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Yeah... It's useful for summarizing searches but I'm tempted to disable it in VSCode because it's been getting in the way more than helping lately.
Experienced software developer, here. "AI" is useful to me in some contexts. Specifically when I want to scaffold out a completely new application (so I'm not worried about clobbering existing code) and I don't want to do it by hand, it saves me time.
And... that's about it. It sucks at code review, and will break shit in your repo if you let it.
On that last note, important thing they left out here being general news reporting tech stuff is that this was specifically bug fixing tasks. It can typically only provide the broadest of advice on that, and it’s largely incapable of tackling problems holistically when you often need to be thinking big picture while tackling a bug.
Interesting that the AI devs thought they were being quicker though.
Same. I also like it for basic research and helping with syntax for obscure SQL queries, but coding hasn't worked very well. One of my less technical coworkers tried to vibe code something and it didn't work well. Maybe it would do okay on something routine, but generally speaking it would probably be better to use a library for that anyway.
I actively hate the term "vibe coding." The fact is, while using an LLM for certain tasks is helpful, trying to build out an entire, production-ready application just by prompts is a huge waste of time and is guaranteed to produce garbage code.
At some point, people like your coworker are going to have to look at the code and work on it, and if they don't know what they're doing, they'll fail.
I commend them for giving it a shot, but I also commend them for recognizing it wasn't working.
I think the term pretty accurately describes what is going on: they don't know how to code, but they do know what correct output for a given input looks like, so they iterate with the LLM until they get what they want. The coding here is based on vibes (does the output feel correct?) instead of logic.
I don't think there's any problem with the term, the problem is with what's going on.
That's fair. I guess what I hate is what the term represents, rather than the term itself.
Not a developer per se (mostly virtualization, architecture, and hardware) but AI can get me to 80-90% of a script in no time. The last 10% takes a while but that was going to take a while regardless. So the time savings on that first 90% is awesome. Although it does send me down a really bad path at times. Being experienced enough to know that is very helpful in that I just start over.
In my opinion AI shouldn’t replace coders but it can definitely enhance them if used properly. It’s a tool like everything. I can put a screw in with a hammer but I probably shouldn’t.
Fun how the article concludes that AI tools are still good anyway, actually.
This AI hype is a sickness
LLMs are very good In the correct context, forcing people to use them for things they are already great at is not the correct context.
Upper management said a while back we need to use copilot. So far just used Deepseek to fill out the stupid forms that management keep getting us to fill out
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.
This was the case a year or two ago but now if you have an MCP server for docs and your project and goals outlined properly it's pretty good.
Not to sound like one of the ads or articles but I vice coded an iOS app in like 6 hours, it's not so complex I don't understand it, it's multifeatured, I learned a LOT and got a useful thing instead of doing a tutorial with sample project. I don't regret having that tool. I do regret the lack of any control and oversight and public ownership of this technology but that's the timeline we're on, let's not pretend it's gay space communism (sigh) but, since AI is probably driving my medical care decisions at the insurance company level, might as well get something to play with.
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 Service now 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 " "Interface for this JSON "
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.
Writing code is the easiest part of my job. Why are you taking that away?
no shit. ai will hallucinate shit I’ll hit tab by accident and spend time undoing that or it’ll hijack tab on new lines inconsistently
I study AI, and have developed plenty of software. LLMs are great for using unfamiliar libraries (with the docs open to validate), getting outlines of projects, and bouncing ideas for strategies. They aren't detail oriented enough to write full applications or complicated scripts. In general, I like to think of an LLM as a junior developer to my senior developer. I will give it small, atomized tasks, and I'll give its output a once over to check it with an eye to the details of implementation. It's nice to get the boilerplate out of the way quickly.
Don't get me wrong, LLMs are a huge advancement and unbelievably awesome for what they are. I think that they are one of the most important AI breakthroughs in the past five to ten years. But the AI hype train is misusing them, not understanding their capabilities and limitations, and casting their own wishes and desires onto a pile of linear algebra. Too often a tool (which is one of many) is being conflated with the one and only solution--a silver bullet--and it's not.
This leads to my biggest fear for the AI field of Computer Science: reality won't live up to the hype. When this inevitably happens, companies, CEOs, and normal people will sour on the entire field (which is already happening to some extent among workers). Even good uses of LLMs and other AI/ML use cases will be stopped and real academic research drying up.
My fear for the software industry is that we'll end up replacing junior devs with AI assistance, and then in a decade or two, we'll see a lack of mid-level and senior devs, because they never had a chance to enter the industry.
Code reviews take up a lot of time, and if I know a lot of code in a review is AI generated I feel like I'm obliged to go through it with greater rigour, making it take up more time. LLM code is unaware of fundamental things such as quirks due to tech debt and existing conventions. It's not great.