If you worry about "staying ahead of generative AI" in it's current state, then I think you are not a good coder and you should learn more instead of worrying about that.
LLMs are only good in writing new code without surrounding context. They are pretty useless in legacy codebases and in codebases with a lot of internal solutions. I've used Copilot for 2 months at work and maybe 10% of suggestions were useful, and from that 10% maybe 10% did not contain bugs.
> then I think you are not a good coder and you should learn more instead of worrying about that
I am not sure if its that simple and/or so black and white. Everyone is bad when they start, and even stay okay for a while. So fear is very rational, the fear of getting replaced by someone or something better is very humble. No matter how good or bad one is, theres always someone better than them.
I think for most people its smart to adapt to using AI in their workflows to make them better and more efficient, so I think everyone benefits from learning no matter what skill level they are on.
> I think for most people its smart to adapt to using AI in their workflows to make them better and more efficient
It probably is smart to try out and test everything for a while to see if it is an actual improvement or not.
What I have a serious problem with is the proposal that this now needs to be part of a workflow when it actually doesn't improve anything.
Generative AI in its current form may be helpful in some cases and unhelpful in others. Plenty of examples are mentioned in the context of the other comments.
I agree that the parent statement "then I think you are not a good coder" is a somewhat dangerous overgeneralization.
> What I have a serious problem with is the proposal that this now needs to be part of a workflow when it actually doesn't improve anything.
Yes, forcing it in the workflow might be bad for personal growth and overall culture.
I think in any form using it alongside you workflow is helping, it saves a lot of time and also helps decreasing cognitive load as one can forget about the commonly used code snippets and boilerplate code and focus on important aspects of the code.
> I think in any form using it alongside you workflow is helping
No, it is not. It can confuse and mislead you which wastes a lot of time. I lost multiple hours on different occasions figuring out subtle mistakes that it had made. It's sometimes harder (and slower) to understand someone else's code than writing the code yourself completely from scratch.
Also, if you aren't working alone, be prepared to answer code review questions on code that you haven't written. GPT is not going to take any responsibility for what it outputs. It often begins its answers to review questions with "Apologies for the oversight" followed by a revised version of the previous output.
The people I work with are used to me providing PRs that don't contain stupid mistakes. So in order to guarantee for that, I usually have to do a full blown quality control on every GPT output that I use. It can still be a time saver, but not really a significant one usually. I am still learning how to distinguish the cases in which it is not even a good idea to involve it and when it can be somewhat trusted. Seems to be highly dependent on the amount of training data in the particular problem domain and programming language.
I didn't mean that using it alongside means blindly trusting it.
I think its far quick to read the code than write those 15 lines of code generally, especially for those type of code snippets. It also is a less stressful and takes very little mental energy to do so (if you already are familiar with the language and codebase)
> I am still learning how to distinguish the cases in which it is not even a good idea to involve it and when it can be somewhat trusted.
Interesting, can comments of that code block being generated by some AI tool be more helpful in your case? Sure it generally isn't' that nuanced and mostly isn't in isolation but labeling the major parts of code like generated data structures, generated functions might be easier to deal with.
So does life. I think we should lock the children in school from the beginning of the education period, without the access to the external, disctracting life. They can leave when they are 18.
That's probably because you've only been a professional developer for 10 years. Here's a quick history lesson:
If we go back, say, 25 years, when the term Open Source entered common usage, it was a way of describing the things that had thusfar been labeled "free software", but as a way of deemphasizing the notion of the Free Software movement that saw non-free-software as immoral. It was a term to describe things that met the Free Software Definition, but without harping on morality.
It was very much a counter-culture (it was, after all, the Free Software movement and the Open Source movement), and very much not a generic term for having access to the source. That was already super common in enterprise agreements, and nobody considered that to be open source.
Then around the early 2000s, Linux became hot shit, and some large companies wanted to avail themselves to the rising tide and began labeling their watered down versions of "source available" things as open source in an attempt to jump on the bandwagon. But that was an intentional attempt to water down the definition everyone already understood for marketing reasons.
You not knowing this history means that to some extent the marketing worked. But just realize that in arguing here, you're participating in the astroturfing. Also, get off my lawn!
I'm also often an advocate of what you're saying there, "language changes..."
But this I think is one of those cases where there is a difference, because it's also descriptive of a community, and it matters how that community sees itself. With whatever definition of open source you have, the most high traction stuff that we all rely on (I originally wrote, "most", but I think e.g. the Linux kernel matters more than a random abandoned repo on Github) is produced by people that use that older definition of open source, and mostly by people who identify with that social movement. (I for a long time was one of those people.) In this case I do believe that in that all of us now rely on open source software, that redefining it in opposition to the group of people who produce that thing is less than respectful.
Anecdotally, I've also been a professional dev for over 10 years, and have been involved with open source projects longer than that. And in my experience, "open source" almost always means you are free to modify and redistribute from the source (possibly with a requirement that you also release the code for your changes, in the case of the GPL). The exceptions are mostly companies that want to claim they are open source for marketing, without actually following the spirit of open source.
> In that case, new developers just don't need to learn the old feature at all
That's not true if you want to be a professional C++ dev - you will encounter projects stuck in older standards, or legacy code written in the age of old standard. In practice you need to know everything from C++98 to the newest.
I don't have a real name on Facebook not have any of my friends. There are also a lot of fake/troll accounts on Facebook. I don't think they ever enforced that policy.
If true I don't know how that happened but two of my friends + me got their account suspended and were asked to provide identifying information to get it reinstated - at the same time.
I’ve tried Dvorak and Colemak but went back to QWERTY. Whole software world is developed with QWERTY in mind, and it was too much PITA.
Split keyboard (especially with ortholinear, column staggered layout) will give you much more benefit than any alternative layout - and will be much easier to switch too.
Your employer will get rid of you in a blink if needed, as current layoffs show, getting too attached to your work is not healthy - no matter how passionate you are about it.
LLMs are only good in writing new code without surrounding context. They are pretty useless in legacy codebases and in codebases with a lot of internal solutions. I've used Copilot for 2 months at work and maybe 10% of suggestions were useful, and from that 10% maybe 10% did not contain bugs.