I’ve found them useful for very broad level stuff (e.g. asking “I’m trying to do X in programming language Y, are there any libraries for that and can you give me an example”). Copilot has been good at giving me broad guesses at why my stuff isn’t working.
But you have to be very careful with any code they spit out. And they sometimes suggest some really stupid stuff. (Don’t know how to set up a C/C++ build environment for some library on Windows? Don’t worry, the AI is even more confused than you are.)
I’m trying to do X in programming language Y, are there any libraries for that and can you give me an example"
I found them to be really bad for that in my testing. They’ll happily hallucinate the existance of a library with a vaguely plausible name, spit out ‘sample’ code for it, and then when I ask for a link to the documentation, say “I’m sorry, that library doesn’t exist”. It drives me round the bend!
I’ve found them useful for very broad level stuff (e.g. asking “I’m trying to do X in programming language Y, are there any libraries for that and can you give me an example”). Copilot has been good at giving me broad guesses at why my stuff isn’t working.
But you have to be very careful with any code they spit out. And they sometimes suggest some really stupid stuff. (Don’t know how to set up a C/C++ build environment for some library on Windows? Don’t worry, the AI is even more confused than you are.)
I found them to be really bad for that in my testing. They’ll happily hallucinate the existance of a library with a vaguely plausible name, spit out ‘sample’ code for it, and then when I ask for a link to the documentation, say “I’m sorry, that library doesn’t exist”. It drives me round the bend!