Absolutely has been my experience. It’s actually slowed me down because of the slop it tends to throw in there as part of the hallucinations.
One of the common uses I’ve heard is for generating boiler plate code. I have two thoughts on this. First, you actually have to understand what the boiler plate code is doing for it to be of any value. Second, there are already solutions for this that work just as well or better. Most of the major IDE’s either support code templates or have extensions for that. You just have to be willing to take the time to create templates. I use Resharper with Visual Studio for this all the time.
I tried copilot free for a month and was not that impressed.
A colleague once “showed off” how impressive Copilot supposedly was. I was like:
- Please don’t let AI write unit tests. That’s the one spot where I really don’t need bugs done by automation.
- Don’t you guys use snippets? I do that shit faster with snippets, macros and knowing my way around neovim.
I don’t have snippets set up for languages I’ve never touched before.
But copilot sucks. ChatGPT went super downhill. Claude is alright. If I know the language then it’s not that helpful. But if I don’t, or I don’t know the algorithm, then yeah, it’s super helpful.
I’d rather just write it out. I’ve never used snippets or macros per say, but I do make liberal use of regex replace and multiline cursors lol. Writing out a bunch of getters and setters? Regex!
I did try LLM tab auto complete and while sure, it did suggest some stuff that was useful (after refactoring it), the amount of time I spent WTF’ing some suggestions it made wasn’t worth it.
I find more benefit from asking an LLM about something I’m undecided or confused about, and while it’s never given me a good enough answer, it has stirred enough creative juices in my brain to help me along lol.
Edit: sorry for the dupes. When Eternity said it failed the send I took that at face value.
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Honestly, it’s GREAT for replying to bull shit business emails.
Bullshit countering bullshit. Finally, an actual use for LLMs.
As a hobbyist with no production-environment or critical coding projects, Google Gemini has been great for generating a starting point for Arduino projects if I otherwise don’t know how to get going.
I used replit for education. At some point they added ai assistance. It was like pair programming with someone who is over eager and doesn’t know why you’re dying things.
When I’m teaching code, I don’t need ai to finish my circle calculation program before I’ve explained the first line to students.
I, on the other hand, am very happy that AI can autocomplete the n-th similar filter function I need to write.
In line completion of repetitive stuff is fine, even though it does often introduce bugs, meaning I still need to read every single char it writes. Now scale that up to entire functions, project that onto people that don’t know the language/library well, and don’t understand the function itself. That’s just chaos.
