The AI industry's claims about AI coding assistants boosting productivity significantly appear to be massively overblown, per a new report.

“No Duh,” say senior developers everywhere.

The article explains that vibe code often is close, but not quite, functional, requiring developers to go in and find where the problems are - resulting in a net slowdown of development rather than productivity gains.

  • altphoto@lemmy.todayEnglish
    8·
    15 hours ago

    Its great for stupid boobs like me, but only to get you going. It regurgitates old code, it cannot come up with new stuff. Lately there have been less Python errors, but again the stuff you can do is limited. At least for the free stuff that you can get without signing up.

    • Terrasque@infosec.pubEnglish
      4·
      8 hours ago

      It regurgitates old code, it cannot come up with new stuff.

      The trick is, most of what you write is basically old code in new wrapping. In most projects, I’d say the new and novel part is maybe 10% of the code. The rest is things like setting up db models, connecting them to base logic, set up views, api endpoints, decoding the message on the ui part, displaying it to user, handling input back, threading things so UI doesn’t hang, error handling, input data verification, basic unit tests, set up settings, support reading them from a file or env vars, making UI look not horrible, add translatable text, and so on and on and on. All that has been written in some variation a million times before. All can be written (and verified) by a half-asleep competent coder.

      The actual new interesting part is gonna be a small small percentage of the total code.

      • altphoto@lemmy.todayEnglish
        2·
        5 hours ago

        I totally agree with this. However, you can’t get there without coding experience and knowledge of the problem as well as education in computer science or experience in the field. I’m a generalist, I’m loving what I can do at home. But I still get the run around using AI. I have to read and understand the code to try to nudge the AI in the right direction or I’ll end up going in circles if I don’t.

    • Corhen@lemmy.worldEnglish
      7·
      12 hours ago

      Yea, I use it for home assistant, it’s amazingly powerful… And so incredibly dumb

      It will take my if and statements, and shrunk it to 1/3 the length, while being twice as to robust… While missing that one of the arguments is entirely in the wrong place.