Counter article: https://jadarma.github.io/blog/posts/2024/11/does-github-copilot-improve-code-quality-heres-how-we-lie-with-statistics/ about the original statistics article from Github this talk and blog post is about: https://github.blog/news-insights/research/does-github-copilot-improve-code-quality-heres-what-the-data-says/

If you rather like a reactionary video commentary to the article from The Primeagen: https://youtu.be/IxYN7DKefmI or watch on Invidious, a privacy focused web YouTube client without using YouTube directly: https://inv.nadeko.net/watch?v=IxYN7DKefmI

You are viewing a single thread.
View all comments View context
-1 points

There is no such thing as “no-brainer commercially” when Ai is involved

There absolutely is. Copilot is $100/year (or something like that). Developer salaries are like $100k/year (depending on location). So it only has to improve productivity by 0.1% to be worthwhile. It easily does that.

You can’t “turn off your brain” when using copilot. It isn’t that advanced yet.

permalink
report
parent
reply
2 points

Productivity goes up, quality goes down.

permalink
report
parent
reply
1 point

Have you ever seriously used Copilot?

permalink
report
parent
reply
1 point

My team tested it out for our company (17k employees) and it was so bad we immediately said no. It wasn’t just harmful, it was actively intrusive. I’d be trying to type something and it would autocomplete the exact opposite of what I wanted to type. I was constantly deleting what it wrote because it was nowhere in the vicinity of being correct. The same experience was had across everyone else that tried it.

Claude on the other hand is wonderful.

permalink
report
parent
reply
1 point

I have, but in my experience any personal gains are lost if I account for the extra time needed to review other devs’ PRs. The volume of sloc submitted has gone way up, but everything runs and looks fine, so the bugs that do sneak in are really nasty little things.

The experience of using it to fill out, like a wall of config changes, or a bunch of repetitive test cases is good though.

permalink
report
parent
reply
0 points

He obviously hasn’t. This is one of those things where some people feel threatened by something, haven’t used it, and feel like they can comment based on how they imagine it is.

Reminds me of when the iPhone came out. You had all sorts of nonsense criticism of it from people that had clearly never even touched one.

permalink
report
parent
reply
5 points

I’m neither a professional programmer nor a user of Ai but…

Do you think your experience, I’m guessing a pre-ai trained programmer, is reflective of post-ai trained programmers?

Will the inevitable reliance on AI in learning and training, will creativity of new programmers drop? Is that even a problem?

permalink
report
parent
reply

Linux

!linux@programming.dev

Create post

A community for everything relating to the linux operating system

Also check out !linux_memes@programming.dev

Original icon base courtesy of lewing@isc.tamu.edu and The GIMP

Community stats

  • 2.2K

    Monthly active users

  • 564

    Posts

  • 4.9K

    Comments