Just out of curiosity. I have no moral stance on it, if a tool works for you I’m definitely not judging anyone for using it. Do whatever you can to get your work done!

  • @[email protected]
    27•1 year ago

    not chatGPT - but I tried using copilot for a month or two to speed up my work (backend engineer). Wound up unsubscribing and removing the plugin after not too long, because I found it had the opposite effect.

    Basically instead of speeding my coding up, it slowed it down, because instead of my thought process being

    1. Think about the requirements
    2. Work out how best to achieve those requirements within the code I’m working on
    3. Write the code

    It would be

    1. Think about the requirements
    2. Work out how best to achieve those requirements within the code I’m working on
    3. Start writing the code and wait for the auto complete
    4. Read the auto complete and decide if it does exactly what I want
    5. Do one of the following depending on 4 5a. Use the autocomplete as-is 5b. Use the autocomplete then modify to fix a few issues or account for a requirement it missed 5c. Ignore the autocomplete and write the code yourself

    idk about you, but the first set of steps just seems like a whole lot less hassle then the second set of steps, especially since for anything that involved any business logic or internal libraries, I found myself using 5c far more often than the other two. And as a bonus, I actually fully understand all the code committed under my username, on account of actually having wrote it.

    I will say though in the interest of fairness, there were a few instances where I was blown away with copilot’s ability to figure out what I was trying to do and give a solution for it. Most of these times were when I was writing semi-complex DB queries (via Django’s ORM), so if you’re just writing a dead simple CRUD API without much complex business logic, you may find value in it, but for the most part, I found that it just increased cognitive overhead and time spent on my tickets

    EDIT: I did use chatGPT for my peer reviews this year though and thought it worked really well for that sort of thing. I just put in what I liked about my coworkers and where I thought they could improve in simple english and it spat out very professional peer reviews in the format expected by the review form

    • @Aceticon
      1•1 year ago

      As a side note, whilst I don’t really use AI to help with coding, I was kinda expecting what you describe, more so for having stuff like ChatGPT doing whole modules.

      You see, I’ve worked as a freelancer (contractor) most of my career now and in practice that does mostly mean coming in and fixing/upgrading somebody else’s codebase, though I’ve also done some so-called “greenfield projects” (entirelly new work) and in my experience the “understanding somebody else’s code” is a lot more cognitivelly heavy that “coming up with your own stuff” - in fact some of my projects would’ve probably gone faster if we just rewrote the whole thing (but that wasn’t my call to make and often the business side doesn’t want to risk it).

      I’m curious if multiple different pieces of code done with AI actually have the same coding style (at multiple levels, so also software design approach) or not.