It’s simple, really. If you don’t understand what the AI is telling you to code, you’ll spend five times what it would take a rawdogger to code it.
If you write the stuff yourself from scratch you know your train of thought, you know what it means and you know what it needs to be better.
Show me a head to head comparison of several coders doing the same assignment and let half of them use AI. Then we can assess the effects. My hypothesis is that the fastest one would have used AI. The slowest one wouldn’t have used AI but is a crappy coder. But there will probably will be non-AI coders quicker than some AI coders.
This. Coding challenges aren’t indicative of building an actual application. So far, I’ve found AI vastly inferior to any human I work with. Only use I’ve found is writing a bunch of basic tests to save some monotony. Still requires a bunch of extra tests to be written though since it never fully groks the code.
I disagree so much. The problem with all of these takes are, that they are build on the assumption that the main skill of a software engineer is writing code. That’s the same mistake a lot of “< seniors” do.
See, the important thing about engineering is to provide a fitting solution that satisfies many different domains. You need to understand and interconnect a lot of information. And the most important thing a good engineer has is “creativity”.
In your example, you think about assignments as you have them in university. Arbitrary scenarios that learn you a tool (which is usually a programming language). However, that is not an assignment you are faced as an engineer.
It’s not like in NCIS where someobey comes and says: “Can you make this algorithm faster?”
It’s more like (an actual example from last week): can you (as in team) analyze why this legacy system failed? We have these analytics for you. We currently conduct these labs, and have these user voices. Figure out a way how we can revamp this whole thing, but this time successful. Once done create a MVP and a rough roadmap. Latter in alignment with our overarching strategy.
I tried chatgpr on something I didn’t understand and it lead me down the wrong path. Ai is only good for boilerplate and finding out interesting ways to refactor imo.
Show me a head to head comparison of several coders doing the same assignment and let half of them use AI. Then we can assess the effects. My hypothesis is that the fastest one would have used AI. The slowest one wouldn’t have used AI but is a crappy coder. But there will probably will be non-AI coders quicker than some AI coders.
You need to introduce one more independent variable, which would be level of coding/ programing experience. If you really do already know what you are doing, and you know how to structure a good query, and know how to confirm if the code assistant/ AI got it right, it absolutely does make you much faster. Also, for really low level stuff, like defining helper functions, it rarely gets them objectively wrong, although they are often pretty… plain? or naive? So I would extend this hypothesis to cover the range of skill levels in individual coders and programmers. I think this is actually the striking difference. If you already know enough to code these things from scratch, it does make a huge difference.
Here is an example that I would use (prompt), and the result.
Prompt:
I want a python function to pull imagery for a bounding box in latitude longitude, for a specific year, and a specific band order from this arcgis REST server (https://map.dfg.ca.gov/arcgis/rest/services/Base_Remote_Sensing). I always want a 512 by 512 pixel tile. The layer pattern for the server is NAIP_XXXX_ZZZZ where XXXX is the year, and ZZZZ is either 4Band, CIR, or NDVI, or missing (including the underscore) for RGB. I want the data as a spatially projected geotiff. Have the function query the server first to confirm the layer options before querying.
Response:
import requests
import rasterio
from rasterio.io import MemoryFile
import numpy as np
def get_arcgis_imagery(bbox, year, band_order, output_path):
"""
Pulls imagery from the ArcGIS REST server for a given bounding box, year, and band order.
Parameters:
- bbox: (min_lon, min_lat, max_lon, max_lat)
- year: YYYY (e.g., 2020)
- band_order: '4Band', 'CIR', 'NDVI', or '' for RGB
- output_path: Path to save the output GeoTIFF
"""
base_url = "https://map.dfg.ca.gov/arcgis/rest/services/Base_Remote_Sensing"
service_url = f"{base_url}/NAIP_{year}_{band_order}/ImageServer" if band_order else f"{base_url}/NAIP_{year}/ImageServer"
# Confirming the layer exists
response = requests.get(f"{service_url}?f=json")
if response.status_code != 200:
raise ValueError(f"Layer NAIP_{year}_{band_order} does not exist on the server.")
# Defining export parameters
params = {
'bbox': f"{bbox[0]},{bbox[1]},{bbox[2]},{bbox[3]}",
'bboxSR': 4326,
'size': '512,512',
'imageSR': 3857, # Projected coordinate system
'format': 'tiff',
'f': 'image'
}
# Requesting the imagery
export_url = f"{service_url}/exportImage"
image_response = requests.get(export_url, params=params)
if image_response.status_code != 200:
raise ValueError("Failed to retrieve image data.")
# Saving the image as a GeoTIFF
with MemoryFile(image_response.content) as memfile:
with memfile.open() as dataset:
profile = dataset.profile
data = dataset.read()
with rasterio.open(output_path, 'w', **profile) as dst:
dst.write(data)
This function appears in just a second, and I don’t even need to consider its details. Its well written, commented, and it just works.
But this is something a third grader could do. This is not engineering work at all.
This may not be production read code as it should also consider the context where this will be inserted, what is your strategy for handling errors etc …
And last but not least I bet this is the first stackoverflow post content when asking the same question to google.
Not worth burning the planet in my opinion.
Show me a third grader who understands the technical underpinnings of GDAL and WMS sufficiently to implement this without documentation and I’ll concede the point. Technical proficiency isn’t just knowing how to use a shovel, its knowing where the bones are buried, and if you are long enough in the tooth like some of us are, knowing how to bury them. Its knowing what will change and how if I use 3857 versus 4326 in the above context (do YOU know what that would do?); what difference getting these results as png, or jpg, or tif would represent. If you have a third grader handy that can address any of the above, DM me because I’ll hire them right now.
The morality of these tools are independent from their utility. When you mix the two judgments you muddle them both beyond the point of legibility.
It’s simple, really. If you don’t understand what the AI is telling you to code, you’ll spend five times what it would take a rawdogger to code it.
If you write the stuff yourself from scratch you know your train of thought, you know what it means and you know what it needs to be better.
Show me a head to head comparison of several coders doing the same assignment and let half of them use AI. Then we can assess the effects. My hypothesis is that the fastest one would have used AI. The slowest one wouldn’t have used AI but is a crappy coder. But there will probably will be non-AI coders quicker than some AI coders.
I’d also bet on AI making isolated solutions, that will be impossible to integrate without incurring massive technical debt.
This. Coding challenges aren’t indicative of building an actual application. So far, I’ve found AI vastly inferior to any human I work with. Only use I’ve found is writing a bunch of basic tests to save some monotony. Still requires a bunch of extra tests to be written though since it never fully groks the code.
Claiming an ai can’t write a single simple function well is such a joke take I can’t tell if you’re serious or not.
Maybe it was unclear, but my point wasn’t isolated functions, rather the trying to glue several of them together into a coherent application.
I disagree so much. The problem with all of these takes are, that they are build on the assumption that the main skill of a software engineer is writing code. That’s the same mistake a lot of “< seniors” do.
See, the important thing about engineering is to provide a fitting solution that satisfies many different domains. You need to understand and interconnect a lot of information. And the most important thing a good engineer has is “creativity”.
In your example, you think about assignments as you have them in university. Arbitrary scenarios that learn you a tool (which is usually a programming language). However, that is not an assignment you are faced as an engineer.
It’s not like in NCIS where someobey comes and says: “Can you make this algorithm faster?”
It’s more like (an actual example from last week): can you (as in team) analyze why this legacy system failed? We have these analytics for you. We currently conduct these labs, and have these user voices. Figure out a way how we can revamp this whole thing, but this time successful. Once done create a MVP and a rough roadmap. Latter in alignment with our overarching strategy.
I tried chatgpr on something I didn’t understand and it lead me down the wrong path. Ai is only good for boilerplate and finding out interesting ways to refactor imo.
You need to introduce one more independent variable, which would be level of coding/ programing experience. If you really do already know what you are doing, and you know how to structure a good query, and know how to confirm if the code assistant/ AI got it right, it absolutely does make you much faster. Also, for really low level stuff, like defining helper functions, it rarely gets them objectively wrong, although they are often pretty… plain? or naive? So I would extend this hypothesis to cover the range of skill levels in individual coders and programmers. I think this is actually the striking difference. If you already know enough to code these things from scratch, it does make a huge difference.
Here is an example that I would use (prompt), and the result. Prompt:
Response:
import requests import rasterio from rasterio.io import MemoryFile import numpy as np
This function appears in just a second, and I don’t even need to consider its details. Its well written, commented, and it just works.
But this is something a third grader could do. This is not engineering work at all. This may not be production read code as it should also consider the context where this will be inserted, what is your strategy for handling errors etc … And last but not least I bet this is the first stackoverflow post content when asking the same question to google. Not worth burning the planet in my opinion.
Show me a third grader who understands the technical underpinnings of GDAL and WMS sufficiently to implement this without documentation and I’ll concede the point. Technical proficiency isn’t just knowing how to use a shovel, its knowing where the bones are buried, and if you are long enough in the tooth like some of us are, knowing how to bury them. Its knowing what will change and how if I use 3857 versus 4326 in the above context (do YOU know what that would do?); what difference getting these results as png, or jpg, or tif would represent. If you have a third grader handy that can address any of the above, DM me because I’ll hire them right now.
The morality of these tools are independent from their utility. When you mix the two judgments you muddle them both beyond the point of legibility.