Comment by Zetice | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Zetice | Hacker News Reader

As others have said, this article is written as if GitHub's Copilot + VSCode integration doesn't exist, and I think the author should get that going before concluding, "AI Does Not Help Programmers."

It saves me a decent amount of rote implementation. I read up on the APIs, I understand the pattern I'm supposed to implement, but then Copilot actually does it for me. It's not a world-changer, but it does save time, it does "help".

And not for nothing, at least once I've pasted a script into GPT4 and asked "What's wrong here?" and it correctly identified I was using `[` instead of `[[` for a Bash conditional. This was code that had been working for years (AWS must have updated what version of Bash it was running CodeDeploy through), I never would have thought to check something like that. Realistically saved me an entire day hunting that down.

I find copilot hallucinate so many variable names, function names, etc that I find it borderline at best for generating code.

I spent about and hour debugging before I realised copilot had put two function arguments in backwards, f(b,a) instead of f(a,b). Yes I should have read it more clearly, but after 4h of working, it just slipped through.

Copilot has "intelisense++" is more useful, but even then the ux is kinda horrible where it inserts random extra quotes at the end of strings and whatnot.

Copilot chat/gpt4/bingai is a lot lot better, but it needs to be integrated into vscode and actually be aware of the entire code base.

I think AI will result in a huge push for statically typed languages so the system can verify its own answers for you.

Give it a couple years, and everyone will forget it and move on to some new shiny

I THINK SO TOO!

I'm 97% sure that just using static analysis to provide all the relevant type definitions and function signatures as context for code completion in LLMs alone will be a massive value-add. I'm literally doing that by hand right now to GPT-4, and it works.

And I think there's more stuff that can be done where one sets up an automated cycle of (1) prompt LLM, (2) type-check completions, (3) construct prompt that incorporates type checking errors, ..etc.

I really think that this, combined with types written with the "make illegal states unrepresentable" philosophy, will be great.

I really wish I had time to work on this myself.

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