Over the past few years, the evolution of AI-driven tools like GitHub’s Copilot and other large language models (LLMs) has promised to revolutionise programming. By leveraging deep learning, these tools can generate code, suggest solutions, and even troubleshoot issues in real-time, saving developers hours of work. While these tools have obvious benefits in terms of productivity, there’s a growing concern that they may also have unintended consequences on the quality and skillset of programmers.
I was hoping this might start with some actual evidence that programmers are in fact getting worse. Nope, just a single sentence mentioning “growing concern”, followed by paragraphs and paragraphs of pontification.
Thx for saving me a click. We are full of options and nobody has data. Down voting the post.
Exactly what I suspected. How could you even truly prove such a thing
It’s probably not “provable” one way or the other, but I’d like to see more empirical studies in general within the software industry, and this seems like a fruitful subject for that.
Anything that allows people to blindly and effortlessly get results inherently makes them more stupid. Your brain is like any muscle. You need to repeatedly use it for it to work well
I’ll bet people said the same thing when Intellisense started suggesting lines completions.
And when errors were highlighted in the code rather than console output.
And when high-level languages started appearing.
I’ll bet people said the same thing when Intellisense started suggesting lines completions.
They did.
And when errors were highlighted in the code rather than console output.
Yep.
And when high-level languages started appearing.
And yes.
That said, if you believed my mentors, we were barelling towards a 2025 in which nothing running on software ever really worked reliably.
So they may have been grumpy, but they were also right, on that point.
I’ve seen enough programmers blindly copypasting code from stackoverflow and other forums without thinking and never understanding the thing they just “wrote”, to know that tools like copilot won’t make programmers worse, they will allow more people to be bad programmers.
people need to read more code, play around with it, break it and fix it to become better programmers.
Hehe, good point.
people need to read more code, play around with it, break it and fix it to become better programmers.
I think AI bots can help with that. It’s easier now to play around with code which you could not write by yourself, and quickly explore different approaches. And while you might shy away from asking your colleagues a noob question, ChatGPT will happily elaborate.
In the end, it’s just one more tool in the box. We need to learn when and how to use it wisely.
