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Living Room / Re: AI Coding Assistants (Who uses them and which)
« on: September 17, 2024, 11:25 PM »Do you mean the quality of the code? The LLMs themselves? or am I missing something-KynloStephen66515 (August 02, 2024, 02:45 PM)
Any example I've seen so far seems to be a garbage answer, unusable or totally unfit to what it's supposed to be tailored to. I'll wait and see what's left after the dust of this hype settles-Ath (August 02, 2024, 04:23 PM)
Not sure what you use. We use Copilot at work and it's been a wonder. It helps me not have to do scut work, and I use it in place of going to stack overflow also.
What I use it for:
Algorithms that I know but would have to look up the implementation.
Spotting inefficiencies in code
Unit Tests
Documentation
Explaining new or under documented code
Scaffolding new classes and POCO/Entities from examples
Generating test data
It really takes a lot of scut work out, and lets me concentrate on other work.
I also use one that's linked to our documentation to help take the load off of us having to do support for the API. We have the documentation, but putting it into a format that everyone can find what they're looking for (or even wants to find what they're looking for) is a challenge. Having them ask their question, and being able to link them to documentation/logs has really cut down on our support queues.
Two of the main problems with "AI coding assistants" - whether they claim to be able to write a complete application or simply complete variable names based on what they boozed up on the internet last night - are these:
- They violate licences. There are many examples (and probably a large number of unreported cases) of parts of code copied verbatim that were under a clear licence, but that clear licence is not part of what was copied.
- They are writing rubbish. A work colleague likes to have work supposedly done by ChatGPT. I would need the time he needs to iron out the worst mistakes in the result to simply write what he wanted to achieve myself. Incidentally, this does not seem to be a ChatGPT-specific problem.
And I'm not even taking into account the mental embarrassment I would personally experience were I to be degraded from a developer to a supplicant to the computer...-Tuxman (August 06, 2024, 05:24 AM)
Incorrect. Github Copilot is set to filter out code that uses public sources- it's basing it on context within the app. I asked it for a particular algorithm, and had to massage the prompt because the code was getting filtered out.
If you need to explain how the algorithm is supposed to work en detail, wouldn’t it be easier to just write the algorithm yourself either way?-Tuxman (August 06, 2024, 10:37 AM)
You don't really have to explain in detail, depending on the context and what you're trying to get. In one case, I just couldn't remember the type of algorithm I needed, and gave it a general idea of what I wanted to do (b-tree sort without modification or recursion) and it gave me that I wanted the Morris Traversal, and an example.
