about now) requires me to spend that much time on boilerplate, that's a language to be ditched/fixed. 3. Turn problem description into a block of concurrency code. Unlike the boilerplate, these code are more complicated. If I already know the area, I don't need AI's help to begin with. If I don't know, how can I trust the generated code to be correct? It could miss a corner case that my question didn't specify, which I don't yet know existing myself. In the end, I still need to spend time learning Python concurrency, then I'll be writing the same code myself in no time. In summary, my experience about AI is that if the question is easy (e.g. easy to find exactly same question in StackOverflow), their answer is highly accurate. But if it is a unique question, their accuracy drops quickly. But it is the latter case where we spend most of the time on.

eru 2y ago
> Boilerplate are tedious, but not really time-consuming. In the aggregate, almost no programmer can think up code faster than they can type it in. But being a better typist still helps, because it cuts down on the amount you have to hold in your head. Similar for automatically generating boilerplate. > If I don't know, how can I trust the generated code to be correct? Ask the AI for a proof of correctness. (And I'm only half-joking here.) In languages like Rust the compiler gives you a lot of help in getting concurrency right, but you still have to write the code. If the Rust compiler approves of some code (AI generated or artisanally crafted), you are already pretty far along in concurrency right. A great mind can take a complex problem and come up with a simple solution that's easy to understand and obviously correct. AI isn't quite there yet, but getting better all the time.
- mewpmewp2 2y ago
  > In the aggregate, almost no programmer can think up code faster than they can type it in. But being a better typist still helps, because it cuts down on the amount you have to hold in your head. I mean on the big picture level sure they can. Or in detail if it is something that they have good experience with. In many cases I get a visual of the whole code blocks, and then if I use copilot I can already predict what it is going to auto complete for me based on the context and then I can pretty much in a second know if it was right or wrong. Of course it is more so for the side projects since I know exactly what I want to do and so it feels most of the time it is having to just vomit all the code out. And I feel impatient, so copilot helps a lot with that.
- enord 2y ago
  > In the aggregate, almost no programmer can think up code faster than they can type it in. And thank god! Code is a liability. The price of code is coming down but selling code is almost entirely supplanted by selling features (SaaS) as a business model. The early cloud services have become legacy dependencies by now (great work if you can get it). Maintaining code is becoming a central business concern in all sectors governed by IT (i.e. all sectors, eating the world and all that). On a per-feature basis, more code means higher maintenance costs, more bugs and greater demands on developer skills and experience. Validated production code that delivers proven customer value is not something you refactor on a whim (unless you plan to go out of business), and the fact that you did it in an evening thanks to ClippyGPT means nothing—-the costly part is always what comes after: demonstrating value or maintaing trust in a competitive market with a much shallower capital investment moat. Mo’ code mo’ problems.
shinycode 2y ago
I agree. I replaced SO with cGPT and it’s the only good case I found. Finding an answer I build onto. But outsourcing my reflexion ? That’s a dangerous path. I tried on small projects to do that, building a project from scratch with cursor just to test it. Sometimes it’s right on spot but in many instances it misses completely some cases and edge cases. Impossible to trust blindly. And if I do so and not take proper time to read and think about the code the consequences pile up and make me waste time in the long run because it’s prompt over prompt over prompt to refine it and sometimes it’s not exactly right. That messes up my thinking and I prefer to do it myself and use it as a documentation on steroids. I never used google and SO again for docs. I have the feeling that relying on it to much to write even small blocs of code will make us loose some abilities in the long run and I don’t think that’s a good thing. Will companies allow us to use AI in code interviews for boilerplate ?
- Moru 2y ago
  The AI's are to a large degree trained on tutorial code, quick examples, howto's and so on from the net. Code that really should come with a disclamer note: "Dont use in production, only example code.". This leads to your code being littered with problematic edge-cases that you still have to learn how to fix. Or in worst case you don't even notice that there are edge cases because you just copy-pasted the code and it works for you. The edge cases your users will find with time.
  - agumonkey 2y ago
    Which makes me wonder, if old companies with a history of highly skilled teams would train local models, how better would they be at helping solve new complex problems.
    - SirHumphrey 2y ago
      They kinda already are - source code for highly complex open source software is already in the training datasets. The problem is that tutorials are much more descriptive (why the code is doing something, how does this particular function work etc. -down to a level of a single line of code), which probably means it’s much easier to interpret for llm-s, therefore weighted higher in responses.
Sateeshm 2y ago
Completely agree. I find it fails miserably at business logic, which is where we spend most of our time on. But does great at generic stuff, which is already trivial to find on stack overflow.
- PUSH_AX 2y ago
  This might be a promoting issue, my experience is very different, I’ve written entire services using it.
  - miningape 2y ago
    Might be that they work in a much more complex codebase, or a language/framework/religion that has less text written on it. Might also be that they (are required to) hold code to a higher standard than you and can't just push half-baked slop to prod.
    - PUSH_AX 2y ago
      Without knowing much about my standards and work you’ve just assumed it’s half baked slop. You’re wrong.
      - miningape 2y ago
        Without knowing much about my prompts and work you’ve just assumed it’s why AI gives me bad results. You’re wrong. (Can you see why this is a bad argument?) Don't get me wrong I love sloppy code as much as the next cowboy, but don't delude yourself or others when the emperor doesn't have clothes on.
      - lomase 2y ago
        IA generated content is the definition of slop for most people.
        TeMPOraL 2y ago
        Which is deeply sad, because this both tarnishes good output and gives a free pass to the competitor - shit "content" generated by humans. AI models only recently started to match that in quantity. But then again, most of software industry exists to create and support creation of human slop - advertising, content marketing, all that - so there's bound to be some double standards and salary-blindness present.
whatever1 2y ago
Have you tried recently to start a new web app from scratch? Specially the integration of frontend framework with styling and the frontend backend integration. Oh my god get ready to waste a full weekend just to setup everything and get a formatted hello world.
- exe34 2y ago
  that's an indictment of the proliferation of shitty frameworks and documentation. it's not hard to figure out such a combination and then keep a template of it lying around for future projects. you don't have to reach for the latest and shiniest at the start of every project.
  - TeMPOraL 2y ago
    > you don't have to reach for the latest and shiniest at the start of every project. Except you kind of do, because if you're working frontend or mobile, then your chosen non-shitty tech stack is probably lacking some Important Language Innovations or Security Featuers that Google or Microsoft forced on the industry since last time you worked with that stack. (Yes, that's mostly just an indictment of the state of our industry.)
    - exe34 2y ago
      every time you capitulate, you tell them that you're happy to play along, bring more "innovation" so you keep having to run very hard just to stay in place.
- dkersten 2y ago
  Most frontend frameworks come with usable templates. Setting up a new Vite React project and getting to a formatted hello world can be done in half an hour tops.
  - namaria 2y ago
    It takes me all of 5 minutes with Phoenix
dkersten 2y ago
1. Is such a taste task for me anyway that I don’t lose much just doing it by hand 2. The last time I wrote boilerplate heavy Java code, 15+ years ago, the IDE already generated most of it for me. Nowadays boilerplate comes in two forms for me: new project setup, which I find it far quicker to use a template or just copy and gut an existing project (and it’s not like I start new projects that often anyway), or new components that follow some structure, where AI might actually be useful but I tend to just copy an existing one and gut it. 3. These aren’t tasks I really trust AI for. I still attempt to use AI for them, but 9 out of 10 times come away disappointed. And the other 1 time end up having to change a lot of it anyway. I find a lot of value from AI, like you, asking it SO style questions. I do also use it for code snippets, eg “do this in CSS”. Its results for that are usually (but not always) reasonably good. I also use it for isolated helper functions (write a function to flood fill a grid where adjacent values match was a recent one). The results for this range from a perfect solution first try, to absolute trash. It’s still overall faster than not having AI, though. And I use it A LOT for rubber ducking. I find AI is a useful tool, but I find a lot of the positive stories to be overblown compared to my experience with it. I also stopped using code assistants and just keep a ChatGPT tab open. I sometimes use Claude but it’s conversation length limits turned me off. Looking at the videos in OP, I find the parallelising task to be exactly the kind of tricky and tedious task that I don’t trust AI to do, based on my experience with that kind of task, and with my experience with AI and the subtly buggy results it has given me.
viraptor 2y ago
> I could select one ":, use "Select All Occurrences" Only if it's the same occurrences. Cursor can often get the idea of what you want to do with the whole block of different names. Unless you're a vim macro master, it's not easily doable. > How many of you spend 90% of time writing boilerplate instead of the core logic of the project? It doesn't take much time, but it's a distraction. I'd rather tab through some things quickly than context switch to the docs, finding the example, adapting it for the local script, then getting back to what I was initially trying to do. Working memory in my brain is expensive.
never_inline 2y ago
100%. Useful cases include * figuring out how to X in an API - eg "write method dl_file(url, file) to download file from url using requests in a streaming manner" * Brainstorming which libraries / tools / approaches exist to do a given task. Google can miss some. AI is a nice complement for Google.
- dexwiz 2y ago
  I don’t even trust the API based exercises anymore unless it’s a stable and well documented API. Too many times I’ve been bitten by an AI mixing and matching method signatures from different versions, using outdated approaches, mixing in apis from similar libraries, or just completely hallucinating a method. Even if I load the entire library docs into the context, I haven’t found one that’s completely reliable.
  - never_inline 2y ago
    It just has to be popular and common boilerplate like the example I gave. It's hard with less popular APIs. It will almost always get something wrong. In such cases, I read docs, search sourcegraph / GitHub, and finally check the source code.
JamesBarney 2y ago
Disagree. I still spend a good amount of time on boilerplate. Stuff that's not thinking hard about the problem I'm trying to solve. Stuff like units tests, error logging, naming classes, methods and variables. Claude is really pretty good at this, not as good as the best code I've read in my career but definitely better than average. When I review sonnets code the code is more likely to be correct than if I review my own. If I make a mistake I'll read what I intended to write, and not what I actually wrote. Where as when I review sonnets there's 2 passes so the chance an error slips through is smaller.
- pylua 2y ago
  Unit tests are boiler plate ?
  - JamesBarney 2y ago
    I'm using an expansive definition of boiler plate to be sure. But like boiler plate most unit tests require a little bit of thought and then a good amount of typing, doing things like setting up the data to test, mocking up methods, writing out assertions to test all your edge cases. I've found sonnet and o1 to be pretty good at this. Better than writing the actual code because while modifying a system requires a lot of context of the overall application and domain, unit testing a method usually doesn't.
  - uh_uh 2y ago
    Quite often, yes. That's why I prefer integration tests.
    - girvo 2y ago
      Indeed. To many tests are just testing nothing other than mocks. That goes for my coworkers directly and for their Copilot output. They’re not useful tests, they are thing to catch actual errors, they’re maybe useful as usage documentation. But in general, they’re mostly a waste. Integration tests, good ones, are harder but far more valuable.
johnisgood 2y ago
Boilerplate comes up all the time when writing Erlang with OTP behaviors though, and sometimes you have no idea if it really is the right way or not. There are Emacs skeletons for that (through tempo), but feels like they are sometimes out of date.
theshrike79 2y ago
I have a corporation-sponsored subscription to Github CoPilot + Rider When I'm writing unit tests or integration tests it can guess the boilerplate pretty well. If I already have a AddUserSucceeds test and I start writing `public void Dele...` it usually fills up the DeleteUserSucceeds function with pretty good guesses on what Asserts I want there - most times it even guesses the API path/function correctly because it uses the whole project as context. I can also open a fresh project I've never seen and ask "Where is DbContext initialised" and it'll give me the class and code snippet directly.
scosman 2y ago
I started like this. Then I came around and can’t imagine going back. It’s kinda like having a really smart new grad, who works instantly, and has memorized all the docs. Yes I have to code review and guide it. That’s an easy trade off to make for typing 1000 tokens/s, never losing focus, and double checking every detail in realtime. First: it really does save a ton of time for tedious tasks. My best example is test cases. I can write a method in 3 minutes, but Sonnet will write the 8 best test cases in 4 seconds, which would have taken me 10 mins of switching back and forth, looking at branches/errors, and mocking. I can code review and run these in 30s. Often it finds a bug. It’s definitely more patient than me in writing detailed tests. Instant and pretty great code review: it can understand what you are trying to do, find issues, and fix them quickly. Just ask it to review and fix issues. Writing new code: it’s actually pretty great at this. I needed a util class for config that had fallbacks to config files, env vars and defaults. And I wanted type checking to work on the accessors. Nothing hard, but it would have taken time to look at docs for yaml parsing, how to find the home directory, which env vars api returns null vs error on blank, typing, etc. All easy, but takes time. Instead I described it in about 20 seconds and it wrote it (with tests) in a few seconds. It’s moved well past the stage “it can answer questions on stack overflow”. If it has been a while (a while=6 months in ML), try again with new sonnet 3.5.
- scosman 2y ago
  Another fun example from yesterday: pasted a blog post in markdown into a HTML comment. Selected it and told sonnet to convert it to HTML using another blog post as a style reference. Done in 5 seconds.
  - kccqzy 2y ago
    And how do you trust that it didn't just alter or omit some sentences from your blog post? I just use Pandoc for that purpose and it takes 30 seconds, including the time to install pandoc. For code generation where you'll review everything, AI makes sense; but for such conversion tasks, it doesn't because you won't review the generated HTML.
    - 2y ago
greenie_beans 2y ago
have you tried using cursor or claude?
yunwal 2y ago
> Snake case to camelCase > VSCode itself has command of "Transform to Camel Case" I never understand arguments like this. I have no idea what the shortcut for this command is. I could learn this shortcut, sure, but tomorrow I’ll need something totally different. Surely people can see the value of having a single interface that can complete pretty much any small-to-medium-complexity data transformation. It feels like there’s some kind of purposeful gaslighting going on about this and I don’t really get the motive behind it.
- cyral 2y ago
  Exactly. I think some commenters are taking this example too literally. It's not about this specific transformation, but how often you need to do similar transformations and don't know the exact shortcut or regex or whatever to make it happen. I can describe what I want in three seconds and be done with it. Literal dropbox.png going on in this thread.
EGreg 2y ago
If you aren’t using AI for everything, you’re using it wrong. Go learn how to use it better. It’s your job to find out how. Corporations are going to use it to replace your job. (Just kidding. I’m just making fun of how AI maxis reply to such comments, but they do it more subtly.)
bee_rider 2y ago
I’m slightly worried that these AI tools will hurt language development. Boilerplate heavy and overly verbose languages are flawed. Coding languages should help us express things more succinctly, both as code writers and as code readers. If AI tools let us vomit out boilerplate and syntax, I guess that sort of helps with the writing part (maybe. As long as you fully understand what the AI is writing). But it doesn’t make the resulting code any more understandable. Of course, as is always the case, the tools we have now are the dumbest they’ll ever be. Maybe in the future we can have understandable AI that can be used as a programming language, or something. But AI as a programming language generator seems bad.
- wry_discontent 2y ago
  I used to agree with this, but the proliferation of Javascript made me realize that newer/better programming languages were already not coming to save us.
- kubanczyk 2y ago
  Maybe it's a rectangle between: seniors copilots juniors new languages Wondering. Since the seniors pair with LLMs, world needs much less juniors. Some juniors will go away to other industries, but some might start projects in new languages without LLM/business support. Frankly, otherwise I don't see how any new lang corpus might get created.
rco8786 2y ago
Before you dismiss all of this because "You could do it by hand just as easily", you should actually try using Cursor. It only takes a few minutes to setup. I'm only 2 weeks in but it's basically impossible for me to imagine going back now. It's not the same as GH Copilot, or any of the other "glorified auto-complete with a chatbox" tools out there. It's head and shoulders better than everything else I have seen, likely because the people behind it are actual AI experts and have built numerous custom models for specific types of interactions (vs a glorified ChatGPT prompt wrapper).
deleted 2y ago
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Writingdorky 2y ago
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yen223 2y ago
Don't mean to be rude, but was this comment written with an LLM?
Myrmornis 2y ago
Have you tried Cursor, or is this just your guess at what your evaluation would be?

eru 2y ago

> Boilerplate are tedious, but not really time-consuming. In the aggregate, almost no programmer can think up code faster than they can type it in. But being a better typist still helps, because it cuts down on the amount you have to hold in your head. Similar for automatically generating boilerplate. > If I don't know, how can I trust the generated code to be correct? Ask the AI for a proof of correctness. (And I'm only half-joking here.) In languages like Rust the compiler gives you a lot of help in getting concurrency right, but you still have to write the code. If the Rust compiler approves of some code (AI generated or artisanally crafted), you are already pretty far along in concurrency right. A great mind can take a complex problem and come up with a simple solution that's easy to understand and obviously correct. AI isn't quite there yet, but getting better all the time.

mewpmewp2 2y ago
> In the aggregate, almost no programmer can think up code faster than they can type it in. But being a better typist still helps, because it cuts down on the amount you have to hold in your head. I mean on the big picture level sure they can. Or in detail if it is something that they have good experience with. In many cases I get a visual of the whole code blocks, and then if I use copilot I can already predict what it is going to auto complete for me based on the context and then I can pretty much in a second know if it was right or wrong. Of course it is more so for the side projects since I know exactly what I want to do and so it feels most of the time it is having to just vomit all the code out. And I feel impatient, so copilot helps a lot with that.
enord 2y ago
> In the aggregate, almost no programmer can think up code faster than they can type it in. And thank god! Code is a liability. The price of code is coming down but selling code is almost entirely supplanted by selling features (SaaS) as a business model. The early cloud services have become legacy dependencies by now (great work if you can get it). Maintaining code is becoming a central business concern in all sectors governed by IT (i.e. all sectors, eating the world and all that). On a per-feature basis, more code means higher maintenance costs, more bugs and greater demands on developer skills and experience. Validated production code that delivers proven customer value is not something you refactor on a whim (unless you plan to go out of business), and the fact that you did it in an evening thanks to ClippyGPT means nothing—-the costly part is always what comes after: demonstrating value or maintaing trust in a competitive market with a much shallower capital investment moat. Mo’ code mo’ problems.

shinycode 2y ago

I agree. I replaced SO with cGPT and it’s the only good case I found. Finding an answer I build onto. But outsourcing my reflexion ? That’s a dangerous path. I tried on small projects to do that, building a project from scratch with cursor just to test it. Sometimes it’s right on spot but in many instances it misses completely some cases and edge cases. Impossible to trust blindly. And if I do so and not take proper time to read and think about the code the consequences pile up and make me waste time in the long run because it’s prompt over prompt over prompt to refine it and sometimes it’s not exactly right. That messes up my thinking and I prefer to do it myself and use it as a documentation on steroids. I never used google and SO again for docs. I have the feeling that relying on it to much to write even small blocs of code will make us loose some abilities in the long run and I don’t think that’s a good thing. Will companies allow us to use AI in code interviews for boilerplate ?

Moru 2y ago
The AI's are to a large degree trained on tutorial code, quick examples, howto's and so on from the net. Code that really should come with a disclamer note: "Dont use in production, only example code.". This leads to your code being littered with problematic edge-cases that you still have to learn how to fix. Or in worst case you don't even notice that there are edge cases because you just copy-pasted the code and it works for you. The edge cases your users will find with time.
- agumonkey 2y ago
  Which makes me wonder, if old companies with a history of highly skilled teams would train local models, how better would they be at helping solve new complex problems.
  - SirHumphrey 2y ago
    They kinda already are - source code for highly complex open source software is already in the training datasets. The problem is that tutorials are much more descriptive (why the code is doing something, how does this particular function work etc. -down to a level of a single line of code), which probably means it’s much easier to interpret for llm-s, therefore weighted higher in responses.

Sateeshm 2y ago

Completely agree. I find it fails miserably at business logic, which is where we spend most of our time on. But does great at generic stuff, which is already trivial to find on stack overflow.

PUSH_AX 2y ago
This might be a promoting issue, my experience is very different, I’ve written entire services using it.
- miningape 2y ago
  Might be that they work in a much more complex codebase, or a language/framework/religion that has less text written on it. Might also be that they (are required to) hold code to a higher standard than you and can't just push half-baked slop to prod.
  - PUSH_AX 2y ago
    Without knowing much about my standards and work you’ve just assumed it’s half baked slop. You’re wrong.
    - miningape 2y ago
      Without knowing much about my prompts and work you’ve just assumed it’s why AI gives me bad results. You’re wrong. (Can you see why this is a bad argument?) Don't get me wrong I love sloppy code as much as the next cowboy, but don't delude yourself or others when the emperor doesn't have clothes on.
    - lomase 2y ago
      IA generated content is the definition of slop for most people.
      - TeMPOraL 2y ago
        Which is deeply sad, because this both tarnishes good output and gives a free pass to the competitor - shit "content" generated by humans. AI models only recently started to match that in quantity. But then again, most of software industry exists to create and support creation of human slop - advertising, content marketing, all that - so there's bound to be some double standards and salary-blindness present.

whatever1 2y ago

Have you tried recently to start a new web app from scratch? Specially the integration of frontend framework with styling and the frontend backend integration. Oh my god get ready to waste a full weekend just to setup everything and get a formatted hello world.

exe34 2y ago
that's an indictment of the proliferation of shitty frameworks and documentation. it's not hard to figure out such a combination and then keep a template of it lying around for future projects. you don't have to reach for the latest and shiniest at the start of every project.
- TeMPOraL 2y ago
  > you don't have to reach for the latest and shiniest at the start of every project. Except you kind of do, because if you're working frontend or mobile, then your chosen non-shitty tech stack is probably lacking some Important Language Innovations or Security Featuers that Google or Microsoft forced on the industry since last time you worked with that stack. (Yes, that's mostly just an indictment of the state of our industry.)
  - exe34 2y ago
    every time you capitulate, you tell them that you're happy to play along, bring more "innovation" so you keep having to run very hard just to stay in place.
dkersten 2y ago
Most frontend frameworks come with usable templates. Setting up a new Vite React project and getting to a formatted hello world can be done in half an hour tops.
- namaria 2y ago
  It takes me all of 5 minutes with Phoenix

dkersten 2y ago

1. Is such a taste task for me anyway that I don’t lose much just doing it by hand 2. The last time I wrote boilerplate heavy Java code, 15+ years ago, the IDE already generated most of it for me. Nowadays boilerplate comes in two forms for me: new project setup, which I find it far quicker to use a template or just copy and gut an existing project (and it’s not like I start new projects that often anyway), or new components that follow some structure, where AI might actually be useful but I tend to just copy an existing one and gut it. 3. These aren’t tasks I really trust AI for. I still attempt to use AI for them, but 9 out of 10 times come away disappointed. And the other 1 time end up having to change a lot of it anyway. I find a lot of value from AI, like you, asking it SO style questions. I do also use it for code snippets, eg “do this in CSS”. Its results for that are usually (but not always) reasonably good. I also use it for isolated helper functions (write a function to flood fill a grid where adjacent values match was a recent one). The results for this range from a perfect solution first try, to absolute trash. It’s still overall faster than not having AI, though. And I use it A LOT for rubber ducking. I find AI is a useful tool, but I find a lot of the positive stories to be overblown compared to my experience with it. I also stopped using code assistants and just keep a ChatGPT tab open. I sometimes use Claude but it’s conversation length limits turned me off. Looking at the videos in OP, I find the parallelising task to be exactly the kind of tricky and tedious task that I don’t trust AI to do, based on my experience with that kind of task, and with my experience with AI and the subtly buggy results it has given me.

viraptor 2y ago

> I could select one ":, use "Select All Occurrences" Only if it's the same occurrences. Cursor can often get the idea of what you want to do with the whole block of different names. Unless you're a vim macro master, it's not easily doable. > How many of you spend 90% of time writing boilerplate instead of the core logic of the project? It doesn't take much time, but it's a distraction. I'd rather tab through some things quickly than context switch to the docs, finding the example, adapting it for the local script, then getting back to what I was initially trying to do. Working memory in my brain is expensive.

never_inline 2y ago

100%. Useful cases include * figuring out how to X in an API - eg "write method dl_file(url, file) to download file from url using requests in a streaming manner" * Brainstorming which libraries / tools / approaches exist to do a given task. Google can miss some. AI is a nice complement for Google.

dexwiz 2y ago
I don’t even trust the API based exercises anymore unless it’s a stable and well documented API. Too many times I’ve been bitten by an AI mixing and matching method signatures from different versions, using outdated approaches, mixing in apis from similar libraries, or just completely hallucinating a method. Even if I load the entire library docs into the context, I haven’t found one that’s completely reliable.
- never_inline 2y ago
  It just has to be popular and common boilerplate like the example I gave. It's hard with less popular APIs. It will almost always get something wrong. In such cases, I read docs, search sourcegraph / GitHub, and finally check the source code.

JamesBarney 2y ago

Disagree. I still spend a good amount of time on boilerplate. Stuff that's not thinking hard about the problem I'm trying to solve. Stuff like units tests, error logging, naming classes, methods and variables. Claude is really pretty good at this, not as good as the best code I've read in my career but definitely better than average. When I review sonnets code the code is more likely to be correct than if I review my own. If I make a mistake I'll read what I intended to write, and not what I actually wrote. Where as when I review sonnets there's 2 passes so the chance an error slips through is smaller.

pylua 2y ago
Unit tests are boiler plate ?
- JamesBarney 2y ago
  I'm using an expansive definition of boiler plate to be sure. But like boiler plate most unit tests require a little bit of thought and then a good amount of typing, doing things like setting up the data to test, mocking up methods, writing out assertions to test all your edge cases. I've found sonnet and o1 to be pretty good at this. Better than writing the actual code because while modifying a system requires a lot of context of the overall application and domain, unit testing a method usually doesn't.
- uh_uh 2y ago
  Quite often, yes. That's why I prefer integration tests.
  - girvo 2y ago
    Indeed. To many tests are just testing nothing other than mocks. That goes for my coworkers directly and for their Copilot output. They’re not useful tests, they are thing to catch actual errors, they’re maybe useful as usage documentation. But in general, they’re mostly a waste. Integration tests, good ones, are harder but far more valuable.

johnisgood 2y ago

Boilerplate comes up all the time when writing Erlang with OTP behaviors though, and sometimes you have no idea if it really is the right way or not. There are Emacs skeletons for that (through tempo), but feels like they are sometimes out of date.

theshrike79 2y ago

I have a corporation-sponsored subscription to Github CoPilot + Rider When I'm writing unit tests or integration tests it can guess the boilerplate pretty well. If I already have a AddUserSucceeds test and I start writing `public void Dele...` it usually fills up the DeleteUserSucceeds function with pretty good guesses on what Asserts I want there - most times it even guesses the API path/function correctly because it uses the whole project as context. I can also open a fresh project I've never seen and ask "Where is DbContext initialised" and it'll give me the class and code snippet directly.

scosman 2y ago

I started like this. Then I came around and can’t imagine going back. It’s kinda like having a really smart new grad, who works instantly, and has memorized all the docs. Yes I have to code review and guide it. That’s an easy trade off to make for typing 1000 tokens/s, never losing focus, and double checking every detail in realtime. First: it really does save a ton of time for tedious tasks. My best example is test cases. I can write a method in 3 minutes, but Sonnet will write the 8 best test cases in 4 seconds, which would have taken me 10 mins of switching back and forth, looking at branches/errors, and mocking. I can code review and run these in 30s. Often it finds a bug. It’s definitely more patient than me in writing detailed tests. Instant and pretty great code review: it can understand what you are trying to do, find issues, and fix them quickly. Just ask it to review and fix issues. Writing new code: it’s actually pretty great at this. I needed a util class for config that had fallbacks to config files, env vars and defaults. And I wanted type checking to work on the accessors. Nothing hard, but it would have taken time to look at docs for yaml parsing, how to find the home directory, which env vars api returns null vs error on blank, typing, etc. All easy, but takes time. Instead I described it in about 20 seconds and it wrote it (with tests) in a few seconds. It’s moved well past the stage “it can answer questions on stack overflow”. If it has been a while (a while=6 months in ML), try again with new sonnet 3.5.

scosman 2y ago
Another fun example from yesterday: pasted a blog post in markdown into a HTML comment. Selected it and told sonnet to convert it to HTML using another blog post as a style reference. Done in 5 seconds.
- kccqzy 2y ago
  And how do you trust that it didn't just alter or omit some sentences from your blog post? I just use Pandoc for that purpose and it takes 30 seconds, including the time to install pandoc. For code generation where you'll review everything, AI makes sense; but for such conversion tasks, it doesn't because you won't review the generated HTML.
  - 2y ago

greenie_beans 2y ago

have you tried using cursor or claude?

yunwal 2y ago

> Snake case to camelCase > VSCode itself has command of "Transform to Camel Case" I never understand arguments like this. I have no idea what the shortcut for this command is. I could learn this shortcut, sure, but tomorrow I’ll need something totally different. Surely people can see the value of having a single interface that can complete pretty much any small-to-medium-complexity data transformation. It feels like there’s some kind of purposeful gaslighting going on about this and I don’t really get the motive behind it.

cyral 2y ago
Exactly. I think some commenters are taking this example too literally. It's not about this specific transformation, but how often you need to do similar transformations and don't know the exact shortcut or regex or whatever to make it happen. I can describe what I want in three seconds and be done with it. Literal dropbox.png going on in this thread.

EGreg 2y ago

If you aren’t using AI for everything, you’re using it wrong. Go learn how to use it better. It’s your job to find out how. Corporations are going to use it to replace your job. (Just kidding. I’m just making fun of how AI maxis reply to such comments, but they do it more subtly.)

bee_rider 2y ago

I’m slightly worried that these AI tools will hurt language development. Boilerplate heavy and overly verbose languages are flawed. Coding languages should help us express things more succinctly, both as code writers and as code readers. If AI tools let us vomit out boilerplate and syntax, I guess that sort of helps with the writing part (maybe. As long as you fully understand what the AI is writing). But it doesn’t make the resulting code any more understandable. Of course, as is always the case, the tools we have now are the dumbest they’ll ever be. Maybe in the future we can have understandable AI that can be used as a programming language, or something. But AI as a programming language generator seems bad.

wry_discontent 2y ago
I used to agree with this, but the proliferation of Javascript made me realize that newer/better programming languages were already not coming to save us.
kubanczyk 2y ago
Maybe it's a rectangle between: seniors copilots juniors new languages Wondering. Since the seniors pair with LLMs, world needs much less juniors. Some juniors will go away to other industries, but some might start projects in new languages without LLM/business support. Frankly, otherwise I don't see how any new lang corpus might get created.

rco8786 2y ago

Before you dismiss all of this because "You could do it by hand just as easily", you should actually try using Cursor. It only takes a few minutes to setup. I'm only 2 weeks in but it's basically impossible for me to imagine going back now. It's not the same as GH Copilot, or any of the other "glorified auto-complete with a chatbox" tools out there. It's head and shoulders better than everything else I have seen, likely because the people behind it are actual AI experts and have built numerous custom models for specific types of interactions (vs a glorified ChatGPT prompt wrapper).

deleted 2y ago

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Writingdorky 2y ago

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yen223 2y ago

Don't mean to be rude, but was this comment written with an LLM?

Myrmornis 2y ago

Have you tried Cursor, or is this just your guess at what your evaluation would be?