I'd almost want a middle option between 2 and three. I've moved from the "not impressed" camp back last year to "they're useful" (but not yet "very useful write all my code for me now clanker" though).

The free local ollama hosted (qwen 2.5 and 3, llama 3.3) that I've used so far are still lagging behind, but compared to 9-12 months ago there's noticeable improvements. "Commercial" offerings I've monkeyed with (Grok, GH copilot, Gemini Flash 2.5, Claude Sonnet) have similarly improved; I ran our interview coding problem through a couple of them and the ones I tried produced working not terrible code. Relatedly if I need to search for something depending on the context I'm going to use maybe 70/20/10 Grok/DDG/my local openweb with qwen.

For code assistants it feels like things have gone from complete slop for even trivial questions to mostly working short programs. At $work it's been decided to move to that ophidian competitor, and I find Grok pretty good for taking a detailed explanation "I'm trying to do X" and turning it into an ok/decent sample code or at the least providing me with enough search fodder to find what I really wanted.

I've also used GH Copilot (from emacs of course) to do some small utility scripts in that-other-language as learning practice and it was helpful producing slightly tweaked versions of a function which I'd already written.

So overall there's still a hype bubble for a lot of this, but if you're an experienced developer don't write things off. I think for experienced people especially moving into an unfamiliar language / domain they're at an interesting point where they can actually help you translate things into the new idiom / syntax / <handwaving />.

Edit: Not coding related, but nanobanana is pretty wild. Image stuff's come a long way from 13-fingered Will Smith consuming spaghetti through his 3 chins.

Edit 2: Coding related check out Aider which will use either an API key service (including OpenRouter) or local ollama hosted endpoints.

They're tools and as with all tools they are useful if you know how and when to use them.

• They are somehow useful.

Update: Here it is: Using AI to Optimise the Calculation of Krippendorff's Alpha.

I haven't personally used a coding assistant yet, but I've asked CoPilot to write me some code on several occasions, and it has been an absolute boon. It has done in mere seconds what would have taken me hours the "old way". And sure, I have to check the code for correctness, but that's still orders of magnitude faster than writing the code from scratch. I (the human) become the verifier, in this mode.

ooh, here's a good article I found on the subject: Best practices for pair programming with AI assistants

I think they do a pretty good job of analysis, and do an OK job on very narrowly defined tasks, but I wouldn't trust them to do any detailed work. Anything they generate is going to have to be examined very closely, and properly documented, before it can be used reliably. And if you have to spend that much time checking and fixing it, have you actually saved any time?

• They will produce a lot of slop.
• So called "Democratization" also means every baby can create dangerous code without understanding what he unleashed.
• What's unclear to me: Since maintenance is the biggest cost in a project, how will LLMs be able to cover that? Rewrite the whole code again and again?

So called "Democratization" also means every baby can create dangerous code without understanding what he unleashed.

Yes, this largely depends on how they use it. I think, everybody uses AI differently. When it comes to computer programming, I use AI to learn new things. For example, I ask questions like "How do I get the length of a string in Lua?" or "How do I open a file in binary mode in Python?" and Google AI gives an answer. It's the first thing that appears above the search results. Often I don't even click anywhere; I just read what was written by AI. I've found that sometimes AI quotes someone else word for word. For example, I click on the first result, and it takes me to a thread on Stack Overflow or somewhere where someone asks the same question and the answer that AI prints on the first page of the search result is the same that someone else wrote. So, AI is almost like a personal assistant that does research for me. I like it. As long as you ask very specific questions to which the answer can be found all over the web, there is no problem.

Sometimes AI tries to improvise. For example, I asked for a regex search and replace code in Lua, and it wrote something that didn't work. It was supposed to replace a substring within a string, and instead of replacing just that substring, the code written by AI replaced everything all the way up to the substring and the substring itself as well. So, that's not what I asked it to do, but whatever... I read up on it, and I understand now that Lua's version of regex is like a lame old man compared to Perl's. It's seriously disabled. Anyway, the point is that even AI couldn't figure out how to write a regex code for Lua that would work. So, when it comes to complicated tasks, you have to test it and double check everything to make sure it did exactly what you asked for, otherwise it's prone to make mistakes. But generally, I've found that AI makes life easier. Just don't ask complicated questions! Lol

there is no problem.

There is an absolutely colossal problem. Have you not noticed the unresponsiveness and at times complete unavailability of this site over the past 18 months or so? If you are using generative AI for anything at all then you are contributing to this problem.

The sooner the AI bubble bursts the better. I will not be paying for AI usage directly and I will not be using any AI system which is funding itself through advertising. We all have a responsibility to cut off the revenue from the perpetrators of the LLM training bot catastrophe if we want our web back.

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🦛

On a couple of occasions I have asked Google to produce some code (for example, JQuery JavaScript code to select/deselect all rows in a DataTables table using a singe checkbox input) and it has provided working code. But these are just snippets. So I can't speak to its ability to produce complex code.

I also find it to be of very limited use because at $work the vast majority of the "coding" we do consists of tiny incremental updates to our enormous codebase due to business rules changes. AI is familiar with neither the codebase nor the business rules behind it.

So for now it finds only an extremely limited role in my toolkit.

Ignoring meta-physical theories trying to explain how humans are "unique", if they have a "soul", if they are different to other animals on this planet or indeed different to any aliens (the metric being some kind of turing-completeness test), I only see the difference between any AI and the human brain as quantitative, not qualitative. I.e. it is a matter of time and resources (if/when available) to reach the performance of the human brain. There is no other factor to stop this other than lack of resources (including: "there are not enough grains in the universe to fill a chessboard"/paraphrased).

I know the above is quite simplistic, but it looks to me that AI is on its way to parity.

What can stop this is Capitalism. Whatever Capitalism achieves in the short-term turns into ashes in the long-term. Of course what to the masses are ashes, can be diamonds for those "non-masses". But it's bubbling already given these massive, unrealistic contracts OpenAI does with Oracle for infrastructure, etc.

I can also answer this question by means of another question: what's your view on AI producing music, films, literature? What about flirting AI assistants? Or AI platonic partners? My answer: simply unacceptable.

It would be interesting to see if AI coding assistants subscribe to Perl's TIMTOWTDI or Python's TIO1WTDI/TINA. I would think the former given how eagerly the bots suck wisdom out of this Monastery.

Another thought: do you think Larry Wall's "the three great virtues of a programmer: laziness, impatience, and hubris" will be taken on-board by AI coding assistants? I think not, that would be political incorrectness for the current "west"-trained AI assistants or anti-conformist for the "east"-trained AI assistants - blasphemy (I can not compute!).

bw, bliako

AIs are not allowed to "I can not compute" - that's why they hallucinate 💭

nescio ergo (homo) sum!

that could be a good anti-bot captcha (yikes): ask them to describe a plum-bird. Or a monkey-tree. Or Another(?) Python hacker. lolllll