Devs gaining little (if anything) from AI coding assistants
Devs gaining little (if anything) from AI coding assistants
Code analysis firm sees no major benefits from AI dev tool when measuring key programming metrics, though others report incremental gains from coding copilots with emphasis on code review.
“Many developers say AI coding assistants make them more productive, but a recent study set forth to measure their output and found no significant gains. Use of GitHub Copilot also introduced 41% more bugs, according to the study from Uplevel”
study referenced: Can GenAI Actually Improve Developer Productivity? (requires email)
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AI coding assistance is good for the same stuff you would have put through a tool assisted service previously anyway. Regex and other forms of complex pattern matching are way easier for a computer than a human. The only difference now is that you can just write out the problem plainly instead of in tiny chunks.
I recently had to write a script to parse an nginx log for unique entries with very specific criteria that could vary depending on other criteria, and then do some crap to manipulate that data and use portions of it for API calls to other more complicated shit. Figuring out how to properly parse that data manually would be mind numbing. AI does it instantly.
That's not to say that the entire concept as a marketing ploy isn't complete bullshit, but if it were just used for the crap it's good at, it would actually be a net benefit to society.
Regex and other forms of complex pattern matching are way easier for a computer than a human.
I know what you meant by this, but I still chuckled. Humans are the ultimate pattern matching machines in the whole solar system.
I agree there. I like it for doing most of the commenting and by extension causing me to comment more as I change the comments a little. Most of the rest was pretty much available before like suggestions as you type. Im concerned about the energy usage but they can be useful if used properly. I think the real problem is mba's have bought into that you can hire cheap people and they just have to ask the ai how to do things and it will happen. That they can hire prompting engineers instead of coders.