Technology

I interviewed someone who used AI (CoPilot, I think), and while it somewhat worked, it gave the wrong implementation of a basic algorithm. We pointed out the mistake, the developer fixed it (we had to provide the basic algorithm, which was fine), and then they refactored and AI spat out the same mistake, which the developer again didn't notice.

AI is fine if you know what you're doing and can correct the mistakes it makes (i.e. use it as fancy code completion), but you really do need to know what you're doing. I recommend new developers avoid AI like the plague until they can use it to cut out the mundane stuff instead of filling in their knowledge gaps. It'll do a decent job at certain prompts (i.e. generate me a function/class that...), but you're going to need to go through line-by-line and make sure it's actually doing the right thing. I find writing code to be much faster than reading and correcting code so I don't bother w/ AI, but YMMV.

An area where it's probably ideal is finding stuff in documentation. Some projects are huge and their search sucks, so being able to say, "find the docs for a function in library X that does..." I know what I want, I just may not remember the name or the module, and I certainly don't remember the argument order.

All the while it gets further and further from the requirements. So you open five more conversations, give them the same prompt, and try pick which one is least wrong.

All the while realising you did this to save time but at this point coding from scratch would have been faster.

That sums up my experience too, but I have found it good for discussing functions for SQL and Powershell. Sometimes, it’ll throw something into its garbage code and I’ll be like “what does this do?” It’ll explain how it’s supposed to work, I’ll then work out its correct usage and solve my problem. Weirdly, it’s almost MORE helpful than if it just gave me functional code, because I have to learn how to properly use it rather than just copy/paste what it gives me.