Explain this too me AI. Reads back exactly what’s on the screen including comments somehow with more words but less information
Ok…
Ok, this is tricky. AI, can you do this refactoring so I don’t have to keep track of everything. No… Thats all wrong… Yeah I know it’s complicated, that’s why I wanted it refactored. No you can’t do that… fuck now I can either toss all your changes and do it myself or spend the next 3 hours rewriting it.
Yeah I struggle to find how anyone finds this garbage useful.
I bet it slows down the idiot software developers more than anything.
Everything can be broken into smaller easily defined chunks and for that AI is amazing.
Give me a function in Python that if I provide it a string of XYZ it will provide me an array of ABC.
The trick is knowing how it fits in your larger codebase. That’s where your developer skill is. It’s no different now than it was when coding was offshored to India. We replaced Ravinder with ChatGPT.
Edit - what I hate about AI is the blatant lying. I asked it for some ServiceNow code Friday and it told me to use the sys_audit_report table which doesn’t exist. I told it so and then it gave me the sys_audit table.
The future will be those who are smart enough to know when AI is lying and know how to fix it when it is. Ideally you are using AI for code you can do, you just don’t want to. At least that’s my experience. In that, it’s invaluable.
You shouldn’t think of “AI” as intelligent and ask it to do something tricky. The boring stuff that’s mostly just typing, that’s what you get the LLMs to do. “Make a DTO for this table <paste>” “Interface for this JSON <paste>”
I just have a bunch of conversations going where I can paste stuff into and it will generate basic code. Then it’s just connecting things up, but that’s the fun part anyway.
I can jot down a bunch of notes and have ai turn it into a reasonable presentation or documentation or proposal
zoom has an ai agent which is pretty good about summarizing a meeting. It usually just needs minor corrections and you can send it out much faster than taking notes
for coding I mostly use ai like autocomplete. Sometimes it’s able to autocomplete entire code blocks
for something new I might have ai generate a class or something, and use it as a first draft where I then make it work
dumping email threads into it to generate user stories,
generating requirements documentation templates so that everyone has to fill out the exact details needed to make the project a success
generating quick one-off scripts
suggesting a consistent way to refactor a block of code (I’m not crazy enough to let it actually do all the refactoring)
summarize the work done for a slide deck and generate appropriate infographics
Essentially, all the stuff that I’d need to review anyway, but use of AI means that actually generating the content can be done in a consistent manner that I don’t have to think about. I don’t let it create anything, just transform things in blocks that I can quickly review for correctness and appropriateness. Kind of like getting a junior programmer to do something for me.
Sounds like you just need to find a better way to use AI in your workflows.
Github Copilot in Visual Studio for example is fantastic and offers suggestions including entire functions that often do exactly what you wanted it to do, because it has the context of all of your code (if you give it that, of course).
Explain this too me AI. Reads back exactly what’s on the screen including comments somehow with more words but less information Ok…
Ok, this is tricky. AI, can you do this refactoring so I don’t have to keep track of everything. No… Thats all wrong… Yeah I know it’s complicated, that’s why I wanted it refactored. No you can’t do that… fuck now I can either toss all your changes and do it myself or spend the next 3 hours rewriting it.
Yeah I struggle to find how anyone finds this garbage useful.
If you give it the right task, it’s super helpful. But you can’t ask it to write anything with any real complexity.
Where it thrives is being given pseudo code for something simple and asking for the specific language code for it. Or translate between two languages.
That’s… about it. And even that it fucks up.
I bet it slows down the idiot software developers more than anything.
Everything can be broken into smaller easily defined chunks and for that AI is amazing.
Give me a function in Python that if I provide it a string of XYZ it will provide me an array of ABC.
The trick is knowing how it fits in your larger codebase. That’s where your developer skill is. It’s no different now than it was when coding was offshored to India. We replaced Ravinder with ChatGPT.
Edit - what I hate about AI is the blatant lying. I asked it for some ServiceNow code Friday and it told me to use the sys_audit_report table which doesn’t exist. I told it so and then it gave me the sys_audit table.
The future will be those who are smart enough to know when AI is lying and know how to fix it when it is. Ideally you are using AI for code you can do, you just don’t want to. At least that’s my experience. In that, it’s invaluable.
You shouldn’t think of “AI” as intelligent and ask it to do something tricky. The boring stuff that’s mostly just typing, that’s what you get the LLMs to do. “Make a DTO for this table <paste>” “Interface for this JSON <paste>”
I just have a bunch of conversations going where I can paste stuff into and it will generate basic code. Then it’s just connecting things up, but that’s the fun part anyway.
Most ides do the boring stuff with templates and code generation for like a decade so that’s not so helpful to me either but if it works for you.
I have asked questions, had conversations for company and generated images for role playing with AI.
I’ve been happy with it, so far.
That’s kind of outside the software development discussion but glad you’re enjoying it.
As a developer
I’ve had success with:
Essentially, all the stuff that I’d need to review anyway, but use of AI means that actually generating the content can be done in a consistent manner that I don’t have to think about. I don’t let it create anything, just transform things in blocks that I can quickly review for correctness and appropriateness. Kind of like getting a junior programmer to do something for me.
Sounds like you just need to find a better way to use AI in your workflows.
Github Copilot in Visual Studio for example is fantastic and offers suggestions including entire functions that often do exactly what you wanted it to do, because it has the context of all of your code (if you give it that, of course).