Code analysis firm sees no major benefits from AI dev tool when measuring key programming metrics, though others report incremental gains from coding copilots with emphasis on code review.

“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)

  • @[email protected]English
    2•2 months ago

    I’m mostly in the “fuck AI” camp. As is my eldest son. The other day I messaged him and said “I hate to say this, but I just had a helpful interaction with AI.”

    Python has importlib. I’ve used it many times, particularly when laying DB libraries conditionally.

    I was in a situation where I needed to load arbitrary python code from an arbitrary location. I was sure I could use importlib to do this, but couldn’t sort it out. Nine of my search results turned to anything that moved me in the right direction. Finally I asked copilot. Not only did it get me where I needed to go but when I told it “I got this error when doing this thing.” It told me I was a moron and why.

    Needless to say I got my weird problem sorted.

    AI still sucks though.