I think automated tests are the one area that LLMs will truly improve productivity (and overall code quality). It’ll likely also lead to a lot of tests that actually tests nothing, but as a whole, it’ll hopefully be capable of both generating and updating tests if you give it some good inputs to do it on. Documentation is another area where I have high hopes. In the ideal world people update it as they change things. In reality, however, well…
Then there is the design side of things. I really feel bad for designers of Icons now that you can get some really good one really fast by tasking one of the image generating AIs.
I’m not sure LLMs will ever really be capable helpers as far as programming goes. Well I guess it’s two part, they can help with trivial tasks, but they can’t help with anything related to the actual work of generating business value with code. It’s two-sided of course. They certainly allow a lot of people write functioning, though really shitty, code. Which is a huge benefit for a lot of programming tasks where it doesn’t really matter that it’s inefficient and well terrible. We’ve already seen our more digitally inclined employees make great things with power apps, most of which are eventually replaced by more robust software as they scale. But we also see small Python programs helping out with tiny personal tasks around our offices, and while IT operations aren’t too happy it’s generating a lot of individual value that wasn’t there before.
If the code isn't doing anything special, it spits out decent enough code (I am using the paid version of ChatGPT with the various customization).
As someone who spends 80% of his time in the backend, I find it great for JavaScript whereas it's not so good for Django which I know pretty well.It can still be useful though and is often faster than looking up docs for specific things.
Yes, I just used ChatGPT to write me some code to iterate through a CSV and add each row to a system via its API.
It wrote a python app. It hard coded the API key and the CSV file. And then it told me to pass the file name as an argument. lol.
I just asked it to fix that and tested with a two line csv. Worked like a charm and saved me quite a bit of time trying to figure a few new things out.
But a proper programmer would have been slowed down by this, for sure.
A test that tests nothing is redundant and therefore is not a test. I have seen people make claims about "useless tests" when they are not able to reason about the coverage. You should be using a tool to gauge test coverage. Tests should be proving accuracy and precision. It's easy to conflate those or lose sight of one.
Then there is the design side of things. I really feel bad for designers of Icons now that you can get some really good one really fast by tasking one of the image generating AIs.
I’m not sure LLMs will ever really be capable helpers as far as programming goes. Well I guess it’s two part, they can help with trivial tasks, but they can’t help with anything related to the actual work of generating business value with code. It’s two-sided of course. They certainly allow a lot of people write functioning, though really shitty, code. Which is a huge benefit for a lot of programming tasks where it doesn’t really matter that it’s inefficient and well terrible. We’ve already seen our more digitally inclined employees make great things with power apps, most of which are eventually replaced by more robust software as they scale. But we also see small Python programs helping out with tiny personal tasks around our offices, and while IT operations aren’t too happy it’s generating a lot of individual value that wasn’t there before.