My least favorite part of this trend is the ageism. "Crusty curmudgeons are not up-to date with the latest bloat if they think RTFM is still a thing", "Oh, you didn't like ORMs? Did you try letting an AI generate code for your ORM?"
Maybe in the future all of these assistants will offer something amazing, but in my experience, there is more time invested in prompting that just reading the relevant documentation and having a coherent design.
My suspicion is that many, (but not all please no flames) of the biggest boosters of AI coding are simply inexperienced. If this is true, it makes sense that they wouldn't recognize the numerous foot-guns in AI generated code.
As an experienced coder, I find ai invaluable for a ton of stuff, nearly none of it writing production code.
* Variable naming
* Summarizing unfamiliar code
* Producing boilerplate code when I have examples
* Producing one-liners when I've forgotten the parameter order or API specification. I double check, but this is basically a Google that directly answers your question
* Pre-code brainstorming
* Code review. Depending on the language it can catch classes of problems that escape linters
In my experience it won't produce production-ready code, but it's great as a rubber duck and a second pair of eyes.
Maybe in the future all of these assistants will offer something amazing, but in my experience, there is more time invested in prompting that just reading the relevant documentation and having a coherent design.
My suspicion is that many, (but not all please no flames) of the biggest boosters of AI coding are simply inexperienced. If this is true, it makes sense that they wouldn't recognize the numerous foot-guns in AI generated code.