GitHub CoPilot Is Ruining Code Quality | Prime Reacts

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[ew]

It was trained on an internet full of meh code

[RickGladwin]

Me: Know what’s _not_ my favourite thing? Debugging other people’s code.
Copilot: Hey, how would you like to spend most of your dev time debugging other people’s code?

[nexovec]

"Github copilot better than junior"
Dude who the f did you hire?

[sdihhk]

we did it guys, we secured our future in the industry!

[NullMello]

"You live in a bubble of 0 application users" 🔥🔥🔥

[aldarrin]

Got my first car around '95. It had a manual transmission. It was awesome, my car felt like an extension of my body. Bought my first car with an automatic transmission in 2012. While the experience wasn't as fun, it was still awesome because I no longer dreaded my 45m+ commute in stop and go traffic. Bought my first car with some AI self driving in 2022. It was awesome because after a long drive I didn't feel drained. I strongly think I'm a better AI supervisor because I have decades of experience driving without it. I worry about people getting into any skill or craft using automation without first understanding the older, manual processes. A few months ago I almost got into a head on collision in a wonky intersection. By the time I knew what had happened, I had already overridden the AI, swerved out of the path of the oncoming car, and came to a safe stop all on instinct. Don't think a teenager using my car would've been able to do the same. I think developers will see the same.

[rosmaraldimanagitalibi]

8:52 Don't worry about that, only like 40% of students in my class of just completed Computer Science education used ChatGPT and co-pilot exclusively to crawl through the education.

[bogdyee]

When AI tools get better, less people understand what they are doing when they use it. Sounds like a catastrophe waiting to a happen.

[retagainez]

More CoPilot code means MORE NEED FOR ENTRY LEVEL JOBS TO FIX UNMAINTAINABLE CODE PROBLEMS!! WOO!!

[zzeck]

If you work in a large legacy system, with not much documentation, and a ton of business rules enforced through copied and pasted code, and need to interact with it respecting existing rules, you do end up reading 10x more than you write, because no function or other abstraction sums up what you need done, separated from details of the most user facing part of the old system. (could be UI forms, could be http controllers etc). It takes even more reading to decide the least damaging place (or if you're lucky it feels like a search for the most appropriate place) to make changes.

[jjfuentes]

"I hate to break this to you but you live in a bubble of zero user applications." 12:15

Best comment

[woolfel]

I work in consulting world and I spent 90% of my time reading code. On a good day, I might spend 3 productive hours coding if there isn't a ton of meetings. If there's 2-4 meetings that day, I might get 1 hour to code. More important than writing code is making code easy to maintain and well documented.

[swannie]

17:07 For every line of code written at my office at least 2 people need to read it during review. Then an additional 2 people need to read it for testing and review. So I kinda believe that in general a lot more time is spent on reading code compared to writing it.

[garanceadrosehn]

Writing code vs reading code: When I'm in the middle of developing something, I can write hundreds of lines a day. That does not happen often. But then I have to come back to that code, say a month later, and need to fix some bug. In that situation I'll spend an hour or two reading code (and maybe writing a bunch of _printf_ commands to figure out the edge-cases), and at the end of the day I'll write maybe 10 lines of code. The bug fix was a *lot* of reading and relatively little writing. And the nature of my job is I'll spend much more of my time fixing bugs than writing brand new code.

[Evilanious]

As a learner AI mainly serves a the role of docs + stack overflow. It immediately gives an answer without belittling me and it knows utility functions off-hand that I didn't know exist or couldn't find. I don't let it write code that I don't understand. If it does I either delete it or look up whatever function I don't understand. It can also explain what's wrong with my code. I feel the follow up is important here. If you ask questions until your problem is resolved it's a crutch that hampers learning. If you prompt it until you understand it speeds along learning.

[nbb]

Sometimes, it's burning obvious what you're about to write. Sometimes, nobody except you knows what you're about to write. Based on this, Copilot's suggestion will be somewhere in the range of convenient to not at all useful. As long as the obvious lines are frequent and as long as reading a suggestion is faster than typing it, Copilot is useful. If you're a zombie and you just complete everything, you have a problem.

[qeqsiquemechanical]

who would've thought that stealing code from the web and automating a plagiarism bot would result in garbage code, amiright? /s

modern techbro world is truly backwards 😂

[KayOScode]

I’d like to mention is that for me, churn is much higher at the start of a project when I haven’t established the patterns I’d like to use. Often I’ll implement things one way, then realize it won’t fully fit my requirements, so I refactor. As a project matures, the established patterns have proven effective, and existing code doesn’t need to be changed to fit new ones as frequently. So maybe there are just more new projects entering the GitHub space causing an increase in churn that’s probably typical of new projects

[neko]

We definitely read much more code than we write, because

1. Most work is around existing code, e.g. bug fixes, writing tests, small changes in behavior, refactors, enhacements (e.g adding a new field to an API)

2. Before adding new code we have to look at existing code for reference, or at the minimum find the right place for our code

3. In any reasonable professional context (job or open source) someone has to review the code we wrote - this alone means half our code interaction is spent reading

Consider a team setting where half the work is maintenance and six devs have to review all code submitted just to stay on top of their team codebase, that's already over 90% reading

[exoZelia]

As a general rule, statistics on any company's sales page shouldn't be taken seriously, especially when one of them is an abstract thing like "fulfilled"