writing the code is the easy part, having a good mental model of what’s going on under the hood and planning ahead is the real challenge. if a chatbot puked out the code it’s easy to assume that it’s right because it worked under your conditions but you might miss stuff that you’d otherwise acknowledge if you wrote the code.
using the chatbots directly discourages thinking and you’re deskilling yourself in the long run, depriving yourself of hands-on experience that you’d usually pick up through your coding career.
having a chatbot generate code for you also usually goes hand-in-hand with writing more code faster, which tends to be bad if you like stable software and want to prevent maintainer fatigue.
and that’s before we get into the ethical and legal problems.
writing the code is the easy part, having a good mental model of what’s going on under the hood and planning ahead is the real challenge. if a chatbot puked out the code it’s easy to assume that it’s right because it worked under your conditions but you might miss stuff that you’d otherwise acknowledge if you wrote the code.
using the chatbots directly discourages thinking and you’re deskilling yourself in the long run, depriving yourself of hands-on experience that you’d usually pick up through your coding career.
having a chatbot generate code for you also usually goes hand-in-hand with writing more code faster, which tends to be bad if you like stable software and want to prevent maintainer fatigue.
and that’s before we get into the ethical and legal problems.
Slop coders see Kernighan’s Law and think “I can do so much worse”