What they forget to mention is that you then spend the rest of the week to fix the bugs it introduced and to explain why your code deleted the production database…
I would rather paint a portrait by myself, spending the time to do it, rather than asking some computer prompt to spit me out a picture. Same logic applies with coding for me.
By the headline statement, that it should be complete and works 100%. Big doubt.
Depends. If it’s a script that will like, cut your video file every 10 seconds with ffmpeg or something simple. Yeah it will one-shot it.
No, just complete. Whatever the dude does may have morning to do with what you needed it to do, but it will be “done”
My problem is that the dev and stage environments are giving me 502 gateway errors when hitting only certain api endpoints from the app gateway. My real problem is devops aren’t answering my support tickets and telling me which terraform var file I gotta muck with and tell me what to fix on it. I’m sure you’ll be fixed soon though right copilot?
yes but all the code will be wrong and you will spend your entire day chasing stupid mistakes and hallucinations in the code. I’d rather just write the code myself thanks.
Yeah! I can make my own stupid mistakes and hallucinations, thank you very much!
I was finished with Windows before Microshit finished Copilot.
It says it will finish the code, it doesn’t say the code will work.
Also just because the code works, doesn’t mean it’s good code.
I’ve had to review code the other day which was clearly created by an LLM. Two classes needed to talk to each other in a bit of a complex way. So I would expect one class to create some kind of request data object, submit it to the other class, which then returns some kind of response data object.
What the LLM actually did was pretty shocking, it used reflection to get access from one class to the private properties with the data required inside the other class. It then just straight up stole the data and did the work itself (wrongly as well I might add). I just about fell of my chair when I saw this.
So I asked the dev, he said he didn’t fully understand what the LLM did, he wasn’t familiar with reflection. But since it seemed to work in the few tests he did and the unit tests the LLM generated passed, he thought it would be fine.
Also the unit tests were wrong, I explained to the dev that usually with humans it’s a bad idea to have the person who wrote the code also (exclusively) write the unit tests. Whenever possible have somebody else write the unit tests, so they don’t have the same assumptions and blind spots. With LLMs this is doubly true, it will just straight up lie in the unit tests. If they aren’t complete nonsense to begin with.
I swear to the gods, LLMs don’t save time or money, they just give the illusion they do. Some task of a few hours will take 20 min and everyone claps. But then another task takes twice as long and we just don’t look at that. And the quality suffers a lot, without anyone really noticing.
Great description of a problem I noticed with most LLM generated code of any decent complexity. It will look fantastic at first but you will be truly up shit creek by the time you realise it didn’t generate a paddle.
I was going to say. The code won’t compile but it will be “finished “
A couple agent iterations will compile. Definitely won’t do what you wanted though, and if it does it will be the dumbest way possible.
Yeah you can definitely bully AI into giving you some thing that will run if you yell at it long enough. I don’t have that kind of patience
Edit: typically I see it just silently dump errors to /dev/null if you complain about it not working lol
And people say that AI isn’t humanlike. That’s peak human behavior right there, having to bother someone out of procrastination mode.
The edit makes it even better, swiping things under the rug? Hell yeah!
Copilot keeps finishing my code for me in near real time… it completely disrupts my train of thought and my productivity dropped tremendously. I finally disabled it.
I LIKE writing code, stop trying to take the stuff away that I WANT to do and instead take away the stuff I HATE doing.
What I don’t want AI to do:
- write code for me
- write fixes for me
What I want it to do:
- find bugs and tell me about them (but still don’t fix them)
Yeah, I just wrote a blog post comment about how I enjoy using Copilot. But that’s when I explicitly ask it a question or give it a task. The auto complete is wrong more often than it’s right.
Probably doesn’t help that if it was tedious, boilerplate code I would have already explicitly asked it.
I had a bit of a breakthrough with some personal growth with my code today.
I learned a bit more about entity framework that my company is using for a project, and was able to create a database table, query it, add/delete/update, normal CRUD stuff.
I normally work mostly on front end code, so it was rewarding to learn a new skill and see the data all the way from the database to the UI and back - all my code. I felt great after doing a code review this afternoon to make sure I wasn’t missing anything, and we talked about some refactoring to make it better.
AI will never give you that.
No, but it can help a capable developer to have more of those moments, as one can use LLMs and coding agents to (a) help explain the relationships in a complicated codebase succinctly and (b) help to quickly figure out why one’s code doesn’t work as expected (from simple bugs to calling out one’s own fundamental misunderstandings), giving one more time to focus on what matters to oneself.
Wow, well it’s absolutely terrible at A. B is worth a shot, but it’s 50/50 to bullshit you in my experience.
Yeah - there’s definitely a GIGO factor. Throwing it at a undocumented codebase with poor and inconsistent function & variable names isn’t likely to yield great revelations. But it can probably still tell you why changing input X didn’t result in a change to output Y (with 50k lines of code in-between), saving you a bunch of debugging time.
TBH, it’s not really that great at that. Is average at best and grossly misleading and flat out wrong at worst. It may bring slight speedups for average development on boring legacy enterprise code, but anything really novel and interesting? Detrimental.
Most code on the planet is boring legacy code, though. Novel and interesting is typically a small fraction of a codebase, and it will often be more in the design than the code itself. Anything that can help us make boring code more digestible is welcome. Plenty of other pitfalls along the way though.
Fair enough, that’s true. I guess my gripe is with the narrow use case and the debugging and/or prompt/context tuning to get what you want. I still feel that if you don’t get what you want on the first try, it’s faster to write it yourself than spending time “debugging” the input and maybe get a 60% chance on correct output, which in most cases, still needs debugging. And god forbid, a framework is rewritten.
I just wished it was a bit better before we hit the plateau of diminishing returns.
Hah, yeah. Vibe coding and prompt engineering seem like a huge fad right now, although I don’t think it’s going to die out, just the hype.
The most successful vibe projects in the next few years are likely to be the least innovative technically, following well trodden paths (and generating lots of throwaway code).
I suppose we’ll see more and more curated collections of AI-friendly design documents and best-practice code samples to enable vibe coding for varied use-cases, and this will be the perceived value add for various tools in the short term. The spec driven development trend seems to have value, adding semantic layers for humans and AI alike.
AI can help you be more agile in getting out a PoC but vibe coding always ends up eating itself and you either aren’t capable enough to fix it (because you are a vibe coder) or you spend more time on the back 9, trying to clean up the code so you don’t have so many hacks and redundancy because the AI was too literal or hallucinated fake libraries that return null or its context window expired and it wrote 5 different versions of the same function
Eh, I’ve enjoyed writing a SQL query and having AI translate it to Linq. I’ve had at least one work directly, very clear on what it’s doing, just with Linq’s odd syntax. The other query was more complicated and wasn’t something that translated well to Linq. I may have had to split that into two Linq queries.
Then again, I wouldn’t count translating psuedocode (or SQL) as really vibe coding. To me “vibe coding” means you’re not really looking at the code it produces.
It’s a changing world, and there is going to be an ever increasing amount of AI slop out there, and even more potential programmers who won’t make the leap due to the crutch.
At the same time, there are always people who want to and will learn in spite of the available crutches the latest tech revolution brings.
There will also be many good engineers who will exploit the tech for all its worth while applying appropriate rigour, increasing their real productivity and value manyfold.
And there will be many non-programmers who can achieve much more in their respective fields, because AI tools can bridge gaps for them.
Hopefully we won’t irreversibly destroy ourselves and our planet while we’re at it. 🙈
Removed by mod
Hm? Oh, I obviously misread the room. It seems I interrupted a circle jerk? My apologies.
I thought you made a good point. I have decades of experience and I find LLMs useful for the things you described.
I have a suspicion that the guy took issue with my use of “one” instead of “you”, more-so than the content. Maybe it came across as uppity.
Ooh, unemployment! How exciting! I love Microsoft now.
Seriously who the hell are they trying to sell this to?
Are they just that desperate to keep the hype train going?
Business owners. People that don’t want to spend money on annoying stuff like wages.
retail suckers and losers who buy into the AI crap to keep the “bubble from bursting overnight”
The circlejerk of tech bros and busidiots who haven’t built a damn thing in their lives.
There are entire media agencies that only do vibe coding. And that might be enough for a one-off event but many of them „develop“ long term solutions without knowing the code or it‘s vulnerabilities so it‘s safe to say their existence will be short lived.
Copilot, turn on the gas stove without the pilot. Copilot, in 3 hours light the pilot.
My Windows automatically read these instructions from my screen and I died!
You forgot to follow it up with “copilot: open windows” then.
Username checks out
To safely put it out just pee on it.
“Microsoft Says Copilot” is like a Two Sentence horror story for me now.
But, will it work, huh? HUH?
I can also type a bunch of random sentences of words. Doesn’t make it more understandable.
but can YOU do it before I finish my coffee?
Some models are getting so good they can patch user reported software defects following test driven development with minimal or no changes required in review. Specifically Claude Sonnet and Gemini
So the claims are at least legit in some cases
Oh good. They can show us how it’s done by patching open-source projects for example. Right? That way we will see that they are not full of shit.
Where are the patches? They have trained on millions of open-source projects after all. It should be easy. Show us.
That’s an interesting point, and leads to a reasonable argument that if an AI is trained on a given open source codebase, developers should have free access to use that AI to improve said codebase. I wonder whether future license models might include such clauses.
Free access to the model is one thing but free access to compute for it is another
Are you going to spend your tokens on open source projects? Show us how generous you are.
I’m not the one trying to prove anything, and I think it’s all bullshit. I’m waiting for your proof though. Even with a free open-source black box.
Will it execute . . . probably.
Will it execute what you want it to . . . probably not.
You really have no idea, I’m working with these tools in industry and with test driven development and human review these are .performing better than human developers
But… But I don’t want it to. 😮💨
