80% of developers find AI coding more addictive than helpful

A new Coddy Developer Survey found that four in five developers, 80%, say their use of AI has felt more like a dependence than an advantage.

www.zdnet.com/article/80-of-developers-find-ai-coding-more-addictive-than-helpful/

I had this experience once. We have a ChatGPT license where I work, and I asked it to configure a switch that I wasn’t familiar with. I simply described in words what network architecture I wanted and it did it! It even made some nice-looking documentation.

But, then I tried the new configs, and they didn’t work. It turns out there were some key syntax things it got wrong. And the documentation was wrong on top of that, with incorrect diagrams, and when I asked it to fix it it made different errors I the diagrams in different places. On balance, I still saved some time over reading all the manuals and figuring out the syntaxes myself, but only because I made my own documentation with the results that worked. If I had trusted the AI I would be sunk.

I’ve concluded that AI gives the illusion of competence, like a overly confident new manager. This can be very attractive to a less experienced person. But it’s really guessing, just like we all are. It can just guess after actually “reading” all the manuals. I haven’t used AI to write anything more than simple configurations and helper scripts. If I did want to use AI for more it would be in more of a pair-programming context. I might have a window open where I describe some things and ask for analysis, but I wouldn’t just run anything it does blindly.

I’ve concluded that AI gives the illusion of competence

Basically the same conclusion I came to. Which is terrifying when you think of all the devs who depend and all the money thats riding on it.

there were some key syntax things it got wrong

And syntax is the kind of thing llm’s should be awesome at. If they can’t even get that right we’re all cooked.

In fairness, this was all on a switch, where the commands are very tightly tied to the vendor and their underlying in-house shell. So commands may vary by release greatly. I was already explicitly telling the bot what software version and licenses I had, but ultimately I had to resort to the CLI’s help function at times and tell the bot “The command you gave me didn’t work. Here’s where it broke, and here’s the commands it will accept”. Given that information, it could (generally) figure it all out.