this post was submitted on 16 Feb 2024
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[–] [email protected] 7 points 9 months ago

Probably 60% where those not using it have just been too lazy to set it up. I have a mostly senior crew so I’m not concerned about code reviews or poorly optimized generated code. For most things, the boilerplate that code gen can add is a continuation of things like Intellisense and linting.

What you have to watch out for is complicated logic being built by code gen and not knowing enough about the code generated. For example, I’m very comfortable with fixing the weird ass Rust iterators Copilot will make because I understand Rust iterators. If I had to move to, say, C#, I’d have no fucking clue whether or not the generated code is idiomatic, solves problems in the way a C# would solve problems, or even compiles until I run it.

I work in web and I came from an SRE background. Those industries lend themselves to this quick code gen. If you managed a Terraform codebase for any appreciable cloud presence pre-code gen, you’d understand how much of a boon it is for certain areas. I don’t know how useful it would be in languages or areas that don’t glue a bunch of boilerplate together. HPC, for example, cares a ton about every instruction. At the same time, code gen can give you a pretty good assembly template to improve.