alt Hacker NewsWhy does there seem to be such a divide in opinions on AI in coding? Meanwhile those who "get it" have been improving their productivity for literally years now.
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There's a lot of reasons. There's a lot of breadth to "software engineering" (FAANG, web dev, embedded, OS, small business, etc.)
I'm sure there are some places where LLMs are bad due to lack of training data. There are some places where the LLMs are bad because the code base is terrible (and there's always "rockstars" at these jobs that severely overestimate their skills because they're always the one fixing the mess... which they also probably caused). Some devs/engineers feel threatened. Many devs/engineers think they're special and super smart so surely no machine can do their job.
I think there are a number of elements:
- What you are working on. AI is better at solving already solved problems with lots of examples.
- How fast/skilled you were before. If you were slow before then you got a bigger speed up. If AI can solve problems you can’t you unlock new abilities
- How much quality is prioritized. You can write quality, bug free code with AI but it takes longer and you get less of a boost.
- How much time you spend coding. If a lot of your job is design/architecture/planning/research then speeding up code generation matters less
- How much you like coding. If you like coding then using AI is less fun. If you didn’t like coding then you get to skip a chore
- How much you care about deeply understanding systems
- How much you care about externalities: power usage, data theft, job loss, etc.
- How much boilerplate you were writing before
I’m sure that’s not a complete list but they are a few things I’ve seen as dividers