Programmer Humor

That estimate seems a little low to me. It's at least 115%.

And if you need anything else, you have to use a new prompt which will generate a brand new application, it's fun!

And it still doesn't work. Just "mostly works".

That's the thing, it's a useful assistant for an expert who will be able to verify any answers.

It's a disaster for anyone who's ignorant of the domain.

I turned on copilot in VSCode for the first time this week. The results so far have been less than stellar. It's batting about .100 in terms of completing code the way I intended. Now, people tell me it needs to learn your ways, so I'm going to give it a chance. But one thing it has done is replaced the normal auto-completion which showed you what sort of arguments a function takes with something that is sometimes dead wrong. Like the code will not even compile with the suggested args.

It also has a knack for making me forget what I was trying to do. It will show me something like the left side picture with a nice rail stretching off into the distance when I had intended it to turn, and then I can't remember whether I wanted to go left or right? I guess it's just something you need to adjust to. Like you need to have a thought fairly firmly in your mind before you begin typing so that you can react to the AI code in a reasonable way? It may occasionally be better than what you have it mind, but you need to keep the original idea in your head for comparison purposes. I'm not good at that yet.

If you're having to do repetitive shit, you might reconsider your approach.

It's taken me a while to learn how to use it and where it works best but I'm coming around to where it fits.

Just today i was doing a new project, i wrote a couple lines about what i needed and asked for a database schema. It looked about 80% right. Then asked for all the models for the ORM i wanted and it did that. Probably saved an hour of tedious typing.

Shhhh! You're not supposed to rock the AI hate boat.

I knocked off an android app in Flutter/Dart/Supabase in about a week of evenings with Claude. I have never used Flutter before, but I know enough coding to fix things and give good instructions about what I want.

It would even debug my android test environment for me and wrote automated tests to debug the application, as well as spit out the compose files I needed to set up the Supabase docker container and SQL queries to prep the database and authentication backend.

That was using 3.5Sonnet, and from what I've seen of 3.7, it's way better. I think it cost me about $20 in tokens. I've never used AI to code anything before, this was my first attempt. Pretty cool.

I'm being pretty resistant about AI code Gen. I assume we're not too far away from "Our software product is a handcrafted bespoke solution to your B2B needs that will enable synergies without exposing your entire database to the open web".

The one on the right prints “hello world” to the terminal

Engineers love moving parts, known for their reliability and vigor

Might is the important here

It gives you the right picture when you asked for a single straight track on the prompt. Now you have to spend 10 hours debugging code and fixing hallucinations of functions that don't exist on libraries it doesn't even neet to import.

While being more complex and costly to maintain

When did you get diagnosed?

OpenTTD is a good game.

LLMs can be great for translating pseudo code into real code or creating boiler plate or automating tedious stuff, but ChatGPT is terrible at actual software engineering.

They mean time to write the code, not compile time. Let's be honest, the AI will write it in Python or Javascript anyway