C++ Wage Slave<p><span class="h-card" translate="no"><a href="https://oldbytes.space/@feoh" class="u-url mention" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">@<span>feoh</span></a></span> <span class="h-card" translate="no"><a href="https://tilde.zone/@dashdsrdash" class="u-url mention" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">@<span>dashdsrdash</span></a></span> </p><p>I tried <a href="https://infosec.space/tags/GitHubCopilot" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#<span>GitHubCopilot</span></a> for a couple of weeks at my employer's request. The screen of my IDE was certainly more active, with GHCP continually making suggestions and me typing over them. Measured just in characters per second, I was probably more productive. But the LLM was more of a distraction than a help; I spent more time on evaluating (and usually discarding) its suggestions than I did on higher-level tasks like considering how the structure of the code should change and how I could maximise performance.</p><p>The <a href="https://infosec.space/tags/LLM" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#<span>LLM</span></a> never came up with an original idea. It never showed me a better way of doing something than I could have produced without its help. Most of its suggestions were substandard.</p><p>A developer is not a typist. A system that optimises typing works too hard at the wrong part of the job.</p><p>The one thing that would have been useful for, it simply refused to do. I wanted it to scour a set of unfamiliar, undocumented classes¹ and all their callers and tell me how to use them. It simply wouldn't do it. </p><p>¹ There's always an excuse, isn't there?</p>