My employer is trying to get people to use AI more, too.
I’m skeptical of AI, but I’m finding it useful for menial tasks - things that you’d otherwise automate using an AST-based codemod tool (like jscodeshift, libcst codemod, etc), a hacky find/replace, or do by hand (boring, tedious work that I’d rather not do). Giving the AI system an example patch for something like migrating away from a legacy API, and saying “do this same thing across these 200 other files”, can have pretty good results.
In general, it seems like a good tool for things where the entire process is well-defined - the prompt and context provide all the info it needs - and I include example code in the context.
I don’t trust it for brand new code in a large existing codebase… Even the best AI models still get a lot of things wrong.
My employer is trying to get people to use AI more, too.
I’m skeptical of AI, but I’m finding it useful for menial tasks - things that you’d otherwise automate using an AST-based codemod tool (like jscodeshift, libcst codemod, etc), a hacky find/replace, or do by hand (boring, tedious work that I’d rather not do). Giving the AI system an example patch for something like migrating away from a legacy API, and saying “do this same thing across these 200 other files”, can have pretty good results.
In general, it seems like a good tool for things where the entire process is well-defined - the prompt and context provide all the info it needs - and I include example code in the context.
I don’t trust it for brand new code in a large existing codebase… Even the best AI models still get a lot of things wrong.
Yep. There’s lots it can do, but more I wouldn’t trust it with. Useful for certain tasks.