Why are developers so excited about coding assistants if they still make so many wrong and annoying suggestions? Why would anyone even pay for such a service?

If used right and you get into the flow, I have seen it being helpful and raising my productivity. But sometimes it just doesn't make sense and there are too many wrong suggestions

I can't fathom it myself. AI in its current form is a minefield of liability and "looks like it works but not actually".

You have to triple check the code, meaning you would have saved time just writing it yourself.

Alternatively, you don't understand the code and are just hoping it works. That's fine if it's in a hobby setting, but in a situation where people are relying on your work so they can work, that is unacceptable.

Plus, there's the whole problem of who owns the code? The owners of these AI systems didn't get authorization for anything they scraped. But that won't stop them from declaring everything made using their systems belongs to them.

It also incentivizes another GPU rush, meaning if you need to buy a replacement, you have to spend triple what they're actually worth. Which also leads to applications that function as fancy text editors requiring over the top resources to run, locking people out of the industry if they don't have the cash.

@cuddlyogre please explain the GPU thing. How does AI code affect GPU usage? I don't get this line of thinking.

@Demolishun For local AI processing, a decent GPU speeds things up considerably. Then again, I have only tinkered with stable diffusion, so maybe text focused AI is different.

@cuddlyogre it's literally gpt based

@myss There are local text-based AI systems available. These will be the *only* systems that anyone with any foresight will use. Anything else is just donating your work to Google and Facebook.

This will lead to the same rush that crypto did, where you build an AI machine instead of a miner. And we all saw how that turned out for the GPU market.

It’s useful for asking questions about language features and syntax. You can iterate on these quickly while learning the new language.

After that, coding assistants are often more hindrance than help.

@jestdotty everything works as long as you want something popular; that's like the joke of the Japanese guy with the German textbook in a beer garden saying that he don't want to buy the carpet but the waiter still brings a beer for everyone anyway