Reminds me of The Primeagen quote:
“If copilot made you 10x better, then you were only a 0.1x programmer to begin with”.
As someone who uses ChatGPT and Claude daily, but cancelled my Copilot subscription after a year of use because it intimately just wasn’t that helpful to me and didn’t provide enough benefit over doing it by hand, I kind of sort of agree. Maybe not entirely, but I can’t shake the feeling that there might be some truth in it.
The code that AI generates for me is rarely good. It’s possible to get good code out of it, but it requires many iterations of careful review and prompting, but for most cases, I can write it quicker by hand. Where it really shines for me in programming and what I still use ChatGPT and Claude for is rubber ducking and as an alternative to documentation (eg “how do I do x in css”).
Besides the code quality being mediocre at best and outright rubbish at worst, it’s too much of a “yes man”, it’s lazy (choose between A and B: why not a hybrid approach? That’s… not what I asked for), and it doesn’t know how to say “I don’t know”.
I also feel it makes you, the human programmer, lazy. We need to exercise our brains, not delegate too much to a dumb computer.
> I also feel it makes you, the human programmer, lazy. We need to exercise our brains, not delegate too much to a dumb computer.
I kinda feel like this isn't talked about enough, my main concern right from the beginning was that new programmers would rely on it too much and never improve their own abilities.
As someone who uses ChatGPT and Claude daily, but cancelled my Copilot subscription after a year of use because it intimately just wasn’t that helpful to me and didn’t provide enough benefit over doing it by hand, I kind of sort of agree. Maybe not entirely, but I can’t shake the feeling that there might be some truth in it.
The code that AI generates for me is rarely good. It’s possible to get good code out of it, but it requires many iterations of careful review and prompting, but for most cases, I can write it quicker by hand. Where it really shines for me in programming and what I still use ChatGPT and Claude for is rubber ducking and as an alternative to documentation (eg “how do I do x in css”).
Besides the code quality being mediocre at best and outright rubbish at worst, it’s too much of a “yes man”, it’s lazy (choose between A and B: why not a hybrid approach? That’s… not what I asked for), and it doesn’t know how to say “I don’t know”.
I also feel it makes you, the human programmer, lazy. We need to exercise our brains, not delegate too much to a dumb computer.