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Why Copilot is Making Programmers Worse at Programming (www.darrenhorrocks.co.uk)

submitted 2 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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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.

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[–] [email protected] 39 points 2 months ago (5 children)

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.

[–] trolololol 8 points 2 months ago

Thx for saving me a click. We are full of options and nobody has data. Down voting the post.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

Welcome to the Internet. Pontification is all we've got. Now we've got LLMs regurgitating the old pontifications to make new ones.

I came in with your same expectations and found the same shit. Just some opinion formed on the basis of "concern".

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (1 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 months ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 months ago

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…

[–] Fades 1 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Exactly what I suspected. How could you even truly prove such a thing

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 month ago

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.