The AI industry's claims about AI coding assistants boosting productivity significantly appear to be massively overblown, per a new report.

“No Duh,” say senior developers everywhere.

The article explains that vibe code often is close, but not quite, functional, requiring developers to go in and find where the problems are - resulting in a net slowdown of development rather than productivity gains.

  • Lembot_0004English
    316·
    3 days ago

    Industry? Yes, industry hires people who know how to do things needed by industry and who do nothing besides those things.

    Programmers outside “industry” more often find themselves writing using the libraries they see for the first time and using languages they never thought to use. AI helps a lot here.

    • SparroHawc@lemmy.zipOPEnglish
      2·
      2 days ago

      Except LLMs are absolutely terrible at working with a new, poorly documented library. Commonly-used, well-defined libraries? Sure! Working in an obscure language or an obscure framework? Good luck.

      LLMs can surface information. It’s perhaps the one place they’re actually useful. They cannot reason in the same way a human programmer can, and all the big tech companies are trying to sell them on that basis.

      • Lembot_0004English
        1·
        2 days ago

        Well, don’t use it with new, poorly documented libraries. That is a common sense rule: use the tool where it is useful.

        Somehow many LLM criticizers just claim that LLMs are shit because they can’t autonomously write code. Yes, they can’t. But they can do many other useful things.