cross-posted from: https://piefed.world/c/tech/p/1394707/study-reveals-how-generative-ai-is-eroding-the-development-pathway-for-software-develope
In-depth interviews with 14 junior and senior developers in Korea reveal four structural changes
cross-posted from: https://piefed.world/c/tech/p/1394707/study-reveals-how-generative-ai-is-eroding-the-development-pathway-for-software-develope
In-depth interviews with 14 junior and senior developers in Korea reveal four structural changes
This is a real problem, I already see it with CS students.
AI is useful in some limited scenarios, the problem is that when you’re learning CS all of the scenarios that you’re given as exercises are almost trivial to solve and fall within AI’s capability to do for you. That completely handicaps a student in ways they don’t even understand until much later.
It isn’t until they get into more complex projects, where AI flounders, that they recognize that they have rarely had to troubleshoot an issue so they don’t have the mental framework to do so. They’re not comfortable with the tools, and they haven’t internalized the methodology so they hit a brick wall.
If you’re a student now, avoid it at all costs. It’s easier to use AI, of course, but facing the difficulty and overcoming it is probably the most important part of learning anything.
From my experience AI works well as a alternative to Stack overflow or searching for the answer, or rewording the solution to be easier understood.
AI is good at rewording the documentation of code so if the documentation isn’t good or written by someone who’s lived in the sauce for too long, AI can be very very helpful.
But you need to know how to code, and not just blindly copying the output, you need to understand what it’s doing and make sure that it fits your code base.
I have touched C in ages so AI helped me get to grips with it again when working in a project. But it didn’t write my code, I did. Which made fixing bugs a lot easier when they were found or reported.
It’s almost like the point of schooling was doing the assignments, not submitting them! Plagiarism was already bad for your education, AI just simultaneously turbocharged and normalized it.