A new Coddy Developer Survey found that four in five developers, 80%, say their use of AI has felt more like a dependence than an advantage.
A new Coddy Developer Survey found that four in five developers, 80%, say their use of AI has felt more like a dependence than an advantage.
Beyond the moralistic objections I have to LLMs, I have serious issues with being fed confidently incorrect answers. I’ve had my share of configuration hell and I’m not above throwing code at the wall to see what sticks, but at least I have the good sense to drop a comment or mention in my commit that “hey, there’s a chance this isn’t right and could cause problems”.
Except I have plenty of experience dealing with this from humans. (Mainly from the aforementioned new managers, because being wrong with confidence seems to be a key trait to get promoted.) It’s been my experience that when you tell an AI “I just tried that and it didn’t work”, it will accept that more readily than a human would.
Every bit of AI-generated code that I use, even in the smallest and most meaningless context, has to pass my own review first. I have to understand every line, and if I don’t I will ask the bot to explain what it did. By the time I am done with it, I can stand behind it just as if I wrote it all myself. I might note that I got AI help, but if my name is on the commit I will not pass the buck on any errors.
This is how you use AI correctly
Then why not just write the fucking code yourself at that point? This is like putting training wheels on a tricycle.
The same reason pair programming exists. You get a better outcome when you have someone (or these days, something) to validate and implement with.
Did you forget pair programming and pair planning exist?
I don’t trust A.I. code at all. If I ever do use it, I use it as a research tool like “please google for me how to do this one obscure thing because IDK what search query to use”; then I type out it’s output manually. Usually as I do so, I come across some subtle error that would cause horrible problems, and fix it as I go.
I tried to use it for a mathematical algorithm once. I might as well have just written
return Math.random();This is a good thing to do if your goal is to gain a deep understanding of something.
If it’s just to get it done, I just enforce TDD on my agent and review it’s output. I don’t need to be an expert in everything (and I am very much a generalist). But if you focus on a very specific thing and only that thing, then yeah what you are doing is a great way to truly understand it. It’s slow, but it’s totally valid.
It’s still faster than what I did before A.I.; I would spend ages Googling for something obscure and scrutinising one vague StackOverflow post over and over for insights. Also cursing iOS Safari.
I like using it to setup github stuff and save time, like I needed to use rembg, I know you can setup terminal scripts as apps so if you open an app it runs the script. Had it set up a basic app to open videos with, create a folder using ffmpeg and turn it into an image sequence then run through that folder using removebg and/or depth anything (have added options for vectorizing, splats, etc.), afterwards sticying the image sequence back together to the original format, bringing back the audio. I was already doing this with comfyui before I realized they could be installed seprately be run through terminal commands, so I tried to get ai to set this up.
Took about 5 minutes and a penny or 2 using deepseekv4flash with hermes. At it’s core, it’s hella simple, it’s just running existing programs rather than coming up with how to do all the tasks itself. I technically didn’t need it and could manually type these terminal commands myself or figure out how to automate it, but ai setting it up means it actually got done and saved me hours of time.
After noticing most converters are frontends for ffmpeg and most downloaders yt-dlp, I realized you can easily make a gui for anything using the terminal with ai.
one of the programs that we use everyday at work recently added an AI coding tool. I was going to announce it to the team when I noticed with the usual disclaimers about ensuring you know what the macros are doing, but then just deleted my message.
we’re not a team of programmers, and there’s only one or two people on my team that I would trust to write code that could potentially cause us days of rework and tons of thousands of dollars lost to the company.
those other people don’t need an AI coding tool, because they can’t code in the first place, and those aren’t the people that I want modifying thousands of files at once when I know that they barely review the work they’re doing manually already and I have tools in place to semi-automate that review for them.