Compliance is usually the hard stop before we even get to capability. We can’t send code out, and local models are too heavy to run on the restricted VDI instances we’re usually stuck with. Even when I’ve tried it on isolated sandbox code, it struggles with the strict formatting. It tends to drift past column 72 or mess up period termination in nested IFs. You end up spending more time linting the output than it takes to just type it. It’s decent for generating test data, but it doesn't know the forty years of undocumented business logic quirks that actually make the job difficult.
Nuances of a codebase are the key. But I guess we are accelerating towards solving that. Let's see how much time will this take.
To be fair, I would not expect a model to output perfectly formatted C++. I’d let it output whatever it wants and then run it through clang-format, similar to a human. Even the best humans that have the formatting rules in their head will miss a few things here or there.
If there are 40 years of undocumented business quirks, document them and then re-evaluate. A human new to the codebase would fail under the same conditions.