[D] The current and future state of AI/ML is shockingly demoralizing with little hope of redemption

I can at least speak to the CoPilot end of things.

I'm a programmer with 20+ years' experience on a variety of languages and platforms, and I started using CoPilot a month ago. I am using it in a domain with which I'm less familiar - Serverless on AWS written in Typescript and running under NodeJS - all of which I have less than a year of experience with.

It can work in several ways, but IMHO only two are useful:

  • as a better auto-complete, compared with the traditional "intellisense"
  • responding to a comment prompt with a suggested code fragment

The first mode is generally excellent. Traditional autocomplete can use language syntax and API structure (depending on language!) to save you from looking up documentation, but is not capable of taking the context of what you're doing and extrapolating. CoPilot does that very well.

The second mode (the one that gets the hype) is not very good. It's roughly equivalent to pair programming where the other dude is constantly looking things up on Stack Overflow and sending sample code fragments, saying "this might help". Much of the time these fragments don't compile - partly because it's not smart enough to include the necessary API imports, or doesn't consider what library version you're using. But it's a good way to get a starting point if you're unfamiliar with the tech stack but you have the experience to know what you want to do.

I do not think CoPilot substantially influences the code I would write. It probably does push you slightly to reproducing fragments of code blindly - but honestly I think most junior programmers do exactly the same thing with StackOverflow. I personally delete and re-write the majority of the comment prompt suggestions, but the copy-paste-edit cycle is part of the early learning process - and CoPilot is merely cutting out the web search. Does it lead to cargo-culting code? Notoriously. Is it new? Not really - that's basically StackOverflow's purpose in life.

TL;DR: CoPilot is currently a better auto-complete - something that's been in every programmer's toolbox for more than 25 years - blended with a bit of StackOverflow. It's not capable enough to affect your code architecture.

/r/MachineLearning Thread