AI Code Assistants

[pritaeas]

Anyone here that wants to share if they use AI Code Assistants professionally, which one and why? I'm looking for experiences with backend .NET development in Visual Studio to be specific.

[stevenbc]

I haven't used it but Microsoft has something called co-pilot which sounds pretty good.

[rproffitt]

The definition of what an AI Code Assistant needs to be spelled out first.

However in my circles we are using various tools to increase our productivity and reduce costs. The cost reduction is that we don't outsource nearly as much as we used to. Yes, the folk that we used to call on have noticed.

As to VS and .NET work, the works ran the gamut that could include such to single board embedded work and web apps.

Impact here is a 50% reduction in payroll costs.

[pritaeas]

Well, I've just recently started using Codeium and I must say, it's a great help in simplifying/accelerating the repetitive tasks required within my/our code.

[spuriousgeek]

I've tried using co-pilot, codeium, claude, chatgpt and gemini. They are good for repetitive work but anything remotely complex and they are pretty terrible tbh. I find that it's quicker for me to just solve issues on my own a lot of the time than try to prompt my way through. You can very easily fall into the trap of going around in circles trying to get the answer you need with various prompts, instead of spending the time using existing knowledge to resolve it yourself quicker. That's just my personal experience but I've been a developer for a number of years now. Writing unit tests is the only place where I've found genuine value so far.

[jwenting]

It's faster to write the code yourself than it is to fix up the junk produced by those AI "assistants".

Code generators have been around for decades for specific purposes, and can work well, but these things are pretty much useless.

[Reverend Jim]

A lot of editors support libraries of code snippets which are generally written and debugged by humans.

[antwanlee]

I'd recommend you to go with ollama: https://ollama.com/

Its FOSS and easy to install:

curl -fsSL https://ollama.com/install.sh | sh
ollama run dolphin-mixtral

Other than that I use chatgpt a lot for all kinds of different things, but I prefer ollama's dolphin-mixtral for coding for now.