Not bothering with any kind of git setup any more, I've reverted back to some good old fashioned folder snapshot backups every time I finish a new version of what I'm working on.
Indeed, there's quite the echo-chamber of agentic encouragement going on, but the overwhelming feeling is that everyone's shilling and no one's buying.
We strictly don't use agentic development, so it's not so much a problem for us. Copying and pasting from LLMs is about the height of our AI use, aside from the AI auto-complete in Visual Studio, and any new starters are made aware during the interview process that agentic dev isn't permitted, so we cut it off at the source.
Nice! Although if you have new young team - things look different. Also, to be fair, agentic dev is something that might be just the right answer for the future.
I got back into board games in about 2013, then when the pandemic came around and in-person wasn't viable we hit Board Game Arena big time for about 18 months.
Online isn't as nice as in-person, but it sufficed.
As what is regarded as an 'old programmer', I wouldn't worry. AI may well be 60% faster at coding, but the quality is more like 90% worse. Like everything new, give it time: the hype will settle down, some AI companies will go bust, and everything will be fine.
I don't really program with AI, as I find the code quality pretty poor.
I use Retool for all our internal tools. I like the fact that somebody else is looking after the hosting of the dozen little one-purpose applications I've built, and it all just works.
Makes sense. But with plain English you can build similar small single purpose app and someone else hosts it. No need to learn how to make low code work and 10x faster. IMHO plain English will triumph!
In the UK tech hiring is fairly buoyant at the moment, and the salaries being offered have got some long-needed growth (over this last year we've begun seeing 6 figure senior developer jobs in the east midlands, whereas a couple of years ago getting a £60k salary for a senior in the east midlands was quite the achievement).
Hmm, interesting, maybe I should look into the UK market then... Because I often see open positions in the UK segment on the company job boards, just didn't know if it's mostly fake ones as in NL and FR.
The ones I see coming up repeatedly on LinkedIn are real jobs, but for places with high staff churn - Bet365 in Stoke for instance have a voracious appetite for recruiting System Development Managers, mainly because they can't get anyone to stay in the role more than a month.
Fortunately it does not. I'm in Nottinghamshire, and the only way I used to be able to do £100k round here was contracting, but the times they are a changing it seems.
The most recent logic I tried getting it to code for me was to make me some recursive C# functions to reverse navigate a node map (a Microsoft Project plan with various feeding chains) to calculate all possible paths, and return them as a list of objects.
It kept producing code that looked to eye that it might work, but each time I ran it it would just throw schoolboy exceptions. I got tired of telling it to correct the things it kept forgetting to check for (nulls, path starts, empty lists), and just coded it from scratch myself.
I find ChatGpt is like pair-programming with a junior, except I'm not getting paid to coach them like I would if it were an actual graduate hire.
keeping context is a thing that they are bad at. For now, i admit, but they are.
Given a long haul goal with instructions and everything they will reinvent the wheel four times and one of those you will get a square.
Reminds me of that monkey paw wish thing. You look at your finished app. Looks beautiful, but its inner workings are a ball of confusion.
I've only recently begun using copilot auto-complete in Visual Studio using Claude (doing C# development/maintenance of three SaaS products). I've been a coder since 1999.
The suggestions are correct about 40% of the time, so I'm actually surprised when they're right, rather than becoming reliant on them. It saves me maybe 10 minutes a day.
The only part AI auto complete I found I really like is when I have a function call that takes like a dozen arguments, and the auto complete can just shove it all together for me. Such a nice little improvement.
I have been begging Claude not to write comments at all since day 1 (it's in the docs, Claude.md, i say the words every session, etc) and it just insists anyway. Then it started deleting comments i wrote!
I find it writes them like a boring neighbour who hasn't talked to anyone for a few days; it just seems to reiterate the same thing three times, worded slightly differently, but not adding anything extra with each sentence, like there's a word count it's aiming for.
Yeah, it usually gets the required args right based on various pieces of context. It have a big variation though between extension. If the extension can't pull context from the entire project (or at least parts of it) it becomes almost useless.
IntelliJ platform (JetBrains IDEs) has this functionality out of the box without "AI" using regular code intelligence. If all your parameters are strings it may not work well I guess but if you're using types it works quite well IME.
Can't use JetBrains products at work. I also unfortunately do most of my coding at work in Python, which I think can confound things since not everything is typed
... you can't use JetBrains? What logic created a scenario where you can't use arguably the best range of cross platform IDEs, but you can somehow use spicy autocomplete to imitate some of their functionality, poorly?
I work in an extremely security minded industry. There are strict guidelines about what we can and can't use. JetBrains isn't excluded for technical reasons, but geopolitical ones.
The AI models we use are all internally hosted, and any software we use has to go through an extensive security review.
> JetBrains isn't excluded for technical reasons, but geopolitical ones.
This makes perfect sense. Who could possibly trust a company run from... the Netherlands.
I get that you don't make the rules you're working under, but Jetbrains of all companies seems like a bizarre "risk" factor, given their history and actions.
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