this post was submitted on 28 Mar 2024
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I'm not particularly interested. Some on my team are playing with it, but I honestly don't see much point since they spend more time fixing the generated code than they would writing it.
And I don't think it'll ever really work well (in the near-ish future) for the most common type of dev work: fixing bugs and making small changes to existing code.
It would be awesome if there was some kind of super linter instead. I spend far more time reading code than writing it, so if it can catch bugs, that would be interesting.
In my experience with Codeium, it sometimes works ok for three or four lines of code at once. I've actually had a few surprises where it nailed what I was going for where I didn't expect it. But most of the time, it's just duplicating code from elsewhere in the same file, which usually doesn't make sense.
It's also pretty good for stuff where I'd usually build some exotic regex to search/replace (or do it manually, because it'd take longer to come up with the expression), like transforming an enum into a switch construct for its members, or mapping said enum to a string of the member's name.
This is very far from taking over my job, though. I'd love to be more of a conductor than the guy playing all instruments in the orchestra at once.
To each their own of course. It just seems like the productivity gains are perceptual, not actual.
For an enum to a switch, I just copy the enum values and run a regex on those copied lines. Both would take me <30s, so it's a wash. That specific one would be trivial with most IDEs as well, just type "switch (variable) {" and it could autocomplete an exhaustive switch, all without LLMs.
Then again, I'm pretty old school. I still use vim as my editor (with language server plugins), and I'm really comfortable with those kinds of common tasks. I'm only going to bother learning to use the LLM if it's really going to help (e.g. automate writing good unit tests).
Sometimes those things are way more complex, for example when it's about matching over a string rather than an enum to convert it into an enum. Typing out a regex would take me maybe 10mins or more, and with the LLM I can just describe roughly what I want (since it knows the language, I don't have to explain it in detail, just something like "make this into a switch statement" is sufficient usually).
10mins at a time really adds up over a full work day.