Same. I also like it for basic research and helping with syntax for obscure SQL queries, but coding hasn't worked very well. One of my less technical coworkers tried to vibe code something and it didn't work well. Maybe it would do okay on something routine, but generally speaking it would probably be better to use a library for that anyway.

I have limited AI experience, but so far that's what it means to me as well: helpful in very limited circumstances.

Mostly, I find it useful for "speaking new languages" - if I try to use AI to "help" with the stuff I have been doing daily for the past 20 years? Yeah, it's just slowing me down.

Not a developer per se (mostly virtualization, architecture, and hardware) but AI can get me to 80-90% of a script in no time. The last 10% takes a while but that was going to take a while regardless. So the time savings on that first 90% is awesome. Although it does send me down a really bad path at times. Being experienced enough to know that is very helpful in that I just start over.

In my opinion AI shouldn’t replace coders but it can definitely enhance them if used properly. It’s a tool like everything. I can put a screw in with a hammer but I probably shouldn’t.

On that last note, important thing they left out here being general news reporting tech stuff is that this was specifically bug fixing tasks. It can typically only provide the broadest of advice on that, and it’s largely incapable of tackling problems holistically when you often need to be thinking big picture while tackling a bug.

Interesting that the AI devs thought they were being quicker though.

Everyone on Lemmy is a software developer.

Sometimes I get an LLM to review a patch series before I send it as a quick once over. I would estimate about 50% of the suggestions are useful and about 10% are based on "misunderstanding". Last week it was suggesting a spelling fix I'd already made because it didn't understand the - in the diff meant I'd changed the line already.

For some of us that’s more useful. I’m currently playing a DevSecOps role and one of the defining characteristics is I need to know all the tools. On Friday, I was writing some Java modules, then some groovy glue, then spent the after writing a Python utility. While im reasonably good about jumping among languages and tools, those context switches are expensive. I definitely want ai help with that.

That being said, ai is just a step up from search or autocomplete, it’s not magical. I’ve had the most luck with it generating unit tests since they tend to be simple and repetitive (also a major place for the juniors to screw up: ai doesn’t know whether the slop it’s pumping out is useful. You do need to guide it and understand it, and you really need to cull the dreck)

I agree with the depicted actual developers, but this is still funny

Code reviews seem like a good opportunity for an LLM. It seems like they would be good at it. I’ve actually spent the last half hour googling for tools.

I’ve spent literally a month in reviews for this junior guy on one stupid feature, and so much of it has been so basic. It’s a combination of him committing ai slop without understanding or vetting it, and being too junior to consider maintainability or usability. It would have saved so much of my time if ai could have done some of those review cycles without me

You shouldn't think of "AI" as intelligent and ask it to do something tricky. The boring stuff that's mostly just typing, that's what you get the LLMs to do. "Make a DTO for this table " "Interface for this JSON "

I just have a bunch of conversations going where I can paste stuff into and it will generate basic code. Then it's just connecting things up, but that's the fun part anyway.

I have asked questions, had conversations for company and generated images for role playing with AI.

I've been happy with it, so far.

This was the case a year or two ago but now if you have an MCP server for docs and your project and goals outlined properly it's pretty good.

If you give it the right task, it’s super helpful. But you can’t ask it to write anything with any real complexity.

Where it thrives is being given pseudo code for something simple and asking for the specific language code for it. Or translate between two languages.

That’s… about it. And even that it fucks up.