Comment Imagine answering questions while kids shout (Score 1) 41
One difference is I work in Java, not Python. Most advocates I have met of AI mostly work in Python where they don't know the shit is broken until their users find the bug. A compiled language will tell you right away if you insert a semicolon in the wrong spot (all the AIs do that often) mismatch braces, or try to add arguments that don't exist to a method or enum values that are incorrect. Even when I add all the classes needed into the context, it regularly suggests invalid enums...they look right, but they don't exist.
The other issue is I am doing REAL work. I am not prototyping some clone of an existing project. I am taking a commercial product that earns billions of dollars, which has had at least 20 contributors and adding features or fixing bugs. If I was making some dumb toy app from scratch that is just a clone of another app in the training set, I am sure it would be easier for the LLM.
The problem is IntelliJ had a pretty good autocomplete system that is now replaced by LLM-based AI and it went for not very ambitious, but always correct, to trying to write the entire program for me and doing a shit job of doing so. So if I don't type fast enough, it will autocomplete the entire statement...get it wrong, and break my concentration.
It's like this...imagine a kid asking you a question..."Dad...what does a Spleen do?"....you don't remember, and you're thinking "does the spleen filter blood or am I mistaking it with the kidney...or wait, is that the liver"...and while you're thinking, another kid is blurting out wrong answers, very confidently..." the spleen makes digestive enzymes!!!"..."the spleen makes pee!!!!"..."the spleen makes blood"...."the spleen makes bile!!!!" You're having to say "no to each one, but it takes some fucking focus to not think..."wait...is the spleen the part of the body that makes blood cells?...I thought they were mostly made in the marrow.....hmmm, but I haven't thought about this in 15 years and I haven't studied this in school for almost 30 years now"
I am not confident it's saving me any time. I honestly think it's slowing me down, but am not fully certain. It SHOULD be making my life easier...like WYSIWYG tools did for web development 25 years ago...or a debugger in an IDE, but it's not there and it has far to improve before it can get there for real work.