TechTakes

Thank you for saving me the breath to shit on that person's attitude :)

and the engineers I know who are still avoiding it work noticeably slower

yep yep! as we all know, velocity is all that matters! crank that handle, produce those features! the factory must flow!!

and you fucking know what? it's not even just me being a snide motherfucker, this rant is literally fucking supported by data:

The survey found that 75.9% of respondents (of roughly 3,000* people surveyed) are relying on AI for at least part of their job responsibilities, with code writing, summarizing information, code explanation, code optimization, and documentation taking the top five types of tasks that rely on AI assistance. Furthermore, 75% of respondents reported productivity gains from using AI.

...

As we just discussed in the above findings, roughly 75% of people report using AI as part of their jobs and report that AI makes them more productive.

And yet, in this same survey we get these findings:

if AI adoption increases by 25%, time spent doing valuable work is estimated to decrease 2.6% if AI adoption increases by 25%, estimated throughput delivery is expected to decrease by 1.5% if AI adoption increases by 25%, estimated delivery stability is expected to decrease by 7.2%

and that's a report sponsored and managed right from the fucking lying cloud company, no less. a report they sponsor, run, manage, and publish is openly admitting this shit. that is how much this shit doesn't fucking work the way you sell it to be doing.

but no, we should trust your driveby bullshit. motherfucker.

Please, señor software engineer was my father. Call me Bob.

I agree with you on the examples listed, there are much better tools than an LLM for that. And I agree no one should be copy and pasting without consideration, that's a misuse of these tools.

I'd say my main uses are kicking off a new test suite (obviously you need to go and check the assertions are what you expect, but it's usually about 95% there) which has gone from a decent percentage of the work for a feature down to an almost negligible amount of time. This one also results in me enjoying my job a bit more now too as I've always found writing tests a bit of a drudgery.

The other big use for me is that my organisation is pretty big and has a hefty amount of code (a good couple of thousand repos at least), we have a tool that's based on GPT which has processed all the code, so you can now ask queries about internal stuff that may not be well documented or particularly obvious. This one saves a load of time because I now don't always have to do the Slack merry go round to try and find an engineer that knows about what I'm looking for—sometimes it's still unavoidable, but they're less frequent moments now.

If LOC/min or a similar metric is used to measure efficiency at your company, I am genuinely sorry.

It's tied to OKR completion, which is generally based around delivery. If you deliver more feature work, it generally means your team's scores will be higher and assuming your manager is aware of your contributions, that translates to a bigger bonus. It's more of a carrot than a stick situation IMO, I could work less hard if I didn't want the extra money.

ah but did you tell them in CP437 or something fancy (like any text encoding after 1996)? 🤨🤨🥹

"despite the many people who have shown time and time and time again that it definitely does not do fine detail well and will often present shit that just 10000% was not in the source material, I still believe that it is right all the time and gives me perfectly clean code. it is them, not I, that are the rubes"

That ChatGPT can be more useful than a web search is really more indicative of how bad the web has got, and can only get worse as fake text invades it. It's not actually better than a functional search engine and a functional web, but the companies making these things have no interest in the web being usable. Pretty depressing.