“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)
I’m a software developer. What it does do is help you out for beginning level work, half remembering methods sometimes works out.
What it’s really good at is templates. Like build a simple MVC based on this table kinda deal. It saves a ton of boilerplate time in a semi intelligent way. What it’s really bad at is anything remotely complicated because it will forget/error out/ rely on libraries that do not exist. I have other thoughts on the actual companies and the spam they say is AI but that’s another convo.
This is the perfect AI niche. Making something mediocre that resembles an already existing pile of mediocre material.
It’s really good at boilerplate. Saves a lot of time on repetitive tasks. I’ve found it particularly useful for unit tests and demo pages. Things where you write one variation and it automatically generates the others for you.
Another instance where it was useful for me was when I needed to make a small change in another team’s repo. I knew exactly what I needed to do, but I wasn’t familiar with the language. Copilot helped with getting the correct syntax.
Based take. Totally agree. Have faced both sides, where it helps with silly errors on new languages, and where it is absolutely incapable of debugging a slightly more complex issue. It’s useful, but only for certain tasks.