Comparing it to ai is insane.
edit: too much brain damaged opinions here
Either you never touched a programming language in your life and don’t know what Auto completion is in combination with what ever source indexing technology used vs using an ai which generates chunks of code this is not about comparing „tools“ this is about undermining effort/knowledge based on using mentioned tools and this is factually an ass comparison to make in every way
Not really. They are actually learning from the data and derive something plausible. The monkey analogy equates to "random gibberish can be meaningful by accident".
LLMs are quite a step above that. Their main problem currently seems to be, that they'd rather hallucinate something plausible-looking than say "I don't know".
My company has started having their Senior Developers use GitHub Copilot. I haven't been using it by doing any "prompt" engineering but more of just how Intellisense previously was being used and have been pleasantly surprised. It more frequently than not provides useful multiple lines of auto complete code overall making the actual coding process a little more efficient. Do I think it's helping anywhere near enough to replace a full Junior Developer on the team? Nowhere close. But it has been neat to use.
An IDE is a tool. A fucking keyboard is a tool.
Can't compare them as if they are equivalent just because they belong in the same extremely broad category.
Being able to code without AI doesn't stop me being a tool either, but you don't hear me complaining, just all of my friends and loved ones and people who meet me.
All I can think is that everyone with their panties in a bunch about AI in programming hasn't actually looked at the current capabilities and seen how little it can be relied upon for.
Every time I read the comments on reddit or YouTube, I feel like I'm being gaslit. Like, surely AI hasn't become useful in the 3 months since I last took a look at it.
AI is fast, but it's got an extremely low ceiling on the level of complexity it can handle before it starts spitting out gibberish.
Ask it a common problem like the probability of different sums when rolling two dice and it does fine because that problem has appeared on the internet hundreds of times. Ask it about probabilities when rolling three dice and you just get confidently (and often hilariously) wrong answers.
That’s like saying for athletes that dependence on drinking water and dependence on anabolic steroids are the same thing
The comparison only works if you completely strip away the context and the lessons learned from basic human experience
I've been joking since VS2015 that my job is just tab dot tab dot tab semi colon. VS2012 there was barely anything. And it was brilliantly fast because of it, like vs code.
VS2015 the intellisense basically replaced resharper. By VS2017 most people I knew actually uninstalled resharper. In part because it fought with intellisense and also because it had by then been superceded by it.
Nowadays it'll pick up on what you're doing and offer to follow that pattern throughout the rest of the file. Auto complete can sometimes be brilliant.
Plus now they've actually integrated GitHub CoPilot into the IDE. I don't have CoPilot but I see the little button in the top right. So I think these days comparing it to AI is pretty accurate. I'm not knowledgeable on AI but it certainly feels like there's some ChatGPT-2 level shit going on even in vanilla intellisense.
That's because Intellisense was using what would be called an "ML" model today (more accurate to call it and associated models recommendation engines, but I digress) which was ranked on how common a proceeding indexed token would appear based on the pattern established by previous tokens in the AST. The reason it's as heavy as it is is because it requires you to constantly run what basically amounts to a compiler frontend and an indexing server that runs over your entire codebase and libraries to be queried. I'd argue it's still immensely more useful than LLMs with programming because it's not pretending to be anything more than a search/recommendation engine.
AI has yet to tell me that a question has already been asked and link me to a completely unrelated question while also blocking me from making any questions for the next several weeks
And failing this web browser to look up the docs online, failing that the include/java files on disk, failing that I'm deciding to get a drink because society has fallen
$ man unzip
UNZIP(1) General Commands Manual UNZIP(1)
NAME
unzip - list, test and extract compressed files in a ZIP archive
SYNOPSIS
unzip [-Z] [-cflptTuvz[abjnoqsCDKLMUVWX$/:^]] file[.zip] [file(s) ...] [-x xfile(s) ...] [-d exdir]
DESCRIPTION
unzip will list, test, or extract files from a ZIP archive, commonly found on MS‐DOS systems. The default behavior (with no op‐
tions) is to extract into the current directory (and subdirectories below it) all files from the specified ZIP archive. A com‐
panion program, zip(1), creates ZIP archives; both programs are compatible with archives created by PKWARE’s PKZIP and PKUNZIP
for MS‐DOS, but in many cases the program options or default behaviors differ.
...
> but if you rely on it entirely, your code is going to be shit
Honestly, that's not even the bad part.
The bad part is that you don't learn. If you rely on AI too much you end up having no more value than the AI. And if your goal is to be employable that's quite important, because employing you is a *hell* of a lot more expensive.
I actually found it is quiet helpfull with learning. I use it like a rubber duck whenever i run into a more complex problem.
Works well enough for that and sometimes comes up with some helpfull insight.
As a reminder, the person I replied to said "if you rely on it entirely". Yes, it *can* be used in a way that is helpful for education. But it's really freaking easy to use it in a way that denies you the practice of figuring things out on your own.
I recommend my students stay away from it entirely. When you're learning, *especially* when you're learning in a formal context where there are requirements on you for what you accomplish by a certain time, it's a really bad idea to have sitting in front of you an easy path that avoids the learning.
Aschually, AI is getting pretty good at explaining the logic and flow of the code. And allows you to ask followup questions and get immediate answers if you're unsure or don't get it.
For beginners and students that's pretty dang handy.
Having someone answer every single one of your questions is handy for sure.
The issue with that is you never learn to debug or problem solve.
'Tom how do I fix this?'
"Do this."
'What happens if I "do this"?'
"Fucking seriously? TRY. IT."
I have seen so many help vampires who cant even run their code with a print statement. They literally just ask 'what will it print?'.
At some point people link them to a debug tutorial/how to use a debugger/problem solving/etc. It is absolutely vital to be able to problem solve/run a debugger.
AI will just hold your hand and allow you to learn nothing. Its absolutely a helpful tool, but it becomes like blindly copy/pasting from a YouTube tutorial. You learn relatively nothing in the worst case scenario.
Edit: Not sure whats hard to understand here. Copy/pasting code from 'stackoverflow etc.' Will often still result in errors if you have no idea what you're doing, you'll generally ask someone or figure it out by problem solving when an error occurs.
With AI people can literally learn nothing and endlessly prompt it, until it stumbles its way to a solution. Some people break out of this habit when a person gives them advice on how to debug their own issues.
You could argue these people should already know not to just mindlessly ask question after question without thinking. But a lot of them do learn once someone tells them to think critically and points them in the right direction.
Like copy-pasting from stack-overflow or copy-pasting from a friend, copy-pasting from AI doesn't help you learn. I think the issue might not be the AI.
The issue is that AI is good enough to let you copy-paste your way through through an intro course, and end up *dramatically* behind in terms of your ability to solve problems on your own.
Llms are great to learn new languages. I already know all the programming basics (and not so basics), but idk how the fuck PowerShell encodes something
I experience that hypothetical situation with Tom in my actual job. It’s hard to tell them they need to actually try things if they don’t know how it works. Because it feels like I’m insulting their intelligence, which I don’t want to do. It’s extremely frustrating.
While that can be handy in some circumstances, it can also make it really easy to avoid the practice of figuring things out on your own, which is *devastating*. Like any tool, AI can be used in good and bad ways. But it's a bad idea to have a tool in front of you that can be used in a way that sometimes lets you skip your classwork without your teacher noticing.
For people self-learning it's a smaller (but still present) issue. But for people in a class, the fact that there is imposed work can make it *extremely* tempting to just AI that work away.
It's not even very good at that tbh. It's good so making short standalone scripts that _look like_ they automate simple tasks, but they're just wrong often as not.
The one area I've found ai useful in programming is as a form of fancy autocomplete, at the level of "finish the current line, _maybe_ give me the next line". Anything more and it rapidly goes off the rails.
I disagree, even that gets wrong, it's decent at making prototypes and very specific and easy to debug functions, anything past that and you have to triple check least a massive implementation bug gets by.
To me AI is massively useful as a documentation finder, it's easier to say, if I'm using library X and I want to put a label in a figure with a plot of type Y, how would I do it? And it tells you exactly what method to use and gives you a small example, now I can go to the docs of the method and get a hold of how the whole class works instead of trying to find and pinpoint the exact thing I want from a bunch of different classes and methods.
Yea I mistakenly tell this joke to our interns and it sort of led them to think they can do their tasks by actually copy/pasting code snippets directly from Stack Overflow, severely underestimating the amount of skill it takes to pick and choose which code snippets are relevant and how you can adjust them to fit your needs.
As I see it the code is pretty good (i.e. it would pass review) but the entire design is so shit. Overengineered in some areas, not at all engineered in others, very opiniated stuff in some places, completely irrelevant or unnecessary patterns here and there. It is a mess.
That is not what code is though. The code is fine if you look at just the code, from a very narrow window, without considering it's purpose.
I use chat gpt when I'm stuck because I'm not willing to ask humans for help with my terrible code. No one can see the horrors I have wrought, it would surely break them
Naive take, most seniors could function perfectly fine without intellisense or autocomplete interfaces. Intellisense is a convenience, because no one has a perfect memory.
As a kid, all I had was IBM reference manuals and books from the library. When I started doing webdev in the early 00s, it was still books, but also PDFs, php.net, and forums.
I use intellisense to aid with type hints, method names, function arguments, etc. I don't have all my working codebases memorized, so things like symbol search, find references, and "go to definition" are very handy. Sure, I could live without any of that, but why would I?
Was mostly just a hobbyist up until 2011.
If I don't get what I need from Intellisense, I go straight to the language/framework/library docs, or even source code, and figure things out from there. Failing that, google, SO, and GPT are a last resort.
As long as you have a perfectly documented UML scheme, and classes description for the library you use, it's easy yeah (but still 100 times less efficient). But it's not always well documentated.
I can't imagine taking chat gpt code without both checking documentation on functions it used and also understanding what it spewed out.
Chat gpt is more of a "Is there a better way to do this" tool so I can checkout alternative documentation because googling alternatives especialy nowadays is near impossible.
Chatgpt to me is a smart documentation parser and Google in one. Works great for the most part when I use it like that, and I have expand greatly what I know programming can do.
I have to remind my juniors of this often. Intellisense, copilot, and gpt are good for guide rails and quickly writing things out, but if you aren’t 100% sure what you’re writing - then go rtfm.
i used to do that but then i got sick of reading due to brain rot attention span and made a dodgy chrome extension with llama3 to just summarize the documentation (and it saves me no time bc the model takes forever to load)
I read docs, really you HAVE to if you are writing anything more complex than a hello world. Intellisense mainly helps me avoid typos and it also helps me type faster (sometimes, sometimes I have to wait several seconds for intellisense)
I definitely use code complete. Can’t shun convenience and time savings. But if I had to sit down with notepad and only have access to docs I can still write code. It’ll be slower going but could still do the same work.
I don't really have enough experience to do that, I'd need at least a compiler to tell me when I've screwed up
Considering how long sometimes I have to wait for intellisense, I've developed the habit of blindly writing code then waiting for intellisense to tell me if I called a function that doesn't exist or mispelled a variable and whatnot
(TLDR: I have skill issues)
I've moved between languages a lot of times in my career, and I rely heavily on intellisense to remind me the exact syntax of slightly different standard library calls for each language. I don't really view it as any different than a context-aware documentation presentation though.
Some documentation is quite bad; with k8s/helm/tf I constantly find myself in the actual module code trying to understand wtf it's doing.
with peewee I remember I had to dissect code to understand how to create custom chained filters.
but gpt is not helping in these cases either.
I think it maybe depends on how many languages people use? I don’t use either tool in the meme and google stuff. But so many things I do are using the same libraries that I know well that I can be very productive working on a train (German trains have no internet most the time) and perhaps doing a little hacky solution for some small part until I am back in internet to load docs.
I am in my 20s but feel like a grumpy old person who is missing out on this new super useful tool. I really should try it out. I was far too slow moving to an IDE and still only use a lightweight one and it’s help functions annoy me. So I feel I am a bit too resistant to change
Yeah, I look at my ticket, I say to myself “no fucking way someone hasn’t done this before”
I google like I’m applying to be a boomer. 9/10 chance I’m in SO copying some -2 answer.
SENIOR senior engineers have paid our dues with vim or nano or tpu or maybe even emacs. The IDE with intellisense is a well-earned break during our golden years.
And just wait until the kids have to look something up in a *book*. It'll break them.
Not sure where I land, being eleven years into my career. But give me a PDF doc and I'm happy. Or better yet, single page HTML doc. Anything I can easily search through.
Documentation sets were fantastic back in the day. That's my biggest problem with newer APIs. The documentation is never as comprehensive, and I'm almost forced to go online to find out about what it's not telling me.
And the organization is so bad, it's easier to just google the stuff than try to navigate the documentation itself. Just about the only piece of documentation I'm navigating manually is the 4k pages reference manual for the microcontroller we use. It's still not great.
The 'documentation comment' tecnique is partially at fault. People thing that a couple of (mostly useless) comments at the top of a function extracted to an html set is enough for working. The minimum viable IMHO is like for GTK with an overview \*and\* the api reference.
I have 2 doulos golden reference books on my desk that I use almost every day, and one for tcl/tk that I use sparingly.
For some domains, a good reference book is worth 1000x more than access to a search engine.
My man, I love vim with all my heart, but I promise you that many if not most other choices are better. The best thing about it is that it's always available everywhere with no setup. But if you have a GUI and time to do all the setup that you would like to do great coding, you also have time to install an IDE, and that IDE is gonna be better for coding.
Except for making repetitive changes to text files. Then nothing beats vim.
Serious question: give me an example of a tool/usecase where an IDE beats neovim.
Edit also to add to my love for vim. It looks mad cool when Im sharing my screen on a call and I have to show or edit some code to managers/team and I am just mad flexing my vim macros and combos.
There is none. It's just the case of "is it worth it to learn vim?", the answer is - probably not. If you already know it well and have hundreds of personalized configuration rules then there's barely any reason to switch to anything else at that point.
This is where I'm at. If I magically lost all knowledge of all IDEs right now, would I relearn vim?
Well maybe, I'm stubborn af. But I wouldn't recommend it. But given I already know vim and have all the muscle memory and whatnot, I have never seen a compelling reason to switch.
I use a vim plugin with my IDE. Best of both worlds!
I can use the features of the IDE, but I’m just used to vim at this point for general editing speed.
Intellisense is a very different technology. In that it was gradually introduced throughout my working life.
This new fangled AI? We didn't need any fancy AI to screw up our code back in the day. We hand coded all our bugs ourselves and that's the way we liked it.
Bachelors degree in humor?
Some of the best programmers I've worked with didn't have one ¯\\\_(ツ)\_/¯ (Hell, some of the most respected authors on the subject of coding doesn't have one)
I don’t trust GenAI as far as I can throw it. Either I go to a tutorial (for dumb basic shit like “how to append char to string in C++”), Stack Overflow, or the docs, especially if I’m working with a non-standard library. (Definitely not a senior engineer btw lmao)
I’m still learning how to use some of the technologies out there so I find it useful to start out the research process, bc at first I don’t even know what I’m dealing with, like wtf is a docker container? I didn’t know what to look up on google to build, deploy or do whatever with them, but I could just ask copilot or whoever “give me step by step on how to create a container specifically in my environment etc.” Sometimes you can find good tutorials but some other things can be so niche that learning it is just too confusing at first
Gen 1 azure functions ran on .csx files and had intelligence support dropped. We have one of our secondary systems entirely written in those functions. I’ve been maintaining it for like four years. We can do it, it’s just really annoying.
Hate to break it to you, but man pages + compiler output is all you need. LSP, Intellisense, etc, is just a convenience. And yes of course I use an LSP, because it's a tighter feedback loop than invoking the compiler directly. If I had to, however, it wouldn't be that bad.
Like students can code without intellisense... Source: me, a student. I also dislike the usage of AI in coding, I just can't stand chatgpt and other tools. I like docs more, because it is tha truth
same, i'm a current student (self-taught CS, i'm in school in general)
for one-off edits to things like my dotfiles or other configs, i just use helix and it works well enough, because the Nix language has such horrible IDE integration. for larger projects in rust and typescript i use vscodium without AI, but i'm looking to switch that to helix once they add a plugin system.
language servers are amazing but i've spent a lot of time reading docs, mostly horrible docs at that.
All I had in college was either Notepad or Jupyter.
I would say that intelisence helps increase productivity, I'm not entirely depended on it.
And also, intellij idea's intelisence is much superior to VSCs (in case of Java ofc). It seems to give more relevant matches.
Joke's on you OP. Magento in VS Code with the intellisense doesn't work. Complete ass. I have to manually search classes and shit anyway. So yeah, wrecked.
I often find intellisense (and other things like it) annoying since the keybinds are not always the best, so it completes things when I don't want it to, and I have to press escape a lot of times.
So sometimes I just disable it.
I'm forced to use a vendor's bespoke editor at work and its most recent version just so happened to break code highlighting and completion.
It's annoying to type everything out and to check the docs more often than before. I've had a few bugs caused by typos for the first time in years. Other than that, I got used to it in a week.
Why would a senior engineer be watching a student? Is this a job or school? Also, do you make fun of a carpenter when he cant drive a nail because someone arbitrarily says he cant use a hammer?
I’m convinced that in software “student” is just “junior that isn’t serious.” Because you can go make things right away without a degree. Y’all just playing house in overpriced daycare. Get your shit together
About 10 years ago, I had to regularly make changes to an ASP classic web application. Due to a plethora of constraints that made it impossible to pull the whole mess into Visual Studio, this became a job for ... Notepad++ and Filezilla.
Was it possible to work without autocomplete/intellisense? Of course. Would I do it again? Of course not.
If you make a post like this, you clearly don't know what's the difference between intellisence and "generative" AI.
One analyses your codebase and its dependencies, providing clear information.
The other makes content up - so it cannot be trusted completely. Not to mention tools like ChatGPT retain ownership of their output, as well as memorising (and sometimes spreading) what you believed to be your proprietary code. They are banned in many important companies.
Some of you all have never coded in a pre internet, pre IDE world.
Its a good thing.
You no longer have to spend 2 years before you can use a new tool or language.
The stuff we can do today would simply not be possible with the \*original\* tools.
I look forward to what is possible when the new AI tools actually work.
all my instructors had intellisense (or jetbrains equivalent) on and then would just type the whole word anyway - adamantly refusing to hit tab.
really slowed one of my classes down cause that instructor was a slow typer
Can we stop with the "seniors are incompetant" memes?
New programmers are starting to take them seriously. Like no, Gary, you're not lost without intellisense; you could scratch out a whole app's source on a cave wall if you had to
Let's stop feeding young programmers the message that there's no mastery to strive for. It's not funny anymore
i'm definitely not a senior engineer, but is it actually bad if i use intellisense and docs on whatever im using? whenever i code i have the docs open on my second screen
As someone who grew up having to read *reference books* to figure out how to solve problems in code, I *love* genAI.
It's another in a long line of tools that help us save time and spend more time coding. But just like search engines before this, you have to be aware of the pitfalls.
Intellisense is just documentation with less steps
Comparing it to ai is insane. edit: too much brain damaged opinions here Either you never touched a programming language in your life and don’t know what Auto completion is in combination with what ever source indexing technology used vs using an ai which generates chunks of code this is not about comparing „tools“ this is about undermining effort/knowledge based on using mentioned tools and this is factually an ass comparison to make in every way
We should write the code on paper, ask an AI to convert it into text and run
You can actually do that.
Wouldn’t even need ai
The comparison lies in both being a tool that people might be dependent on.
One tool is robust and widely used. The other one is as reliable as handing the keyboard to a monkey.
To be fair, the monkey doesn't ever get anything right. It's pretty unfair to expose the monkey like that.
If you've got enough monkeys with enough keyboards and enough time they'll get it right. Eventually.
This is kind of how large language models work if you think about it
Not really. They are actually learning from the data and derive something plausible. The monkey analogy equates to "random gibberish can be meaningful by accident". LLMs are quite a step above that. Their main problem currently seems to be, that they'd rather hallucinate something plausible-looking than say "I don't know".
[удалено]
I mean, there are fairly reliable benchmarks that show it's better in many ways. Hallucinations are hard to get rid of though.
What GPT did you try?
Give it enough time and it will write Shakespeare
Or just ask it to write Shakespeare, it's faster that way.
wdym he's complimenting the monkey
Intellisense is hotkeys on steroids
My company has started having their Senior Developers use GitHub Copilot. I haven't been using it by doing any "prompt" engineering but more of just how Intellisense previously was being used and have been pleasantly surprised. It more frequently than not provides useful multiple lines of auto complete code overall making the actual coding process a little more efficient. Do I think it's helping anywhere near enough to replace a full Junior Developer on the team? Nowhere close. But it has been neat to use.
Doesn't stop it being a tool though.
An IDE is a tool. A fucking keyboard is a tool. Can't compare them as if they are equivalent just because they belong in the same extremely broad category.
Being able to code without AI doesn't stop me being a tool either, but you don't hear me complaining, just all of my friends and loved ones and people who meet me.
How dare you compare monkeys to AI?
All I can think is that everyone with their panties in a bunch about AI in programming hasn't actually looked at the current capabilities and seen how little it can be relied upon for. Every time I read the comments on reddit or YouTube, I feel like I'm being gaslit. Like, surely AI hasn't become useful in the 3 months since I last took a look at it. AI is fast, but it's got an extremely low ceiling on the level of complexity it can handle before it starts spitting out gibberish. Ask it a common problem like the probability of different sums when rolling two dice and it does fine because that problem has appeared on the internet hundreds of times. Ask it about probabilities when rolling three dice and you just get confidently (and often hilariously) wrong answers.
That’s like saying for athletes that dependence on drinking water and dependence on anabolic steroids are the same thing The comparison only works if you completely strip away the context and the lessons learned from basic human experience
The same way an IDE would be a tool or a debugger, or a keyboard or screen
One is a useful tool which fulfils the purpose it was designed for, the other is an experiment which was not designed for a useful purpose.
I've been joking since VS2015 that my job is just tab dot tab dot tab semi colon. VS2012 there was barely anything. And it was brilliantly fast because of it, like vs code. VS2015 the intellisense basically replaced resharper. By VS2017 most people I knew actually uninstalled resharper. In part because it fought with intellisense and also because it had by then been superceded by it. Nowadays it'll pick up on what you're doing and offer to follow that pattern throughout the rest of the file. Auto complete can sometimes be brilliant. Plus now they've actually integrated GitHub CoPilot into the IDE. I don't have CoPilot but I see the little button in the top right. So I think these days comparing it to AI is pretty accurate. I'm not knowledgeable on AI but it certainly feels like there's some ChatGPT-2 level shit going on even in vanilla intellisense.
That's because Intellisense was using what would be called an "ML" model today (more accurate to call it and associated models recommendation engines, but I digress) which was ranked on how common a proceeding indexed token would appear based on the pattern established by previous tokens in the AST. The reason it's as heavy as it is is because it requires you to constantly run what basically amounts to a compiler frontend and an indexing server that runs over your entire codebase and libraries to be queried. I'd argue it's still immensely more useful than LLMs with programming because it's not pretending to be anything more than a search/recommendation engine.
The bulk of people here have never coded. It’s mostly college students in CS50 classes and bored IT people.
It also helps avoid annoying typos.
AI is just stackoverflow with less steps
I dunno stackoverflow has yet to recommend I put glue on my pizza AFAIK
how about using regex to parse html?
You would not believe how common that is
AI has yet to tell me that a question has already been asked and link me to a completely unrelated question while also blocking me from making any questions for the next several weeks
And failing this web browser to look up the docs online, failing that the include/java files on disk, failing that I'm deciding to get a drink because society has fallen
*sigh \*unzip documentation\**
``` $ man unzip No manual entry for unzip ``` edit: mobile editor is weak.
$ man unzip UNZIP(1) General Commands Manual UNZIP(1) NAME unzip - list, test and extract compressed files in a ZIP archive SYNOPSIS unzip [-Z] [-cflptTuvz[abjnoqsCDKLMUVWX$/:^]] file[.zip] [file(s) ...] [-x xfile(s) ...] [-d exdir] DESCRIPTION unzip will list, test, or extract files from a ZIP archive, commonly found on MS‐DOS systems. The default behavior (with no op‐ tions) is to extract into the current directory (and subdirectories below it) all files from the specified ZIP archive. A com‐ panion program, zip(1), creates ZIP archives; both programs are compatible with archives created by PKWARE’s PKZIP and PKUNZIP for MS‐DOS, but in many cases the program options or default behaviors differ. ...
Don't stop now, I'm so close...
``` $ tldr unzip ```
… directions super unclear, I unzipped it and now it returned another nested zip file..
I don't use intellisense either... I just Google 'js array contains' and 'python string template' once a week for the last 10 years and copy paste.
Welcome to the most seniour PhD club.
oh man had me in stiches, reading the comic i was like what do you mean, u don't just google it every time or read an api doc?
Tools are all about how you use them, gen AI can help but if you rely on it entirely, your code is going to be shit
> but if you rely on it entirely, your code is going to be shit Honestly, that's not even the bad part. The bad part is that you don't learn. If you rely on AI too much you end up having no more value than the AI. And if your goal is to be employable that's quite important, because employing you is a *hell* of a lot more expensive.
I actually found it is quiet helpfull with learning. I use it like a rubber duck whenever i run into a more complex problem. Works well enough for that and sometimes comes up with some helpfull insight.
As a reminder, the person I replied to said "if you rely on it entirely". Yes, it *can* be used in a way that is helpful for education. But it's really freaking easy to use it in a way that denies you the practice of figuring things out on your own. I recommend my students stay away from it entirely. When you're learning, *especially* when you're learning in a formal context where there are requirements on you for what you accomplish by a certain time, it's a really bad idea to have sitting in front of you an easy path that avoids the learning.
Aschually, AI is getting pretty good at explaining the logic and flow of the code. And allows you to ask followup questions and get immediate answers if you're unsure or don't get it. For beginners and students that's pretty dang handy.
Having someone answer every single one of your questions is handy for sure. The issue with that is you never learn to debug or problem solve. 'Tom how do I fix this?' "Do this." 'What happens if I "do this"?' "Fucking seriously? TRY. IT." I have seen so many help vampires who cant even run their code with a print statement. They literally just ask 'what will it print?'. At some point people link them to a debug tutorial/how to use a debugger/problem solving/etc. It is absolutely vital to be able to problem solve/run a debugger. AI will just hold your hand and allow you to learn nothing. Its absolutely a helpful tool, but it becomes like blindly copy/pasting from a YouTube tutorial. You learn relatively nothing in the worst case scenario. Edit: Not sure whats hard to understand here. Copy/pasting code from 'stackoverflow etc.' Will often still result in errors if you have no idea what you're doing, you'll generally ask someone or figure it out by problem solving when an error occurs. With AI people can literally learn nothing and endlessly prompt it, until it stumbles its way to a solution. Some people break out of this habit when a person gives them advice on how to debug their own issues. You could argue these people should already know not to just mindlessly ask question after question without thinking. But a lot of them do learn once someone tells them to think critically and points them in the right direction.
I guess it's fortunate that I have terrible luck getting chat gpt 3.5 to give me usable code lol
Chat gpt 3.5 sucks, get 4 or 4o
Like copy-pasting from stack-overflow or copy-pasting from a friend, copy-pasting from AI doesn't help you learn. I think the issue might not be the AI.
The issue is that AI is good enough to let you copy-paste your way through through an intro course, and end up *dramatically* behind in terms of your ability to solve problems on your own.
Llms are great to learn new languages. I already know all the programming basics (and not so basics), but idk how the fuck PowerShell encodes something
I experience that hypothetical situation with Tom in my actual job. It’s hard to tell them they need to actually try things if they don’t know how it works. Because it feels like I’m insulting their intelligence, which I don’t want to do. It’s extremely frustrating.
While that can be handy in some circumstances, it can also make it really easy to avoid the practice of figuring things out on your own, which is *devastating*. Like any tool, AI can be used in good and bad ways. But it's a bad idea to have a tool in front of you that can be used in a way that sometimes lets you skip your classwork without your teacher noticing. For people self-learning it's a smaller (but still present) issue. But for people in a class, the fact that there is imposed work can make it *extremely* tempting to just AI that work away.
>The bad part is that you don't learn. If you don't learn, you wouldn't be able to use it anyway.
gen ai is pretty good at making short standalone scripts to automate simple tasks but that's about it
It's not even very good at that tbh. It's good so making short standalone scripts that _look like_ they automate simple tasks, but they're just wrong often as not. The one area I've found ai useful in programming is as a form of fancy autocomplete, at the level of "finish the current line, _maybe_ give me the next line". Anything more and it rapidly goes off the rails.
I disagree, even that gets wrong, it's decent at making prototypes and very specific and easy to debug functions, anything past that and you have to triple check least a massive implementation bug gets by. To me AI is massively useful as a documentation finder, it's easier to say, if I'm using library X and I want to put a label in a figure with a plot of type Y, how would I do it? And it tells you exactly what method to use and gives you a small example, now I can go to the docs of the method and get a hold of how the whole class works instead of trying to find and pinpoint the exact thing I want from a bunch of different classes and methods.
Most code snippets are copy-pasted from stack overflow anyway.
I'd say that's a meme exaggeration we joke about. It is obviously not the case.
Yea I mistakenly tell this joke to our interns and it sort of led them to think they can do their tasks by actually copy/pasting code snippets directly from Stack Overflow, severely underestimating the amount of skill it takes to pick and choose which code snippets are relevant and how you can adjust them to fit your needs.
Don't worry, no matter if I use Gen AI or documentation my code is still going to be pretty shit :D
As I see it the code is pretty good (i.e. it would pass review) but the entire design is so shit. Overengineered in some areas, not at all engineered in others, very opiniated stuff in some places, completely irrelevant or unnecessary patterns here and there. It is a mess. That is not what code is though. The code is fine if you look at just the code, from a very narrow window, without considering it's purpose.
Honestly I just use AI to help me remember math formulas that I can't remember the name of
I use chat gpt when I'm stuck because I'm not willing to ask humans for help with my terrible code. No one can see the horrors I have wrought, it would surely break them
I know exactly what I want and what will work. But gen ai is much quicker than me and doesn't leave out ;
Naive take, most seniors could function perfectly fine without intellisense or autocomplete interfaces. Intellisense is a convenience, because no one has a perfect memory. As a kid, all I had was IBM reference manuals and books from the library. When I started doing webdev in the early 00s, it was still books, but also PDFs, php.net, and forums. I use intellisense to aid with type hints, method names, function arguments, etc. I don't have all my working codebases memorized, so things like symbol search, find references, and "go to definition" are very handy. Sure, I could live without any of that, but why would I? Was mostly just a hobbyist up until 2011. If I don't get what I need from Intellisense, I go straight to the language/framework/library docs, or even source code, and figure things out from there. Failing that, google, SO, and GPT are a last resort.
lol look at this guy thinking we know how to read.
As long as you have a perfectly documented UML scheme, and classes description for the library you use, it's easy yeah (but still 100 times less efficient). But it's not always well documentated.
… am I the only person in the world that writes code based on docs? Am I a crazy person?
I can't imagine taking chat gpt code without both checking documentation on functions it used and also understanding what it spewed out. Chat gpt is more of a "Is there a better way to do this" tool so I can checkout alternative documentation because googling alternatives especialy nowadays is near impossible.
Chatgpt to me is a smart documentation parser and Google in one. Works great for the most part when I use it like that, and I have expand greatly what I know programming can do.
I have to remind my juniors of this often. Intellisense, copilot, and gpt are good for guide rails and quickly writing things out, but if you aren’t 100% sure what you’re writing - then go rtfm.
i used to do that but then i got sick of reading due to brain rot attention span and made a dodgy chrome extension with llama3 to just summarize the documentation (and it saves me no time bc the model takes forever to load)
I read docs, really you HAVE to if you are writing anything more complex than a hello world. Intellisense mainly helps me avoid typos and it also helps me type faster (sometimes, sometimes I have to wait several seconds for intellisense)
I definitely use code complete. Can’t shun convenience and time savings. But if I had to sit down with notepad and only have access to docs I can still write code. It’ll be slower going but could still do the same work.
I don't really have enough experience to do that, I'd need at least a compiler to tell me when I've screwed up Considering how long sometimes I have to wait for intellisense, I've developed the habit of blindly writing code then waiting for intellisense to tell me if I called a function that doesn't exist or mispelled a variable and whatnot (TLDR: I have skill issues)
I've moved between languages a lot of times in my career, and I rely heavily on intellisense to remind me the exact syntax of slightly different standard library calls for each language. I don't really view it as any different than a context-aware documentation presentation though.
Docs? Is that the new chatgpt competitor?? /s
Some documentation is quite bad; with k8s/helm/tf I constantly find myself in the actual module code trying to understand wtf it's doing. with peewee I remember I had to dissect code to understand how to create custom chained filters. but gpt is not helping in these cases either.
Helm docs could definitely be improved, I struggle with them often
Helm is like - here, 300 variables go figure. At least most of the popular charts follow the same structure
Why would you do that
I feel you my brother. I learned to code on documentation and that’s the way i like it. Code by gen ai is usually shit
Lol, no. I code in Vim. Not NeoVim, just Vim.
I think it maybe depends on how many languages people use? I don’t use either tool in the meme and google stuff. But so many things I do are using the same libraries that I know well that I can be very productive working on a train (German trains have no internet most the time) and perhaps doing a little hacky solution for some small part until I am back in internet to load docs. I am in my 20s but feel like a grumpy old person who is missing out on this new super useful tool. I really should try it out. I was far too slow moving to an IDE and still only use a lightweight one and it’s help functions annoy me. So I feel I am a bit too resistant to change
Yeah, I look at my ticket, I say to myself “no fucking way someone hasn’t done this before” I google like I’m applying to be a boomer. 9/10 chance I’m in SO copying some -2 answer.
I also did that as a begginer when i had no IDEs for web and notepad had no intellisense.
You're not alone. I often feel that the majority of my job is just reading documentation.
There aren't always docs and when I'm working with a codebase I very much don't fully understand (think game modding) Intellisense can be *very* handy
At least intellisense is accurate.
Junior feelings hurt
SENIOR senior engineers have paid our dues with vim or nano or tpu or maybe even emacs. The IDE with intellisense is a well-earned break during our golden years. And just wait until the kids have to look something up in a *book*. It'll break them.
Not sure where I land, being eleven years into my career. But give me a PDF doc and I'm happy. Or better yet, single page HTML doc. Anything I can easily search through.
What you need to know is somewhere in [here](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/80/Vax-vms-grey-wall.jpg). Good luck.
I could find my way through an old school paper index (and those docs definitely had one), but I'll probably be swearing the entire time.
Not that IBM docs is smaller. Organization is great however.
Documentation sets were fantastic back in the day. That's my biggest problem with newer APIs. The documentation is never as comprehensive, and I'm almost forced to go online to find out about what it's not telling me.
And the organization is so bad, it's easier to just google the stuff than try to navigate the documentation itself. Just about the only piece of documentation I'm navigating manually is the 4k pages reference manual for the microcontroller we use. It's still not great.
The 'documentation comment' tecnique is partially at fault. People thing that a couple of (mostly useless) comments at the top of a function extracted to an html set is enough for working. The minimum viable IMHO is like for GTK with an overview \*and\* the api reference.
Day that a book becomes a regularly used reference material is the day I spend scanning that book and making a searchable document
I have 2 doulos golden reference books on my desk that I use almost every day, and one for tcl/tk that I use sparingly. For some domains, a good reference book is worth 1000x more than access to a search engine.
If you haven't updated live production code in vim, you're only senior in title.
vim has "intellisense" though thats what an LSP server is.
Im still using vim (neovim). Nothing else is anywhere as good.
My man, I love vim with all my heart, but I promise you that many if not most other choices are better. The best thing about it is that it's always available everywhere with no setup. But if you have a GUI and time to do all the setup that you would like to do great coding, you also have time to install an IDE, and that IDE is gonna be better for coding. Except for making repetitive changes to text files. Then nothing beats vim.
Serious question: give me an example of a tool/usecase where an IDE beats neovim. Edit also to add to my love for vim. It looks mad cool when Im sharing my screen on a call and I have to show or edit some code to managers/team and I am just mad flexing my vim macros and combos.
There is none. It's just the case of "is it worth it to learn vim?", the answer is - probably not. If you already know it well and have hundreds of personalized configuration rules then there's barely any reason to switch to anything else at that point.
This is where I'm at. If I magically lost all knowledge of all IDEs right now, would I relearn vim? Well maybe, I'm stubborn af. But I wouldn't recommend it. But given I already know vim and have all the muscle memory and whatnot, I have never seen a compelling reason to switch.
I use a vim plugin with my IDE. Best of both worlds! I can use the features of the IDE, but I’m just used to vim at this point for general editing speed.
Emacs these days has even LSP. True \*senior\* engineers used ISPF on mainframes. Dead engineers FORTRAN coding paper
i honestly kinda like having books around to reference, gives me an excuse to look away from the screen and fix my eyes
Book? I'm only 30, but I've written BASIC with a pencil...>!without docs!<.
Intellisense is a very different technology. In that it was gradually introduced throughout my working life. This new fangled AI? We didn't need any fancy AI to screw up our code back in the day. We hand coded all our bugs ourselves and that's the way we liked it.
Copium
You should need a bachelors degree to post here this is so dumb
Bachelors, industry experience, or approved exception and you’ve got my vote
Bachelors degree in humor? Some of the best programmers I've worked with didn't have one ¯\\\_(ツ)\_/¯ (Hell, some of the most respected authors on the subject of coding doesn't have one)
I'm a senior developer and don't have a degree... This is still very dumb though 😅
Yeah, this post is very dumb :/
I don’t trust GenAI as far as I can throw it. Either I go to a tutorial (for dumb basic shit like “how to append char to string in C++”), Stack Overflow, or the docs, especially if I’m working with a non-standard library. (Definitely not a senior engineer btw lmao)
I’m still learning how to use some of the technologies out there so I find it useful to start out the research process, bc at first I don’t even know what I’m dealing with, like wtf is a docker container? I didn’t know what to look up on google to build, deploy or do whatever with them, but I could just ask copilot or whoever “give me step by step on how to create a container specifically in my environment etc.” Sometimes you can find good tutorials but some other things can be so niche that learning it is just too confusing at first
Lmao you can’t compare gen Ai to intellisense
Pathetic
AI is just stackoverflow with extra steps.
I see a huge difference between AI and Stack. Ai give you an answer to your question, while Stack gives you multiple answers and debate.
Hmm i wonder which group the author of this image considers himself part of...
Dumb lazy take, but 3k upvotes. Speaks volumes on what this sub has become. Or Reddit rather...
Gen 1 azure functions ran on .csx files and had intelligence support dropped. We have one of our secondary systems entirely written in those functions. I’ve been maintaining it for like four years. We can do it, it’s just really annoying.
Atleast we don't have to fix the broken code it provides.
These are the kind of memes I bet scribes made about typesetters.
Hate to break it to you, but man pages + compiler output is all you need. LSP, Intellisense, etc, is just a convenience. And yes of course I use an LSP, because it's a tighter feedback loop than invoking the compiler directly. If I had to, however, it wouldn't be that bad.
I’m using Emacs and my autocomplete is the M-\ I don’t know if this makes me a horrible person.
I consider anyone using emacs a horrible person :P - Vim user
Thanks ❤️ it means a lot to me 🤗
Like students can code without intellisense... Source: me, a student. I also dislike the usage of AI in coding, I just can't stand chatgpt and other tools. I like docs more, because it is tha truth
same, i'm a current student (self-taught CS, i'm in school in general) for one-off edits to things like my dotfiles or other configs, i just use helix and it works well enough, because the Nix language has such horrible IDE integration. for larger projects in rust and typescript i use vscodium without AI, but i'm looking to switch that to helix once they add a plugin system. language servers are amazing but i've spent a lot of time reading docs, mostly horrible docs at that.
As a student, using docs is easier for me. Even though I'm just a beginner. Idk why, but the AI generated code is really hard to understand sometimes.
Pathetic, I read the test cases in the source to figure out the API.
Reject modernity. Return to vi. Or ed. Or a cardpunch. Or whatever.
acme
The seniors in my company work entirely on vim...
I use AI in coding EVERY DAY. Just don't trust it. *Learn from it.*
Ai will enfeeble us
am i the only one who codes without ai, intellisense and lsp
As a senior who sometimes uses vim without any autocomplete, this isn't strictly true.
This is such a weird take.
I don't trust GenAI to write my code The most use I have got for it was making it write sample code for stuff that doesn't have any docs
I use notepad.
All I had in college was either Notepad or Jupyter. I would say that intelisence helps increase productivity, I'm not entirely depended on it. And also, intellij idea's intelisence is much superior to VSCs (in case of Java ofc). It seems to give more relevant matches.
*\*pulls out the hex editor\** 😈
What is intellisens ? It’s like saying Tempo instead of handkerchief
Me: checks the documentation for the method to open a file handle in C#.
Joke's on you OP. Magento in VS Code with the intellisense doesn't work. Complete ass. I have to manually search classes and shit anyway. So yeah, wrecked.
I think people are missing the point lmao. You could probably replace this with intellisense vs no intellisense and it’d have the same meaning.
I can't code without VS or VSCode
0b1100100% 0b1
The days of scouring stackoverflow for a solution vaguely similar to what you're looking for are over?
I use nano
I often find intellisense (and other things like it) annoying since the keybinds are not always the best, so it completes things when I don't want it to, and I have to press escape a lot of times. So sometimes I just disable it.
Doesn't most let you rebind the keys?
`man man`
I think AI is more comparable to stack overflow.
I use GitHub copilot with latex to write my papers.
Seniors write code now?
Never used intellisense
You've spelt Stackoverflow wrong
I'm forced to use a vendor's bespoke editor at work and its most recent version just so happened to break code highlighting and completion. It's annoying to type everything out and to check the docs more often than before. I've had a few bugs caused by typos for the first time in years. Other than that, I got used to it in a week.
Why would a senior engineer be watching a student? Is this a job or school? Also, do you make fun of a carpenter when he cant drive a nail because someone arbitrarily says he cant use a hammer?
????? What kinda senior engineers are you working with
I’m convinced that in software “student” is just “junior that isn’t serious.” Because you can go make things right away without a degree. Y’all just playing house in overpriced daycare. Get your shit together
Thats why i dont use any kind of autocompletion so my only guide is the documentation and the code i wrote.
About 10 years ago, I had to regularly make changes to an ASP classic web application. Due to a plethora of constraints that made it impossible to pull the whole mess into Visual Studio, this became a job for ... Notepad++ and Filezilla. Was it possible to work without autocomplete/intellisense? Of course. Would I do it again? Of course not.
If you make a post like this, you clearly don't know what's the difference between intellisence and "generative" AI. One analyses your codebase and its dependencies, providing clear information. The other makes content up - so it cannot be trusted completely. Not to mention tools like ChatGPT retain ownership of their output, as well as memorising (and sometimes spreading) what you believed to be your proprietary code. They are banned in many important companies.
Some of you all have never coded in a pre internet, pre IDE world. Its a good thing. You no longer have to spend 2 years before you can use a new tool or language. The stuff we can do today would simply not be possible with the \*original\* tools. I look forward to what is possible when the new AI tools actually work.
I mean I can still do it, it just takes longer and I'm like "ugh, I have to type out a whole word?! Uuuuuuggggghhhhhhhh!"
all my instructors had intellisense (or jetbrains equivalent) on and then would just type the whole word anyway - adamantly refusing to hit tab. really slowed one of my classes down cause that instructor was a slow typer
Can we stop with the "seniors are incompetant" memes? New programmers are starting to take them seriously. Like no, Gary, you're not lost without intellisense; you could scratch out a whole app's source on a cave wall if you had to Let's stop feeding young programmers the message that there's no mastery to strive for. It's not funny anymore
lol. It’s the jr ones that can’t survive without intillisense. They also whine like babies if they have to use VI instead of vs code.
Intellisense is giving farmers a mule. Genai is giving them a tractor. You still have to know how to use your tools
i'm definitely not a senior engineer, but is it actually bad if i use intellisense and docs on whatever im using? whenever i code i have the docs open on my second screen
As someone who grew up having to read *reference books* to figure out how to solve problems in code, I *love* genAI. It's another in a long line of tools that help us save time and spend more time coding. But just like search engines before this, you have to be aware of the pitfalls.
What's the difference between intellisense and lsp?
Im Both of those people.
real programmers write thier code into strings for less distracting colors
Any time i don't have intellisense or comparable tool, I just keep mashing on the compile/build button. It will tell you what's wrong...
coder using vi here
When I see memes like this I question where the poster works where the "senior engineers" are that incompetent.