Post #765731

2026-03-18 05:39 UTC

As a developer on a team of 20ish that use AI heavily, daily, I’d argue there are proper ways of using it as a tool that substantially increases productivity and quality while also reducing bugs and improving maintainability. But I would also say that 75%+ of people I encounter aren’t leveraging it properly or even close to properly. Also too many people use ChatGPT and Copilot which are just bottom of the barrel garbage and then wonder why the output is also garbage. But I agree that too many people and companies lean into AI too heavily and incorrectly and there will be a reckoning. I’m all for it.

Replies (2)

@sobchak@programming.dev 2026-03-18 07:45

I do try to give it a chance and use it every once and a while (most recently Claude Code; last year, Cursor), and it has been my experience that it personally decreases my productivity and quality. I found that even CoPilot’s autocomplete would introduce bugs if I decided to “trust” it and try to work too fast without meticulously reviewing every token generated. I have seen people I work with use AI to quickly create decent looking prototypes (i.e. bog standard, boring design), but I think this is still detrimental because they lose the full benefit of exploratory programming (and of course, the prototypes just have all kinds of faked data and functionality, glaring security problems, bad architecture). I’ve also experienced people submitting nonsense vibe-coded pull requests that would break tons of things they shouldn’t have even touched for the issue. I could see a less interested or overworked reviewer letting stuff like that through, which is why I think we’re seeing all these failures and bugs at these big tech companies. So for me, at least, I haven’t seen the benefit. Using CoPilot in VSCode actually caused me to go back to using nvim and lsp plugins :)

Open ##768739
@Serinus@lemmy.world 2026-03-18 06:10

Copilot isn’t bad, but generally I agree. It’s a tool that can be helpful, or you can just create problems for yourself down the road. It’s a lot like building a house. After all the drywall is up, it’s hard to tell if the studs are 18 inches apart or five feet apart, but you’re gonna find out eventually.

Open ##1373689