AI-generated code contains more bugs and errors than human output
AI-generated code contains more bugs and errors than human output
Anyone blindly having AI write their code is an absolute moron.
Anyone with decent experience (5-10 years, maybe 10+?) can absolutely fucking skyrocket their output if they properly set up their environments and treat their agents as junior devs instead of competent programmers. You shouldn’t trust generated code any more than you trust someone fresh out of college, but they produce code in seconds instead of weeks.
I have tripled my output while producing more secure code (based on my security audits), safer code (based on code coverage), and less error-prone code (based on production logs and our unchanged QA process).
Now, the ethical issues and environmental issues, I 100% can get behind. And I have no idea what companies are going to do in 10 years when they have to replace people like me and haven’t been hiring or training replacements. But the productivity and quality debates are absolutely ridiculous, as long as a strong dev is behind the wheel and has been trained to use the tools.
Consider: [dev.to/…/the-ai-productivity-paradox-why-develope…](the facts)
People are very bad at judging their own productivity, and AI consistently makes devs feel like they are working faster, while in fact slowing them down.
I’ve experienced it myself - it feels fucking great to prompt a skeleton and have something brand new up and running in under an hour. The good chemicals come flooding in because I’m doing something new and interesting.
Then I need to take a scalpel to a hundred scattered lines to get CI to pass. Then I need to write tests that actually test functionality. Then I start extending things and realize the implementation is too rigid and I need to change the architecture.
It is as this point that I admit to myself that going in intentionally with a plan and building it myself the slow way would have saved all that pain and probably got the final product shipped sooner, even if the prototype was shipped later.
The end of your comment was
But the productivity and quality debates are absolutely ridiculous
Which is a general statement and not dealing with your specific circumstance. If a tool works for you, by all means keep using it.
However, broadly across software that is not the case. So the “productivity and quality debates” are not ridiculous … the data supports the sceptics.
Which is a general statement and not dealing with your specific circumstance. If a tool works for you, by all means keep using it.
Absolute nonsense. Have we banned hammers because some people keep hitting their hands with them? Have we banned ladders as one of the single most dangerous items in any household?
I don’t think we should be putting these tools in the hands of junior devs - as the studies show, it hinders their productivity and learning. But to generally claim that they are bad tools with no upsides is just as ridiculous as the strawman you set up.