From talking to colleagues at Microsoft it's a very management-driven push, not developer-driven. Friend on an Azure team had a team member who was nearly put on a PIP because they refused to install the internal AI coding assistant. Every manager has "number of developers using AI" as an OKR, but anecdotally most devs are installing the AI assistant and not using it or using it very occasionally. Allegedly it's pretty terrible at C# and PowerShell which limits its usefulness at MS.
That's exactly what senior executives who aren't coding are saying everywhere.
Meanwhile, engineers are using it for code completion and as a Google search alternative.
I don't see much difference here at all, the only habit to change is learning to trust an AI solution as much as a Stack Overflow answer. Though the benefit of SO is each comment is timestamped and there are alternative takes, corrections, caveats in the comments.
> I don't see much difference here at all, the only habit to change is learning to trust an AI solution as much as a Stack Overflow answer. Though the benefit of SO is each comment is timestamped and there are alternative takes, corrections, caveats in the comments.
That's a pretty big benefit, considering the feedback was by people presumably with relevant expertise/experience to contribute (in the pre-LLM before-time).
The comments have the same value as the answers themselves. Kinda like annotations and errata on a book. It's like seeing "See $algorithm in The Art of Programming V1" in a comment before a complex code.
In my experience it's far less useful than simple auto complete. It makes things up for even small amounts of code that I have to pause my flow to correct. Also, without actually googling you don't get any context or understanding of what it's writing.
I found it to be more distracting recently. Suggestions that are too long or written in a different style make me lose my own thread of logic that I'm trying to weave .
I've had to switch it off for periods to maintain flow.
There's a large group of people that claim that AI tools are no good and I can't tell if they're in some niche where they truly aren't, they don't care to put any effort into learning the tools, or they're simply in denial.
Or simply unwilling to cut their perfectly good legs off and attach those overhyped prostheses that make people so fast and furious at running on the spot
It's just tooling. Costs nothing to wait for it to be better. It's not like you're going miss out on AGI. The cost of actually testing every slop code generator is non-trivial.
