The general comments that Ben received were that experienced developers can use AI for coding with positive results because they know what they’re doing. But AI coding gives awful results when it’s used by an inexperienced developer.

I wouldn’t even go so far as to call myself an experienced developer, and this has still been my experience of using AI as a coding assistant. There are definitely situations where you need to bang out a simple script or function and you know that the AI can throw it together faster than you can knock it out yourself, especially when it’s something off to the side of the stuff you’re normally doing, so you’d probably need to read up on some libraries and APIs that you don’t regularly work with. But then you look at the code it spits out, and you’re constantly having to correct minor errors. Not just bugs, but downright bizarre ways of solving problems. In one case ChatGPT wrapped an entire function up as a single threaded future object just to put a timeout on it, even though the function was a subprocess call that already has its own built in timeout option. I run into stuff like that constantly. It also has a really hard time understanding the current state of an evolving language, because in their effort to harvest training data they fed it everything, so when implementing relatively new features like asyncio it tends to flip back and forth between current recommended approaches and outdated methods.

The idea that AI can allow you to code if you’re not already a coder is lunacy. The idea that it could ever successfully do code review is flat out demented. And the problem is that companies will go all in on it anyway, and hire a bunch of junior devs to review and fix the AI code without paying them as much because “Oh, the AI is doing all the work.” They’ll get shit code out, and then they’ll be surprised when it runs badly and breaks constantly.