Programmer Humor

but for beginners? They will have a lot of bugs in their code.

Everyone has lots of bugs in their code, especially beginners. This is why we have testing and qa and processes to minimize the risk of bugs. As the saying goes, "the good news about computers is that they do what you tell them to do. The bad n was is that they do what you tell them to do."

Programming is an iterative process where you do something, it doesn't work, and then you give it another go. It's not something that senior devs get right on the first try, while beginners have to try many times. It's just that senior devs have seen a lot more so have a better understanding of why it probably went wrong, and maybe can avoid some more common pitfalls the first time around. But if you are writing bug free code in your first pass, well you're a way better programmer than anyone I've met.

Ai is just another tool to make this happen. Sure, it's not always the tool for the job, just like IoC is not always the right tool for the job. But it's nice to have it and sometimes it makes things much easier.

Like just now I was debugging a large SQL query. I popped it into copilot, asked if to break it into parts so I could debug. It gave a series of smaller queries that I then used to find the point where it fell apart. This is something that would have taken me at least a half hour of tedious boring work, fixed in 5 minutes.

Also for writing scripts. I want some data formatted so it was easier to read? No problem, it will spit out a script that gets me 90% of the way there in seconds. Do I have to refine it? Absolutely. But if I wrote it myself, not being super prolific with python, it would have taken me a half hour to get the structure in place, and then I still would have had to refine it because I don't produce perfect code the first time around. And it comments the scripts, which I rarely do.

What also amazes me is that sometimes it will spit out code and I'll be like "woah I didn't even know you could do that" and so I learned a new technique. It has a very deep "understanding" of the syntax and fundamentals of the language.

Again, I find it shocking that experienced devs don't find it useful. Not living up to the hype I get. But not seeing it as a productivity boosting tool is a real head scratcher to me. Granted, I'm no rockstar dev, and maybe you are, but I've seen a lot of shit in my day and understand that I'm legitimately a senior dev.