“Many developers say AI coding assistants make them more productive, but a recent study set forth to measure their output and found no significant gains. Use of GitHub Copilot also introduced 41% more bugs, according to the study from Uplevel”
study referenced: Can GenAI Actually Improve Developer Productivity? (requires email)
The #1 thing Ive used AI for is commenting my code. It is pretty good at following my format and generating code documentation, based on my existing code.
It’s also really good at helping me think of a good name for something, if there’s a specific word on the tip of my tongue. “Whats the word for when you do the thing with the thingy?” “It sounds like you are looking for (word)”
Also its really good for helping me find the name of specific algorithms for use cases.
“Is there a known algorithm I can look up that can fenangle a dinger?”
“You might be looking for the Ferg Dergeson Flemming algorithm, which is a popular way to fenangle dingers”
Then Ill look it up and it is, indeed, like the best way to fenangle a dinger and I’m like “well holy shit, this is a solved problem turns out, I shoulda known”
seems a lot of people are using AI as a replacement for search since Google search has become such garbage
Last time I tried to look up how to fenagle a dingle, Google showed me ads about how to friffle bahoonies for two pages, and finally out showed me the dingle fenagling algorithm in the ancient Expert Sex Change website.
Yep. I think looking back it’s going to be clear Google chose the wrong time to lean into enshittification of their algorithm. Further, their habit of abandoning products will cause people to choose other LLM solutions first.
The main thing here is its like another level of the little preview you get of websites. So like original web surfing look through links, next level was scroll through synopsis of the links, now its look at the synopsis of syopsis of most relevant links. Again though I worry about the energy costs. I how the hardware can midigate this but at least does serve some useful function unlike bitcoin.