Plenty of good programmers use AI extensively while working. Me included.
Mostly as an advance autocomplete, template builder or documentation parser.
You obviously need to be good at it so you can see at a glance if the written code is good or if it’s bullshit. But if you are good it can really speed things up without any risk as you will only copy cody that you know is good and discard the bullshit.
Obviously you cannot develop without programming knowledge, but with programming knowledge is just another tool.
I maintain strong conviction that if a good programmer uses llm in their work, they just add more work for themselves, and if less than good one does it, they add new exciting and difficult to find bugs, while maintaining false confidence in their code and themselves.
I have seen so much code that looks good on first, second, and third glance, but actually is full of shit, and I was able to find that shit by doing external validation like talking to the dev or brainstorming the ways to test it, the things you categorically cannot do with unreliable random words generator.
That’s why you use unit test and integration test.
I can write bad code myself or copy bad code from who-knows where. It’s not something introduced by LLM.
Remember famous Linus letter? “You code this function without understanding it and thus you code is shit”.
As I said, just a tool like many other before it.
I use it as a regular practice while coding. And to be true, reading my code after that I could not distinguish what parts where LLM and what parts I wrote fully by myself, and, to be honest, I don’t think anyone would be able to tell the difference.
It would probably a nice idea to do some kind of turing test, a put a blind test to distinguish the AI written part of some code, and see how precisely people can tell it apart.
I may come back with a particular piece of code that I specifically remember to be an output from deepseek, and probably withing the whole context it would be indistinguishable.
Also, not all LLM usage is for copying from it. Many times you copy to it and ask the thing yo explain it to you, or ask general questions. For instance, to seek for specific functions in C# extensive libraries.
That’s why you use unit test and integration test.
Good start, but not even close to being enough. What if code introduces UB? Unless you specifically look for that, and nobody does, neither unit nor on-target tests will find it. What if it’s drastically ineffective? What if there are weird and unusual corner cases?
Now you spend more time looking for all of that and designing tests that you didn’t need to do if you had proper practices from the beginning.
It would probably a nice idea to do some kind of turing test, a put a blind test to distinguish the AI written part of some code, and see how precisely people can tell it apart.
But that’s worse! You do realise how that’s worse, right? You lose all the external ways to validate the code, now you have to treat all the code as malicious.
For instance, to seek for specific functions in C# extensive libraries.
And spend twice as much time trying to understand why can’t you find a function that your LLM just invented with absolute certainty of a fancy autocomplete. And if that’s an easy task for you, well, then why do you need this middle layer of randomness. I can’t think of a reason why not to search in the documentation instead of introducing this weird game of “will it lie to me”
Also I don’t see how you will take more that 5 second to verify that a given function does not exist. It has happen to me, llm suggesting unexisting function. And searching by function name in the docs is instantaneous.
I you don’t want to use it don’t. I have been more than a year doing so and I haven’t run into any of those catastrophic issues. It’s just a tool like many others I use for coding. Not even the most important, for instance I think LSP was a greater improvement on my coding efficiency.
It’s like using neovim. Some people would post me a list of all the things that can go bad for making a Frankenstein IDE in a ancient text editor. But if it works for me, it works for me.
And there is enormous amount of safeguards, tricks, practices and tools we come up with to combat it. All of those are categorically unavailable to an autocomplete tool, or a tool who exclusively uses autocomplete tool to code.
Also I don’t see how you will take more that 5 second to verify that a given function does not exist. It has happen to me, llm suggesting unexisting function. And searching by function name in the docs is instantaneous.
Which means you can work with documentation. Which means you really, really don’t need the middle layer, like, at all.
I haven’t run into any of those catastrophic issues.
Glad you didn’t, but also, I’ve reviewed enough generated code to know that a lot of the time people think they’re OK, when in reality they just introduced an esoteric memory leak in a critical section. People who didn’t do it by themselves, but did it because LLM told them to.
I you don’t want to use it don’t.
It’s not about me. It’s about other people introducing shit into our collective lives, making it worse.
You can actually apply those tools and procedures to automatically generated code, exactly the same as in any other piece of code. I don’t see the impediment here…
You must be able to understand that searching by name is not the same as searching by definition, nothing more to add here…
Why would you care of the shit code submitted to you is bad because it was generated with AI, because it was copied from SO, or if it’s brand new shit code written by someone. If it’s bad is bad. And bad code have existed since forever. Once again, I don’t see the impact of AI here. If someone is unable to find that a particular generated piece of code have issues, I don’t see how magically is going to be able to see the issue in copypasted code or in code written by themselves. If they don’t notice they don’t, no matter the source.
I will go back to the Turing test. If you don’t even know if the bad code was generated, copied or just written by hand, how are you even able to tell that AI is the issue?
There is an exception to this I think. I don’t make ai write much, but it is convenient to give it a simple Java class and say “write a tostring” and have it spit out something usable.
Plenty of good programmers use AI extensively while working. Me included.
Mostly as an advance autocomplete, template builder or documentation parser.
You obviously need to be good at it so you can see at a glance if the written code is good or if it’s bullshit. But if you are good it can really speed things up without any risk as you will only copy cody that you know is good and discard the bullshit.
Obviously you cannot develop without programming knowledge, but with programming knowledge is just another tool.
I maintain strong conviction that if a good programmer uses llm in their work, they just add more work for themselves, and if less than good one does it, they add new exciting and difficult to find bugs, while maintaining false confidence in their code and themselves.
I have seen so much code that looks good on first, second, and third glance, but actually is full of shit, and I was able to find that shit by doing external validation like talking to the dev or brainstorming the ways to test it, the things you categorically cannot do with unreliable random words generator.
That’s why you use unit test and integration test.
I can write bad code myself or copy bad code from who-knows where. It’s not something introduced by LLM.
Remember famous Linus letter? “You code this function without understanding it and thus you code is shit”.
As I said, just a tool like many other before it.
I use it as a regular practice while coding. And to be true, reading my code after that I could not distinguish what parts where LLM and what parts I wrote fully by myself, and, to be honest, I don’t think anyone would be able to tell the difference.
It would probably a nice idea to do some kind of turing test, a put a blind test to distinguish the AI written part of some code, and see how precisely people can tell it apart.
I may come back with a particular piece of code that I specifically remember to be an output from deepseek, and probably withing the whole context it would be indistinguishable.
Also, not all LLM usage is for copying from it. Many times you copy to it and ask the thing yo explain it to you, or ask general questions. For instance, to seek for specific functions in C# extensive libraries.
Good start, but not even close to being enough. What if code introduces UB? Unless you specifically look for that, and nobody does, neither unit nor on-target tests will find it. What if it’s drastically ineffective? What if there are weird and unusual corner cases?
Now you spend more time looking for all of that and designing tests that you didn’t need to do if you had proper practices from the beginning.
But that’s worse! You do realise how that’s worse, right? You lose all the external ways to validate the code, now you have to treat all the code as malicious.
And spend twice as much time trying to understand why can’t you find a function that your LLM just invented with absolute certainty of a fancy autocomplete. And if that’s an easy task for you, well, then why do you need this middle layer of randomness. I can’t think of a reason why not to search in the documentation instead of introducing this weird game of “will it lie to me”
Any human written code can and will introduce UB.
Also I don’t see how you will take more that 5 second to verify that a given function does not exist. It has happen to me, llm suggesting unexisting function. And searching by function name in the docs is instantaneous.
I you don’t want to use it don’t. I have been more than a year doing so and I haven’t run into any of those catastrophic issues. It’s just a tool like many others I use for coding. Not even the most important, for instance I think LSP was a greater improvement on my coding efficiency.
It’s like using neovim. Some people would post me a list of all the things that can go bad for making a Frankenstein IDE in a ancient text editor. But if it works for me, it works for me.
And there is enormous amount of safeguards, tricks, practices and tools we come up with to combat it. All of those are categorically unavailable to an autocomplete tool, or a tool who exclusively uses autocomplete tool to code.
Which means you can work with documentation. Which means you really, really don’t need the middle layer, like, at all.
Glad you didn’t, but also, I’ve reviewed enough generated code to know that a lot of the time people think they’re OK, when in reality they just introduced an esoteric memory leak in a critical section. People who didn’t do it by themselves, but did it because LLM told them to.
It’s not about me. It’s about other people introducing shit into our collective lives, making it worse.
You can actually apply those tools and procedures to automatically generated code, exactly the same as in any other piece of code. I don’t see the impediment here…
You must be able to understand that searching by name is not the same as searching by definition, nothing more to add here…
Why would you care of the shit code submitted to you is bad because it was generated with AI, because it was copied from SO, or if it’s brand new shit code written by someone. If it’s bad is bad. And bad code have existed since forever. Once again, I don’t see the impact of AI here. If someone is unable to find that a particular generated piece of code have issues, I don’t see how magically is going to be able to see the issue in copypasted code or in code written by themselves. If they don’t notice they don’t, no matter the source.
I will go back to the Turing test. If you don’t even know if the bad code was generated, copied or just written by hand, how are you even able to tell that AI is the issue?
There is an exception to this I think. I don’t make ai write much, but it is convenient to give it a simple Java class and say “write a tostring” and have it spit out something usable.