AI adoption and IntelliSense
Complete off the top of my head thing, no source/research, just anecdotes and pontificating. As i've been doing some heavy editing today of a 300+ line SQL query, one thing I'm wondering about...
Complete off the top of my head thing, no source/research, just anecdotes and pontificating.
As i've been doing some heavy editing today of a 300+ line SQL query, one thing I'm wondering about with these AI usage stats are how much of the "adoption" falls into things like intellisense suggestions.
There's two parts to this, with the first being just bad suggestions.
I've found them to be "okay" for something like F#, but for SQL, which has always required me to knife fight for an alias to begin with, they're just utter garbage.
I normally don't blow through my free github copilot suggestions in my month (I'm not in the code mines as much anyways), but I blew through it in a day of shitty SQL suggestions (and then just turned it off). This was last month, so not even while dealing with the current monster, and I'm left wondering how many people just have it vomit out useless stuff they change anyways.
The second part, is just the usual "you don't really know your tools".
While doing this query I considered turning it back on or using it. I have several CTE's for readability as this is a prototype but it necessitates an annoying pattern of taking the names of your columns, uplifting them to the next query select, and then summing and renaming them AGAIN such as SUM(COALESCE(a.example,0)) AS [example]
When you have 84 columns to do this with, it can be tempting to let AI notice the pattern and just do it. However it's not actually necessary, and now that they're clocking the tokens as we knew they would, I'm back to just using my multi line editor skills. Middle click select, some home/end to get a starting point, then ctrl+shift+arrows mixed with Alt+arrows and some copy paste and I'm mostly done. Few Ctrl + D's or straight up find and replaces and I'd edited 80 lines in maybe 30 seconds?
AI would've been a bit easier, and from what i've seen of MANY coders, something I suspect they only think is doable through AI. However much like how AI is getting people to use features they never even knew existed in their business tools, I wonder how much adoption on the coder side is the same. All these text editor helper tools many coders don't use (please keep all VIM manifestos under 400 pages) suddenly being automated out by the VASTLY more expensive AI.
And like some of the other AI solutions, as the money starts to hit the budgets, I think we'll see a lot more "Look you need to learn how to do this normally" (or "hey guess what we're removing from VS code!").
Not sure I have an overall point to this, but I'd be curious to hear what other people are seeing in their environments.