As I was saying…
Glad to know that I am not alone in my thoughts. Thank you also for letting me know that you believe I am wrong.
I think that AI is going to be a huge benefit to reading and writing code. I think it can be a useful tool for knowledgeable developers.
And perhaps I should have stated that I don’t think that AI is ready now to write complex, custom formula/code to be used in production environments without the results being reviewed/tested by someone with technical knowledge of the language and/or use cases.
I think that non-technical people want to use AI generated code/formulas that they can use without the input of someone with technical knowledge. The current reason why I dislike this is because there is a significant risk that the AI produced code will not actually do what the person wants and the person will either not know realize that the output is flawed, or the person will have no clue how to fix the output and have unreasonable expectations about fixing the code.
Well let’s revisit this in 1 year again. Markets work quietly while tyranny of change brings those ones who can’t or do not want to adapt to extinction.
Exactly 1 year ago I asked a question about how to summarize text and @bfrench responded suggesting GPT-3. Well I couldn’t start anything but hey how times change, it’s going pretty quick. It’s unstoppable.
Ha ha ha! You just described what Airtable users currently experience all the time. Do you think these largely clueless users will be worse off, or better off with an AI-paired formula attendant? To guide someone who needs only a teensy bit of expert help is still a very low bar given the questions I see you address all the time on the forums.
I have a hunch if Airtable introduced a paired-formula assistant, support and questions about formulas would all but vanish except in extremely complex cases. The law of large numbers suggests the 80/20 rule would apply.
The data is in; it turns out even less knowledgeable developers; Jr developers, and even newcomers to the world of actual coding are benefiting significantly from an AI-paired programmer. The ship has sailed.
That’s a fair concern. Do you think the risk falls without a paired-formula or scripting assistant? Would they be better off without AI? The data is already coming in, so answer this one carefully. 
Are happier developers better developers?
Ha! I remember you asking too! That was half the lifetime of GPT ago. I was testing GPT in 2021 and CoPilot as well. No one believed me when I showed them little snippets of AI-generated code. They thought I was nuts. Some still do.
I don’t think it’s that simple. Change is not abrupt for most workers. The supply of developers will transition slowly because wholesale replacement of engineering skills is going to take time. @Kuovonne is right about one thing - AI is not ready to completely replace skilled workers. And what will these displaced engineers do? Many will move into the AI economy doing stuff like this. Some will become prompt engineers. 50% will retire.
We all worry about AI, but there seems to be little concern for ICE mechanics or OEMs, who currently employ 2 million people building internal combustion engines and whose skills will be entirely unnecessary by 2040 (16 years from now). Vastly these people will transition slowly because EVs will – like AI – transition slowly. Two-thirds will retire, and one-third will do something else.
I think in general that is the biggest risk in AI code at the moment - code that looks correct, but has some flaws in it. I use CoPilot in VSCode and accelerates my process by taking away quite a bit of typing.
1-2 line suggestions are fine, but every now an then I get tempted to take suggestion for a bigger block of code. 10 min later, when something doesn’t work - and quite often it is the AI generated code block. Usually it is just some minor points, that do not fully reflect the intention of the function. On the other hand sometimes these are also mistakes that I would make as well.
There are some pitfall but Copilot is an productivity improvement for me. I would really like to see CoPilot integrated in the scripting block in Airtable. I looked at it and while it is possible to get to data in the script editors, the scope to build it is a bit too much for me.
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Let’s be clear, a bigger risk is code created in isolation by a programmer who has not seen and knows all the successful design choices. This is vastly all of us.
Feel free to reject the risks of AI-paired programmers, but I have a hunch (and the early studies indicate) you are actually increasing, not reducing, risks of poorly designed code or code that will fail more without paired assistance.
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In my opinion, AI is the next fancy tool. It will take some time for people to adjust to it, but in the long run, everyone will be better off because of it.
In some ways, I think that the non-technical person would benefit from AI generated (and executed) test cases as much as from AI generated code. Oh, wait, it looks like Copilot does help with test cases. More for me to learn.
Yeah, the challenge is that any vendor who has tightly wound up their editor in a proprietary fashion, is not the gatekeeper for improvements. The editors they use should be as extensible as the product itself. As such, don’t count on CoPilot integration until Airtable caves to the pressure.
Yep.
Throughout this thread, I’ve maintained a common theme - AI is not perfect, but it is better than some humans doing many things. This recent quote from OpenAI’s Greg Bockman sums it up…
GPT-4 isn’t perfect, but neither are you
The future is likely better if neither of these imperfect entities is wholly rejected.
I document large formulas by creating a JavaScript file in VS Code and then pasting the formulas into the file. VS Code does a good job of color coding, curly brace and parenthesis matching etc.
Github Co-pilot does a credible job of writing comments. I usually wind up updating the suggestions but they are a decent start.
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