this post was submitted on 21 Mar 2025
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Maybe I’m old, but I avoid AI specifically because I’ve seen the quality of code out there (not to say my quality is amazing), and if AI learned from that…. Well
AI is great for when you're typing out 30 slight variations of the same thing, and you can just be like "see what I'm doing here? Do it for the other 30 variables" and it does it just fine.
It's also great if you have a general knowledge of something but don't know the details. Like today I needed to do some database introspection using queries in Snowflake, I knew exactly what I needed but not where the database schema is located etc., so I let GPT write the query instead.
Or some time ago I needed to get all instances of classes implementing a specific generic interface in .NET, the code eventually dabbled into the very specifics of the runtime, it would've taken me much longer to find out with documentation.
All in all, it's my opinion that AI is great if two conditions are met:
*pastes list of 100 numbers"
"Flunky, put this in a where in SQL statement. "
It's taught me a few new tricks. It's good at short bits of code, but anything longer is likely to have problems that take as much time to fix as writing it yourself to begin with.
I also find learning something new to be much faster when you can just ask a question about best practices or why something works like it does.
I don't think it's necessary to strictly avoid it by any means, it's quite a useful tool. You just have to use it appropriately, similar to stack overflow in some ways. That said, obviously you should use / avoid whatever tools as you want.