JenniferplusplusSo, what was up last week, when all of tech suddenly decided that writing software isn't good or useful or interesting?
Cuz, I gotta say, that sucks, and you're all wrong.
Like, I really don't get why so many of you are so eager to have statistical models write code for you.
I've been arguing for literally my whole career that the actual writing isn't the hard part of software development. But wow, did everyone take that in the wrong direction recently.
Understanding the system is the hard and valuable part. And I genuinely don't know how you think you're going to do that if you never get to do any of the safe and easy interactions with the system.
matzipan@jenniferplusplus @scottjenson I've been playing with copilot and I have found some genuine uses for it:
1. It uses context like comments and other lines of code and acts as an autocomplete++. If you have some repetitive code with some changes in variables it will pick up on those and make changes needed. In a docstring I wrote if a variable was 1, 2 or 3 bytes. I wrote the code for 1 byte and then copilot wrote the code for 2 and 3 bytes and correctly adjusted the asserts and encodings.
1. It uses context like comments and other lines of code and acts as an autocomplete++. If you have some repetitive code with some changes in variables it will pick up on those and make changes needed. In a docstring I wrote if a variable was 1, 2 or 3 bytes. I wrote the code for 1 byte and then copilot wrote the code for 2 and 3 bytes and correctly adjusted the asserts and encodings.
2. It has a clever way of looking inside functions and open tabs to write actually good comments about the code you are referencing. A few times have I found that it wrote the exact non-trivial comment that I wanted to write.
@jenniferplusplus @scottjenson That being said it most of the time fucks up and misses completely 🙄
@matzipan @scottjenson As I said elsewhere, using AI to write code for you is the software dev equivalent of sitting behind the wheel of a self driving car. Just waiting to take responsibility for when things go wrong.
@jenniferplusplus @scottjenson Of course. To the same extent that if autocomplete gives you the wrong thing and you press enter its your fault.