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New GitHub Copilot Research Finds 'Downward Pressure on Code Quality'
(visualstudiomagazine.com)
this post was submitted on 27 Jan 2024
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Programming
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If you use AI to generate code, that should always be the first draft. You still have to edit it to make sure it's good.
I totally agree, but I don't hear any discussion about how to incentivize developers to do it.
If AI makes creating new code disproportionately easy, then I think DRY and refactoring will fall by the wayside.
How do we currently incentivize developers to keep it DRY? Code review still exists.
For now code reviews are done by competent people. What about once
?
Edit: Is it clear the quote, plus the items before and after are all one thought? I am hopeful, but not convinced.
Yes your message is clear.
To answer your original question, I have no idea what it will look like when software writes and reviews itself. It seems obvious that human understanding of a code base will quickly disappear if this is the process, and at a certain point it will go beyond the capacity of human refactoring.
My first thought is that a code base will eventually become incoherent and irredeemably buggy. But somebody (probably not an AI, at first) will teach ChatGPT to refactor coherently.
But the concept of coherence here becomes a major philosophical problem, and it's very difficult to imagine how to make it practical in the long run.
I think for now the practical necessity is to put extra emphasis on human peer review and refactoring. I personally haven't used AI to write code yet.
My dark side would love to see some greedy corporations wrecking their codebase by over-relying on AI to replace their coders. And debugging becomes a nightmare because nobody wrote it and they have to spend more time bug-fixing than they would have spent writing it in the first place.
Edit: missing word
And, while some of us may be out of a job temporarily, historically, when companies make these big brain decisions, we end up getting to come back and charge 4x what we used to get paid to get it working again.
When I found out one of the contractors I worked with was not one of the cheap ones, but instead rehired after he retired at a 400% bump, I decided that maybe I needed to understand the business needs better
Wow that's a huge pay bump lol. Maybe I should also start studying those business needs more.
Because it will lead to an incomprehensible mess. Ever heard the quote, "Programs are meant to be read by humans and only incidentally for computers to execute"? This is well-trodden ground in science fiction. If you have AI writing code that's so lacking in abstraction (because machines require less of it to understand) then humans will become useless in maintaining it. Obviously this is a problem because it centralizes responsibility of maintenance onto machines who depend on this very code to operate.
If the AI is creating the code, it is up to it to keep itself DRY
Well that means it's up to us to make it recognize non-DRY code and teach it to refactor while remaining coherent forever and ever, or else we'll have to parachute into lands of alien code and try to figure out something nobody wrote and nobody understands.
Yeah, but by generating with AI you're incentivized to skip that initial research stage into your own code base, leading you to completely miss opportunities for consolidation or reuse