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.
lj·rk@matzipan @jenniferplusplus @scottjenson But isn't the right way to do this to... not write repetitive code. Copilot just makes writing bad code easier.
cratermoon@ljrk @matzipan @jenniferplusplus @scottjenson I'm also a bit confused by this. If you mean you can change a variable name one place and have it change everywhere else, refactoring tools can also do that. But yeah, if you have duplicate code, the solution isn't "automatically update all the other places this code appears", it's "extract the duplicate code to its own thing", and again, refactoring tools can mostly already do that.