I do use AI to assist my programming, but I always take what it suggests as likely highly flawed. It frequently sends me in the right direction but almost never is fully correct. I read the answers carefully, throw away answers frequently, and never use a solution without modifying it in some way.
Also, it is terrible at handling more complex tasks. I just use it to help me construct small building blocks while I design and build the larger code.
If 30% of my code was written by AI it would be utter trash.
AI is like a utils library: it can do well known boilerplate like sorting very well, but it’s not likely to actually write your code for you
AI is like fill down in spreadsheets: it can repeat a sequence with slight, obvious modifications but it’s not going to invent the data for you
AI is like static analysis for tests: it can roughly write test outlines, but they might not actually tell you anything about the state of the code under test
And presumably must developers at Microsoft take a similar approach (all the ‘this explains everything’ comments notwithstanding, so it’s ridiculous that they’re even tracking this as a metric. If 30% is AI generated, but the devs had to throw away 90% of it, that doesn’t mean you could get rid of the developer, as they did a huge amount of work just checking the AI and potentially fixing stuff after it.
This is a metric that is misleading and will cause management to make the wrong decisions.
That exains a lot…
I do use AI to assist my programming, but I always take what it suggests as likely highly flawed. It frequently sends me in the right direction but almost never is fully correct. I read the answers carefully, throw away answers frequently, and never use a solution without modifying it in some way.
Also, it is terrible at handling more complex tasks. I just use it to help me construct small building blocks while I design and build the larger code.
If 30% of my code was written by AI it would be utter trash.
AI is like a utils library: it can do well known boilerplate like sorting very well, but it’s not likely to actually write your code for you
AI is like fill down in spreadsheets: it can repeat a sequence with slight, obvious modifications but it’s not going to invent the data for you
AI is like static analysis for tests: it can roughly write test outlines, but they might not actually tell you anything about the state of the code under test
Well said. Fully agreed.
And presumably must developers at Microsoft take a similar approach (all the ‘this explains everything’ comments notwithstanding, so it’s ridiculous that they’re even tracking this as a metric. If 30% is AI generated, but the devs had to throw away 90% of it, that doesn’t mean you could get rid of the developer, as they did a huge amount of work just checking the AI and potentially fixing stuff after it.
This is a metric that is misleading and will cause management to make the wrong decisions.