I am not anti-AI or something like it and I use AI on a daily basis. If you work on a domain where there’s plenty code written for it or documentation, AI acts like a very efficient search tool. It does not replace traditional documentation or stack overflow, but it significantly reduces the time I take searching for specific syntax, or an example of how to use a library, or how to use a specific feature or parameter of a library. Occasionally it gives me bad advice as well, such as doing something that results in low performance, low security, but then I can check the actual documentation and code to see the details. For code reviews, I think it’s only partially useful, while sometimes it spits something useful, most of the time it spits out bad or irrelevant advice that ends up polluting the code review screen for actual human devs trying to review the code. However, even with all the gains, which is kind of a mixed bag, I think it’s very unlikely AI will increase speed 10 fold. At best, it will be like a 25% improvement at best, and only specific to some times in the project lifecycle, and most of the gains only happen when you are dealing with generating boilerplate code and adding non business-specific functionality. Most of the time I had to maintain existing code, debug existing functionality and fix some security flaws, AI didn’t help me at all.
I am not anti-AI or something like it and I use AI on a daily basis. If you work on a domain where there’s plenty code written for it or documentation, AI acts like a very efficient search tool. It does not replace traditional documentation or stack overflow, but it significantly reduces the time I take searching for specific syntax, or an example of how to use a library, or how to use a specific feature or parameter of a library. Occasionally it gives me bad advice as well, such as doing something that results in low performance, low security, but then I can check the actual documentation and code to see the details. For code reviews, I think it’s only partially useful, while sometimes it spits something useful, most of the time it spits out bad or irrelevant advice that ends up polluting the code review screen for actual human devs trying to review the code. However, even with all the gains, which is kind of a mixed bag, I think it’s very unlikely AI will increase speed 10 fold. At best, it will be like a 25% improvement at best, and only specific to some times in the project lifecycle, and most of the gains only happen when you are dealing with generating boilerplate code and adding non business-specific functionality. Most of the time I had to maintain existing code, debug existing functionality and fix some security flaws, AI didn’t help me at all.