Experienced Devs

3978 readers

1 users here now

A community for discussion amongst professional software developers.

Posts should be relevant to those well into their careers.

For those looking to break into the industry, are hustling for their first job, or have just started their career and are looking for advice, check out:

Logo base by Delapouite under CC BY 3.0 with modifications to add a gradient

founded 1 year ago

MODERATORS

[email protected]

Are you still using AI tools to help with development? (programming.dev)

submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

46 comments fedilink hide all child comments

I trialed GitHub Copilot and used ChatGPT for a bit, but recently I found myself using them less and less.

I've found them valuable when doing something new(at least to me), but for most of my day-to-day it seems to have lost it's luster.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

I don’t have Copilot and never plan to use it. I tried Tabnine back when it was early and found it broke my flow more than helped. And I don’t have the patience to try either again… I’m too reliant on muscle memory and key bindings to have these tools get in the way.

As for ChatGPT, my company has a decently-restrictive policy. We can and are encouraged to use it, but no IP can be given. So everything is really generic. That said, I find it most useful in two areas. First, getting me unstuck. And what I mean by that is, I basically ask it if it’s possible to solve a problem. If it spits out code, I’ve got a general idea of how to get there. In short, I skip Stackoverflow.

Second, I like it for a second perspective. For example, I recently had a task to remove “duplicate rows” from a database table. We’ve used the same algorithm 2 or 3 times prior. Something wasn’t sitting quite right with a reviewer of the changes I made for this particular need, but even after group discussion, no one could put a finger on it.

So, I asked ChatGPT how to do this same thing and its solution was actually sound. We still kept my solution… and eventually figured out what was wrong, after the migrator didn’t do its job properly. That resulted in a good, solid day of hand-fixing databases… I really should have listened to my gut when ChatGPT gave a totally different, probably more bulletproof answer. It may not always correctly, but that doesn’t mean it’s not necessarily helpful.