Why CoPilot Is Making Programmers Worse 

Most skills really

I think AI is just another abstraction tier, though. This is as an aggregate over time, and for disciplined programmers, of course. To some, the internet is a place to copy code from. LLMs didn't suddenly change lazy programming in that way. As far as lost skills, well we don't retain much ability to write in binary. We have accepted that allowing compilers or interpreters to do the final and tedious step is an acceptable paradigm. We have also accepted Syntax highlighting as an important feature for any editor, despite it being a crutch of sorts. A more mature LLM may become an invaluable tool like all of those before, if the trade-off is deemed worthy. I think there are other factors in the software world that pollute the discussion. A programmer at a job counting lines of code as a performance metric will have a different incentive and intent with their LLM than someone using an LLM to help them learn programming in their spare time. Is it the LLM's fault that a company has an awful policy? I don't think current LLMs are worth very much loss in ability aside from perhaps boilerplate code that you could have macros for anyway. The future may be very different.

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If AI makes you a worse programmer, you’re using it incorrectly. Use it to learn, and use it to automate tedious tasks. Be critical of what it suggests all the time. It’s simply not a good idea to rely on it too much

i mean how much it can hurt just copying some :nth Child and animation CSS from GPT directly...

Genuine question, how are things going these days with translators and the whole AI hype, is it making many in roads into that line of work or is it very much hype driven like the programming world?

@@padraigconnolly2991 I imagine for formal and important meetings, people would definitely prefer a human translator. Could you imagine if the AI hallucinates something in a diplomatic discussion between two countries? Sht could cause a war 💀

​@@padraigconnolly2991 A mixture of both. It depends on exactly what type of translating work we were talking about. Machine Translations were already dominating certain parts of the industry, especially in terms of just translating for business sites and things that were "good to have, but not critical". The very cheap translation jobs for translating large amounts of text has been dominated by foreign people using MTL and then roughly editing the output since like 2010, and that section of the market has been absolutely further revolutionized by chat models because it functions similarly to what was already done but gives better outputs for the same amount of labour. From what I'm able to see, the scope of that type of work is certainly increasing as well. It's getting good enough that it is "acceptable" to more and more companies, not just the absolute cheapest ones. My take is that it is going to increasingly take over the low-quality and the mid-quality types of jobs more and more. "Bespoke" jobs are still going to exist though. There are a lot of types of job where high insight into context matters. Localization work for entertainment is an example of this. I don't foresee these jobs going away. AI tools might start being used here as well, but they will still need more human input to correct for context. Most AI and even the old MTL tools are very bad at context, especially cultural and cross-language contexts. Words can have literal translations but mean entirely different things in the other language due to context. This is where humans are unlikely to be replaced IMO. I've done a little bit of everything personally. I'm not going to be out of a job because of AI, but there are absolutely situations where AI can be used to help the workflow. AI tools aren't perfect to replace things like one-on-one translator work in person, but it can certainly be used in a pinch. I don't do that type of work anymore, but I don't expect those jobs to completely go away. It will depend on how critical it is to accurately communicate, if that makes sense. What I do most of the time nowadays is more along the lines of localization work. Not always creative projects, but my clients do pay me to be able to find the best way to get across the exact meaning that they were expressing in the original language. My type of work will not be replaced by AIs, but it could potentially be used in this process. For now though, I still find that it is roughly the same amount of work to just translate a document by hand from the get-go as it is to put it through a chat model and then correcting the result. An example of the kind of area I've done work in is translating medical documents and facillitating communication between doctor and patient. Both on behalf of the hospitals or institutions, but also sometimes on behalf of individual clients. The main thing I've seen being useful in that area has been that clients have had an easier time bridging some of that gap by themselves with the help of the AI, but it's not precise enough to always be used as a substitute for an actual person who speaks both languages. It's definitely been *helpful* however. Anyway, wall of text, but here's some of my thoughts in general without going into too many details .

​@@padraigconnolly2991 ​I posted a super long reply but it seems to have disappeared? Anyway yeah, there's definitely an entire part of the industry that has been dominated by machine translations since 2010, and they do very low quality but functional translations that are a little bit edited by humans and then just sent. This is incredibly cheap, and low quality, but it's already a huge part of the industry and that market share is definitely just going to increase over time. The theme though is that this is low consequence. While I don't do one on one translation work in person much anymore, I've done both that and translation of documents for hospitals. AI can and is used by patients in a pinch to try to communicate with their doctor, but nothing beats having a person there who can speak both languages. AI and MTL sucks at context too, so it'll never be good enough to use for localization work. I explained more in depth about that before my comment got eaten but I can't be bothered to retype it. Vivek is on the right track though. High precision, high consequence, or high context sensitive work is inherently a bad fit for automated processes, and that's *generally* what I work with, so I'm not exactly interfacing with the trend as much as other parts of my industry.

​​​@@padraigconnolly2991I used ChatGPT to learn Russian, and I'm able to have conversations with native speakers and I understand most words. I like ChatGPT more than other translators because it's able to explain things where a direct translation doesn't work or doesn't capture the meaning. For example misspelled/slang words, euphemisms, and sayings. Although somehow ChatGPT got it into its memory that I'm learning Russian and will occasionally respond to my English queries about programming in Russian. (I know I can delete "memories", but I find it comical and it's random, spaced repetition). It's been very accurate in my experience . That being said I wouldn't trust it to translate anything important, like another commenter said, you wouldn't want it to hallucinate during negotiations. IDK how it would do with larger blocks of text, I usually ask about individual sentences/words. It's good at rephrasing my translation in a more natural way as well, since the word order is arbitrary in a lot of... cases... I tend to default to a correct, but somtimes strange, word order/sentence structure which would be used in English.

yes

Oh my god I didn’t notice that until you said this

Off-by-one errors are hard

I'm enthralled that you chose the word " enthralled " from all the words lol

Didn’t notice he did it. I do it because (in my phone) many sites select more than I want when I select the first and last chars. 😂

We gain fatness though

AI is like a car it can get you a lot further, but also discourages people from walking for miles. Do people actually like coding? I guess it depends on how much proficiency you have cause I don't like constantly looking stuff up, so AI allows me to express my ideas in natural language instead of creating janky code and debugging forever. So AI is more like a scooter where you still gotta put some effort but the ride is much smoother which is better than walking.

@@ckq If current AI is like a car, then it's a car that constantly breaks down and sometimes veers off the road. Personally, I'd rather just walk. 🙂

Agree! This is my main use for them. Which is why I actually prefer the chat interface to something like CoPilot. But then I am slowly getting old, and perhaps change-averse.

This is precisely how I use them.

Precisley!

I say this all the time, it's my #1 reason I use them.

Yeah, and obviously that's kind of inherent in the concept of rubber ducking, if i do use an AI, i try to only use if i'm really stuck on something.

Same as it was before these tools came out. It's not like all the resources these LLMs leached off of no longer exist. Just avoid using these algorithms and find/learn what you need yourself without relying the robot. It also helps not using a search engine full of "AI" features.

Looks like when we invented high level programming languages and didn't need to use punchcards, vacuum tube arrays or assembly anymore. Whole lot of obsolete details were forgotten or not learned, but the information was still there for the once in a blue moon someone needed it.

@@pixels_per_minute The issue if that youngster tend to use them.

You can spend more time learning things than finding answers and writing it to test it for yourself.

@@iMagUdspEllr Finding answers (which is in fact, solving problem) probably accounts for 50% or more of a developer's work. So it's essential to be able to find answers quickly and efficiently.

Same for me with Japanese. This is also true for Japanese people. Since we 99% write using computers or smartphones these days, it is not uncommon for people to have to look up how characters because they forgot how to write them.

Good analogy. And as you now there are LOTS of gotchas that will find us in human languages if we don't commit fully and stay committed to all the skills needed to say "I speak that language". We're just talking about learning and staying committed to it, which is easy to let slide too long.

I guess there is a similar thing in english where you can forget how to spell certain words, and your vocabulary can diminish over time if you don't do a fair amount of reading and writing.

@almazu2770 thats transfer knowledge. In order to use something in different domains you need to wire it through your brain at least once. For a language that reading and listening on the input, and speaking and writing on the output. Once you expressed something meaningfull like an application, letter, paper etc. you know the character for many many years. But if you only exercise them like vocabulary they only wire on the surface of the brain and loose connection with more usefull stuff.

I mean, don't take it as a personal attack, but some of you guys probably just shouldn't be doing any mentally challenging work. If you had a junior sit next to you and make poor suggestions would you also accept them without thinking?

First thing I did when installing the jetbrains family editors was disabling full line completion, just feels absolutely horrible.

@@JanVerny It may not be a 'personal' attack but it is still trying to be an insult. 1) There is a difference between the confidence of an AI tool that you *are* supposed to trust, supposedly, and trusting a 'poor suggestion' from another human where you will have to think it over. Hell, I'd say going with the human's suggestion over the AI's is better because you'd still actually have to write it out yourself and understand it. 2) You wrote this on someone's comment who made the active choice to critically engage with the medium to perform the mentally challenging work. Just feels like you wanted to sound superior and say it in the most needlessly snarky way you could.

@@JanVerny But if you can't trust it and have to review it, then it's no better than writing it yourself, completely defeating the purpose

@@Kwazzaaap I was honestly kind od not planning to respond, because, yeah, I was probably needlesly snarky and arrogant in my original comment. But you guys have some big L takes. At least try to pretend to be decently competent. You get an insanely fast tireless junior and you can't be bothered to at least check his work? You turn off yout brain because you think you are supposed to trust the machine? What a sad lame bunch of pathetic excuses.

yet, here you are, day after day, talking, commenting about AI. I predict you will leave a few dozen more comments in the future about AI... regardless of the comments will say. My point is, you're being hard headed. You should be more open minded and appreciate AI more. Just because YOU have no interest in LLMs and solving problems using AI, doesn't mean progress in AI field will stop! I'm sure you keep up with AI news every other day now!

@@uiuxaidesign what are you talking about 😂

@@OfficialBeeswaxsince you can’t comprehend basically Money is going to AI and the systems that support so it will get better no matter how hardheaded we engineers get

@@cohaya1 are you an LLM? Because I think you're hallucinating

@@OfficialBeeswax lol no I’m an actual Machine learning engineer and was a software engineer for years beforehand. I develop by following the money not hard headed folks like you. Change comes whether you like it or not because you have no control

Yes, and that is a problem, not "problem". We already had enough people just copying and pasting code without any deeper understanding. Now we have more of said people using tools advertised as being on a PHD level, if not better. And we are not teaching people to be suspicious enough when it comes to results.

This actually should be top comment. It’s definitely the fault of the person, not the tool. But one could argue that the availability of these tools makes it easier for people to be complacent about actually putting in effort.

This is my additude. I have never trusted LLM code, and if I don't immediately understand the code it generates, I write it myself.

As a senior developer i strongly disagree with this. Coding is like a sport. Anybody can understand it. Just like i know the basics of baseball or soccer and i can even do many things. But the hard part is having things in muscle memory, having a feel for something or the right intuition and that does not come from looking up things, but actually running into the issues and dealing with them instead of getting the correct answer and then looking up why it is correct. Or think about maths in school. Do you retain how something works when being shown the answer and then shown the way they got there or do you understand things by actually going through the problem a figuring out the solution. Or think about knowing something. We all know about obama, we have seen him on tv, we have heared about his politics. But do we actually know him? Like do you know how his evening looks like or will he call you by name if he sees you? No because knowing somehow is more than that. I dont really know how to put into words what i mean. But i guess you get the gist of it by looking at those examples. Going through a problem or getting handed the solution and then looking up why it is the solution are just different things.

Human beings are LAZY and always looking for a shortcut. You might look things up when you see something you don't recognize, but most people will not as long as it works. Stack overflow continues to exist in large part bc of that.

Kind of like how those older programmers are "compiler proxies"

Maybe if the vast majority of tech documentation wasn't an incomprehensible mess to newcomers, they wouldn't have to rely on LLMs to explain it to them in ways that actually make sense....

@@TheMidnightillusion I mean, at that point, you're generally suppose to just read the source code.

How is reading and understanding the code written by a jerk on stack overflow different than reading and understanding the code outputting by an AI? If you mindlessly copy and paste either one, it's bad. But AI is just a faster, more polite teacher that gets things wrong (just like humans do). If they don't understand the code, they tricked you during the hiring process, and that's partially your fault. Learning from a forum, another person, documentation, or AI is the same.

​@TheMidnightillusion Right. As soon as the old heads get an English degree or a teaching degree I'll crawl through the drivel they wrote. Not everyone is a communicator. Don't worry, AI will do that job your for you and I don't have to listen to your snide remarks while I learn.

LLMs are trained on open source. You don't get much poorer in terms of quality.

More like they're trained on any code off the internet. Not matter if it's some brand new green coder or someone developing a well made tool.

On top of that, the amount of times projects are completely halted because of lack of fundamental knowledge.

That's the problem that data annotation startups are meant to serve. Or as the racists on here often call them "actually indians." The open question is whether we can train the models on javascript frameworks faster than people can throw new ones together with the new and improved LLMs.

This is already happening with the llms. They cant give you good pyside6(qt for python) code, cause the they dont know the newest Version yet(it dident come out befor 2021). Wenn you ask for code in the new version, they just chage the number not the out off date syntacs. If LLMS could read documentation and original source better, they might become usefull, until then its better to give in and read the docs :( .

the only thing i ever use copilot for now is just mock data and writing tests

You are writing low quality tests then. Data must be extracted from working system when possible, faking data is last resort

All in understanding and actual competency. If your abstractions mean you understand a problem set better and as a result can implement it quicker then it is a great abstraction. Copilot is not helping you abstract, it's just doing shit for you. So you're taking away your problem solving ability and giving it to something else. Which is fine for speed, but that is the dampening that's happening. If it takes you 30-60 minutes to write 5 boilerplate crud functions, that's probably a sign you might be lacking a bit in your domain. Chefs may have apprentice's cut some veggies, but they're still absolute mad lads at chopping onions and they're designing the menu. Co-pilot is kind of tricking you into becoming a head-chef but you can't dice an onion to save your life.

Well, it didn't make weavers who didn't use mechanized looms worse at weaving, but any weaver who adopted a mechanized loom certainly became worse at weaving without it.

Surely their labor became less valuable, because there would have been lots of other cheap labor flooding the market?

@@JavedAlam-ce4mu Buy a handwoven rug and let me know how cheap they are

Skill issue. Doesn't happen when I use AI.

​@@steve_jabzCare to share that AI?

​@@steve_jabzyour comment history on the channel is so funny, lmao

@@ambralemon yeah

@@ambralemon he might be AI himself lol judging by his comments

Be careful about the tests. Gonna get obliterated by a pseudobug that sometimes fails and there's nobody who knows why they wrote the test that way. I would triple check even if you go into extreme detail specifying a comment description.

@@adissentingopinion848 Totally agree, everything I listed must be done with caution, care and further edits/refactoring to make sure it's actually good But I find it to be a great boilerplate generator, it gives me some general test ideas, and I refine them and make them more useful or work better

It's pretty damn good as a complex universal text format transformer for situations where you otherwise need to manually delete a *lot* of crap line by line or copy paste, but regex is either impossible or even slower to create for a find and replace.

Although, not for huge documents, since it both fucks up more, and you need to be able to visually verify results since obviously you can ot trust them with modern LLMs.

My advice; stop asking it for code, and start asking it to give you the steps that *you* should follow while *you* write the code. Instead of learning to rely on it, you'll start seeing the patterns and start, on your own, figuring the answer out on your own.

@@BruceNJeffAreMyFlies Yeah, that's also how I use it. I describe the feature I want to implement and ask it what options I have and what the pros and cons of them are. Then I decide if one of them works in my situation and ask it for more details on what I need to do more precisely. If I don't understand anything I ask it to explain it to me and it does a great job of doing so usually

So true like they want us to look at the calculator and chose the paper and pen Lolol 😂

There's an enormous difference between using a calculator because doing a kinematics equation by hand is obnoxious, and using a calculator because your entire understanding of arithmetic is the operation buttons.

@@mr_fish6684 nope there isn’t bro it’s plain and simple simple new tech comes just adapt to the new way. I think some guys just try to make programming hard because the way how they did it and the new way how people do it is diff. They come with all type of crap no get with the times I see guys brag how they can code in notepad an no intelli sense I just laugh get a life.

@@mr_fish6684 I agree, this is an absolutely bullshit metaphor, there hasn't been anything equivalent to LLMs before in history, machines that can actually reason for you. Ridiculous comparison.

@@JavedAlam-ce4mu LLMs can't reason though??? And the point he's making in the video isn't about how the tool functions, it's about how people can and are using it.

when you learn to do it, the first time is slow, but every time you do the same thing later, it will be much faster. If you just lean on the bot all the time, you'll be fast, but dumb. It's the old "give a man a fish, vs teach a man to fish" analogy

people used to debug with literally reading the code long time ago, you know

The bot will never be "gone", but you can bet that once everyone is relying on it heavily, they'll change the terms of the agreement, charge more, and the enshitification will ramp up to 12!

I feel like this is a really common opinion. I'd never seen someone say it on yt and already had the same opinion

That is super sad. I agree, it's so dodgy Microsoft giving copilot for free to students. It should be illegal.