However, I would argue (even though I have no data back this claim up) that most developers either choose to use it or are required by their employers. I can't predict the future, so I don't know if this is an ASM vs. C kind of moment, or if those giving in to the convenience will regret it years down the line when their skills atrophy.
Me personally, I use it and I feel more productive than ever. That said I can't help but feeling a bit of shame when admitting that. Hearing so many people say that AI-generated code is unusable and fixing it takes longer than writing it by hand, makes me wonder if they are working on a very specific field or I just have skill issues. Or maybe both.
How much AI are you using? If you do, do you feel comfortable admitting it?
The value is not writing the code anymore, but deciding what to create and keeping the code maintainable and understandable.
About the AI generated slop thing, honestly a tool which i use is impeccable - you can find it on Github. It transforms your generic AI slop code into something beautiful.
Personally I'm really comfortable admitting I use AI - it just seems like the better way to do things!
In my work, there are people everywhere in the "AI adoption" spectrum.
On one hand, a certain Senior engineer spent a month having an AI write him thousands of lines of code for a feature. The AI wrote a million tests, tools to visualize data, everything. But he still has not delivered the code to the main repository since he knows nobody will ever review the mess the AI wrote, and he can't even properly understand it to defend it in review. We have human reviews as part of our process, the coworker is 100% stuck on it.
I, on the other hand, don't ask AI to write code for me, but I have AI explain me concepts, track down bugs, review my patches, etc. Sometimes it shows me patch format, but I prefer it doesn't touch my filesystem. I treat it as a senior employee whose task is to be there and help me. It's been going great. I am definitely more productive, I am coding faster, and the future is sustainable for me. Having it write shit for me would definitely be faster, but I want to use AI as a tool to teach me what to do, not do it for me.
There are also employees who are still working on the pre-AI model. Whenever AI is mentioned, they automatically assume it could be hallucinating and whatnot. To these, I never mention AI, because it simply derails the conversation to a useless point.
The worst part is whenever my tokens ran out , my productivity was zero. I was even an engineer anymore just a glorified prompter.
Lately i have changed how i work, i still use it but like a fancy autocomplete, a debugger,
I make it draft stuff for me , then i interrogate it, i make it justify every line of code that it writes, until i understand the code myself that i can write it if i wanted to.
Guys listen to me oneshot an entire feature may seem like you're 10x productivity but once the code it generate becomes complex even the agent can't deal with the complexity it itself created.
Big LLM companies market the product as coding is over, just become a prompter and buy our subsbscription fees.
We used to get paid to write code, now we pay to write code.
I think it's important to disclaim AI generated content, as a matter of courtesy.
The Github CoPilot proved interesting, but when I tried to use it to create a simulator for my BitGrid project, it just created a massive pile of slop that kept growing and getting worse. On its own, it does nothing to curate code, it is strongly biased towards adding more patches.
ChatGPT is interesting for exploring ideas, but you can't trust its math, you have to check it. It easily gets itself off by 3 or more orders of magnitude when things get interesting.