Over the past few years, the evolution of AI-driven tools like GitHub’s Copilot and other large language models (LLMs) has promised to revolutionise programming. By leveraging deep learning, these tools can generate code, suggest solutions, and even troubleshoot issues in real-time, saving developers hours of work. While these tools have obvious benefits in terms of productivity, there’s a growing concern that they may also have unintended consequences on the quality and skillset of programmers.
I’ve seen enough programmers blindly copypasting code from stackoverflow and other forums without thinking and never understanding the thing they just “wrote”, to know that tools like copilot won’t make programmers worse, they will allow more people to be bad programmers.
people need to read more code, play around with it, break it and fix it to become better programmers.
Hehe, good point.
people need to read more code, play around with it, break it and fix it to become better programmers.
I think AI bots can help with that. It’s easier now to play around with code which you could not write by yourself, and quickly explore different approaches. And while you might shy away from asking your colleagues a noob question, ChatGPT will happily elaborate.
In the end, it’s just one more tool in the box. We need to learn when and how to use it wisely.
I was hoping this might start with some actual evidence that programmers are in fact getting worse. Nope, just a single sentence mentioning “growing concern”, followed by paragraphs and paragraphs of pontification.
Thx for saving me a click. We are full of options and nobody has data. Down voting the post.
We’ve all read this post multiple times. Isn’t it just the “young people are lazy” that’s been going around for thousands of years?
https://historyhustle.com/2500-years-of-people-complaining-about-the-younger-generation/
At most it’s a tangent on it…
I don’t think it’s making devs worse, however I do think it’s significantly lowering the bar to entry to the point where people who don’t have enough knowledge to actually do the job well are becoming proceedingly common. Theoretically they should get weeded out by a good interview process but corporate be corporate
Not that my opinion is worth anything, it’s not like I have anything to back it up.
Please disregard any takes I may have
I mean, at least you acknowledge that you’re presenting an opinion. This blog post just tries to gloss over the fact that it’s pure speculation.
Exactly what I suspected. How could you even truly prove such a thing
It’s probably not “provable” one way or the other, but I’d like to see more empirical studies in general within the software industry, and this seems like a fruitful subject for that.
Anything that allows people to blindly and effortlessly get results inherently makes them more stupid. Your brain is like any muscle. You need to repeatedly use it for it to work well
I’ll bet people said the same thing when Intellisense started suggesting lines completions.
And when errors were highlighted in the code rather than console output.
And when high-level languages started appearing.
This really isn’t a good comparison at all. One gives you a list of choices you can make, and the other gives you a blind answer.
If seeing what argument types the function takes make me a worse engineer, so be it, I guess
I’ll bet people said the same thing when Intellisense started suggesting lines completions.
They did.
And when errors were highlighted in the code rather than console output.
Yep.
And when high-level languages started appearing.
And yes.
That said, if you believed my mentors, we were barelling towards a 2025 in which nothing running on software ever really worked reliably.
So they may have been grumpy, but they were also right, on that point.
I mean with the “move fast and break things” mentality of most companies nowadays, I’d say he was spot-on
I’ll bet people said the same thing when Intellisense started suggesting lines completions.
I’m sure many did, but I’m also pretty sure it’s easy to draw a line between code assistance and LLM-infused code generation.
And when people started writing books instead of memorizing epic poems.
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Claude is laughable hypersensitive and self-censoring to certain words independently of contexts (…)
That’s not a problem, nor Claude’s main problem.
Claude’s main problem is that it is frequently down, unreliable, and extremely buggy. Overall I think it might be better than ChatGPT and Copilot, but it’s simply so unstable it becomes unusable.
What’s Copilot? ;)
A thing that hallucinates uncompilable code but somehow convinces your boss it’s a necessary tool.
Copilot is a tool for programmers who don’t want program.
I’ll never forget attending CS courses with a guy who got violently angry at having to write code. I assume he’s either thrilled with Copilot or in prison for attacking somebody over its failure to reliably write all of his code for him.
An LLM that propose autocompletion for whole line/function.
This is the right answer.
Of course, I don’t understand why people think it’s “unecessary”.
Do they never do exploratory work and do thing they are uncomfortable with ?
It’s a tool, if i’m in a codebase I know well, it’s often pretty useless.
But I started writing some python, I’m a python noob, copilot is a gigantic productivity booster.
As someone who thinks we are in an AI bubble about to burst, this article has “old man angry at the kids using new technology” vibes.
I agree. Those who make bold claims like “AI is making programmers worse” neither has any first-hand experience with AI tools nor has any contact with how programmers are using them in their day-to-day business.
Let’s think about this for a second: one feature of GitHub Copilot is the
/explaincommand, which is used to put together a synthetic description of what a codebase does. Please someone tell me how a programmer gets worse at their job by having a tool that helps him understand any codebase anywhere.I honestly wonder if they’re not trying to imply by virtue of digging up the info yourself, you’re not better for it… some real boomer shit
