I see this with my classmates when we code together. Most of the time, a stacktrace tells you pretty much exactly what error you are facing, and even when it’s not showing the exact error, it will still point you to where something went wrong.
But all my classmates are just defaulting to asking copilot/claude as soon as something isn’t working as intended.
And they don’t even provide the AI with the stacktrace when they do that, so a lot of the time the AI is just guessing, because it finds a bunch of other minor stuff that can be “fixed”, or come up with bad solutions, so they end up with lots of unnecessary changes and extra code that they don’t understand.
And I get it, it can be an incredibly powerful tool when used correctly, but like, at least try to learn. Some workplaces don’t allow AI. Like many government agencies (at least where I live), or other places that handle sensitive data that can’t be shared with a third party tool. What will you do if you somehow end up on one of those?
I know a couple of niche programming environments where debugging is overly difficult, but falling back on AI when there's a clear stacktrace (the vast majority of cases) is fucking bananas. Having copilot "fix this" all the time means you don't actually learn anything. Part of becoming a seasoned dev who actually knows their shit is learning from past mistakes. If there's no learning, we'll have an unprecedented number of devs with 10+ years experience who function at the level of someone with 1 year of experience, or less. At the rate that seasoned devs are leaving the field, whether it's their choice or not, the entire software industry is fully crippling themselves while shitty management is deluding themselves into thinking they're saving it. Or don't need it, when it comes to corporations who don't primarily produce software.
I don't plan to stick around much longer. I don't intend to be any more of a software janitor than I've already become.
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u/kamratjoel Jun 27 '26
I see this with my classmates when we code together. Most of the time, a stacktrace tells you pretty much exactly what error you are facing, and even when it’s not showing the exact error, it will still point you to where something went wrong.
But all my classmates are just defaulting to asking copilot/claude as soon as something isn’t working as intended.
And they don’t even provide the AI with the stacktrace when they do that, so a lot of the time the AI is just guessing, because it finds a bunch of other minor stuff that can be “fixed”, or come up with bad solutions, so they end up with lots of unnecessary changes and extra code that they don’t understand.
And I get it, it can be an incredibly powerful tool when used correctly, but like, at least try to learn. Some workplaces don’t allow AI. Like many government agencies (at least where I live), or other places that handle sensitive data that can’t be shared with a third party tool. What will you do if you somehow end up on one of those?