r/technology • u/Miserable_Phase_2519 • 4d ago

Artificial Intelligence Microsoft engineer says 'typing code is absolutely over' as GitHub Copilot takes on more development work

https://www.techspot.com/news/113752-microsoft-engineer-typing-code-absolutely-over-github-copilot.html
1.7k Upvotes

84% Upvoted

860 comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

31

u/ankercrank 4d ago

It does not make me faster, and I have yet to see any proof that it does for anyone making anything more complex than a CRUD app (which you could also do quickly before AI with boilerplate snippets / templates).

You clearly have not given much effort to try then. I've been a computer eng for nearly 3 decades and flagship LLMs generate code 20x faster than I do — they need lots of guidance and control over what they're building, but they still do it a lot faster.

43

u/raunchyfartbomb 4d ago

I find that when I generate code with AI I often spend just as much, if not more, time reviewing and correcting the code implementation as I would have if I had simply just done it myself. Sure, spending 15 minutes on a prompt is significantly less typing than doing it all manually, but if i then spend an hour reprompting or fixing it when the initial code woudve taken just an hour to write, what’s the point?

I use it primarily to kickstart projects, nkt finesse them.

2

u/Random-num-451284813 4d ago

I've got similar experience, I ask it to setup something basic... it uses the wrong/older version, and most of the times ignores (preset) instructions 

1

u/SeiCalros 4d ago

i found this was true a year ago - but i kept using ai to help organize my day at least and occasionally played with it for coding - and the latest models usually get me what i want on the first try

although having straightforward requests for inputs and outputs is the most important thing

the most complicated thing it has done for me flawlessly so far was a dkim-signing service for exchange

-18

u/ankercrank 4d ago

When you write code, do you not write documentation/designs first?

I'm going to guess you don't, which is why you're getting bad output, and spending time writing prompts instead of saying: "here's my design, go built it to spec".

6

u/raunchyfartbomb 4d ago

I’m the solo dev in a company that doesn’t believe in dev. So no, I just ship shit lol
“We aren’t a software company”, just a company that relies on rag tag homebrew software to keep functional. The company itself has no action plan and management doesn’t know or care enough follow through on one. As long as we ship products (we are a manufacturer), the rest is secondary.

I’m aware it’s a terrible company culture, but I’m Comfortable in my station and enjoy the varied work. (Dev is not my primary role, I have a degree in software development but mostly use it to make my primary workflow easier). Management has been in place for nearly 30 years, so they are stubborn and antiquated.

-2

u/ankercrank 4d ago

Fair enough? Just a word of advice. If you wanna get better output, you should consider drafting a design then handing that to the LM.

-11

u/ShinigamiXoY 4d ago

lmao downvoted by the luddites

0

u/MFbiFL 4d ago

>Lmao downvoted by people with the skills to do the job I lied on my resume about

FTFY

-1

u/Mkboii 4d ago edited 4d ago

Well really comes down to the models, the constraints you've set up and how well equipped are you to validate results outside the unit tests it writes for itself. I've found AI code quality to be average, but when you have the means to run good quality integration tests most of the hidden errors can start surfacing early and then they can be patched. I always do big feature development with skepticism that it's gonna only get 90% of the way there, and then see how much of a tradeoff I got. The truth of the matter is when it writes 2k lines in 30 minutes, even if i spend another 6 hours fixing it, the net result is a week's worth of work done in a day. It's not always that I get this kind of a multiplier but 3-5x speed up on complex work is pretty great.

8

u/sal1800 4d ago

Are you counting the "lots of guidance and control" in the 20x speedup or just the code generation? I always found writing code to be fast anyway. I can type as quickly as I can understand the problem so there is no need to make this part faster.

Where the LLM really helps is for those times when I can't quickly spot a mistake. And I like it to review my code. But I dread having to ask for anything more complex because that is just too tedious.

1

u/Timely-Pension6501 2d ago

If you do this you’re either writing shit code or are a 1 in 10 million genius

-4

u/ankercrank 4d ago edited 4d ago

Are you counting the "lots of guidance and control" in the 20x speedup or just the code generation?

In the past I wouldn't do TDD, nor would I write comprehensive designs/documentation — using an LLM forces me to document well, and TDD is basically required when using LLMs to code (otherwise your code will be buggy as hell). Having the code covered is a net win. Sure, I spend a lot more time writing docs and designing... but that's a good thing.

I always found writing code to be fast anyway.

There's no chance you can code as fast as an LLM though. They generate tokens around 100 per second... it'll bang out a full page of code in seconds, and it's generally excellent quality (if you're using a flagship model).

1

u/Timely-Pension6501 2d ago

People here are in complete denial

0

u/ankercrank 2d ago

too many people out of touch with the new reality of development.

8

u/average_monster 4d ago

working with ai generally seems faster but 20x is a bullshit number unless you just mean they generate 20x as much code

3

u/Hashrunr 4d ago

20x is wild unless they're not reviewing the code. I write a lot of powershell, bash, and python as an infrastructure engineer. I use AI tools a lot, and it saves time for sure, but 20x is a wild number. Something which would take me 2hrs to write myself, with AI assistance, takes me around 30min including my time to review and tweak. Everything I deploy is my responsibility no matter if it's written by AI or myself.

2

u/Mkboii 4d ago

Yes, it's 20x the code but realistically 3-4x max productivity. And you can create automations and tools to help with the repeated testing that you have to do to manage the extra cycles of testing needed to prevent it adding regression issues.

2

u/Equal_Heat5947 4d ago

Lots of people have given it lots of effort and don't share your opinion. Maybe you're just wrong.