What I am talking about has nothing to do with Intellisense or your workflow. What I am saying is that, if someone in 2019 told you that there is a "thing" that is able to take a very complex sentence and qith high accuracy (and awareness of the database details) generate 50 lines of SQL, using CTEs, complex JOINs, subqueries, string formatting, date manipulation, etc, you would have been amazed. That thing now exists, and it didn't exist before. It is a complete phase shift and it cannot simply be viewed as a incremental improvement. This is a whole different beast.
Using this beast as intellisense is just one application (called "Copilot") and it has all these annoyance factors sometimes. But I am not talking about that.
To me, this is like we found a way to transform iron to gold with low energy usage, and people are complaining that gold is not that useful. And most chemists not even hearing about the news. I'm constantly amazed by this, every single day, as I read threads like this one.
Thank god, finally found someone with the same issue. This is incredibly frustrating.
I'm also wondering why the news coverage of this is so abysmal. In the Netherlands there is very little if any awareness of this, in my bubble at least. (We all seem to very aware of every goddamn bowel movement of every soccer player.)
Even my government seem to just very recently become aware that using data and generally working in a structured manner is preferable to just winging everything all the time. Some departments are even starting to use basic statistics which some even call AI. Nobody is quite sure what anything means and how to make sense of it and all these high-level decision makers studied history, administration or something legal. Absolutely nobody with a clue about anything beyond '80s tech - if even that. It's downright disturbing to see this immense gap and we are supposed be somewhat advanced. But I digress..
I can only speak for myself, but it just hasn't been around long enough for me to properly trust any AI-driven tool to give me correct output for anything important.
I'll admit I haven't played with Copilot yet (since I don't think my employer would be happy for me to send off proprietary code to third-party servers, so I've effectively self-banned myself from using it at work*), but I'd feel that for anything non-trivial like your example of complex SQL queries I'd be reluctant to use the generated output without extra scrutiny (essentially a very fine-toothed code review, which is exhausting).
My opinion will probably change as the tools become more mature, but for now I'm treating them as toys primarily which limits the excitement.
Something like TLDR is less risky as it's not producing code, just summarising it, but I'd still feel wary to trust it since it's such a new field. Maybe this speaks more to my own paranoia than anything else!
EDIT: *and on this topic while I'm here: I'm actually a bit confused (and honestly... jealous?) on the topic of privacy for these kinds of external models. Is everyone who's using Copilot and tools like this working at non-Bigcos? Or just ignoring that it's sending off your source code to a third party server? Or am I missing something here?
It'd be against the rules to use external pastebins or other online tools that send off private source code to a server, so I'm kind of shocked how many devs are talking about how they use AI tools like this at work... is this just a case of "ask for forgiveness, not permission"?
Check out the SQL example I posted below. If you're interested, I'd be happy to post more. To me, this is not about "is the machine accurate enough already". Maybe it isn't and it needs to mature. But the door has been opened now, and it's only up to "technical details" now.
And I'm not saying this can replace developers, as it clearly isn't capable of building complete codebases and reasoning about the system as a whole. But writing self-contained code snippets seems like a solved problem to me, and I think that's the biggest thing that happened in our field since a long time ago.
Please point me to an "old" model that was able to do something similar to my example, and was general enough to do that not only for any custom schema, but for basically all often used languages as well (both natural languages as input, and programming languages as output).
It's possible to start with tests and then generate the code, using tests to ensure it is correct. Humans iterate many times on a piece of code - write, execute, compare with your desired output, AI should work step by step with executions and feedback too.
I’ve heard AI researchers describe this phenomenon before. As soon as something is discovered or invented it immediately becomes trivial and boring. The goalposts shift, and now they have to find the next amazing thing that will suffer the same fate.
Can you elaborate? To me (but I know very little about it) it seems like part of the incremental progress in the internet availability. What am I missing?
Using this beast as intellisense is just one application (called "Copilot") and it has all these annoyance factors sometimes. But I am not talking about that.
To me, this is like we found a way to transform iron to gold with low energy usage, and people are complaining that gold is not that useful. And most chemists not even hearing about the news. I'm constantly amazed by this, every single day, as I read threads like this one.