Programmer Humor

Itellij is actually pretty good at this. Besides that, cursor or windsurf should be able to. I was using cursor for a while and when I needed to reactor something, it was pretty good at picking that up. It kept crashing on me though, so I am now trying windsurf and some other options. I am missing the auto complete features in cursor though as I would use this all the time to fill out boilerplate stuff as I write.

The one key difference in cursor and windsurf when compared to other products is that it will look at the entire context again for any changes or at least a little bit of it. You make a change, it looks if it needs to make changes elsewhere.

I still don't trust AI to do much though, but it's an excellent helper

Not reliably, no. Python is too dynamic to do that kind of thing without solving general program equivalence which is undecidable.

Use a static language, problem solved.

I use pycharm for this and in general it does a great job. At work we've got some massive repos and it'll handle it fine.

The "find" tab shows where it'll make changes and you can click "don't change anything in this directory"

most IDEs are pretty decent at it if you configure them correctly. I used intelliJ and it knows the difference. use the refactor feature and it'll crawl references, not just rename all instances.

AI bad. But also, video AI started with will Will Smith eating spaghetti just a couple years ago.

We keep talking about AI doing complex tasks right now and it's limitations, then extrapolating its development linearly. It's not linear and it's not in one direction. It's a exponential and rhizomatic process. Humans always over-estimate (ignoring hard limits) and under-estimate (thinking linearly) how these things go. With rocketships, with internet/social media, and now with AI.

someone drank the koolaid.

LLMs will never code for two reasons.

one, because they only regurgitate facsimiles of code. this is because the models are trained to ingest content and provide an interpretation of the collection of their content.

software development is more than that and requires strategic thought and conceptualization, both of which are decades away from AI at best.

two, because the prevalence of LLM generated code is destroying the training data used to build models. think of it like making a copy of a copy of a copy, et cetera.

the more popular it becomes the worse the training data becomes. the worse the training data becomes the weaker the model. the weaker the model, the less likely it will see any real use.

so yeah. we're about 100 years from the whole "it can't draw its hands" stage because it doesn't even know what hands are.

How can it pass if it hasn't had lessons.. Well said. Ooh I wonder if lecture footage would be able to teach AI, or audio in from tutors..

Man, I can't wait to try out generative AI to generate config files for mission critical stuff! Imagine paying all of us devops wankers when my idiot boss can just ask Chat GPT to sort all this legacy mess we're juggling with on the daily!