If so, I’d like to know about that questions:
- Do you use an code autocomplete AI or type in a chat?
- Do you consider environment damage that use of AIs can cause?
- What type of AI do you use?
- Usually, what do you ask AIs to do?
No
I don’t use AI when I’m learning a new system, framework or language because I won’t actually learn it.
I don’t use AI when I need to make a small change on a system I know well, because I can make it just as fast and have better insight into how it all works.
I don’t use AI when I’m developing a new system because I want to understand how it works and writing the code helps me refine my ideas.
I don’t use AI when I’m working on something with security or copyright concerns.
Basically, the only time I use AI is when I’m making a quick throw away script in a language I’m not fluent in.
No; I don’t use AI at all for programming currently.
I don’t.
I played around with it twice, but both times it gave me nonfunctioning code. It seemed stupid to use it when I’d still have to go back and rewrite it anyway.
Generating quick programs like “a python script that calculates the mean value of two hex colours, outputting the result as a HTML file displaying the resulting three-color gradient”? Yeah, AI is decent at stupid simple tasks like that, and it’s much faster than me writing the script or calculating the values myself. I tend to generate things like these when I’m working on something else, don’t want to spend time on things outside the project I’m working on, and can’t find a website that does the thing I want.
Touching my actual code? Hell no.
I mostly use it as a code search tool, when dealing with large projects that I’m not very familiar with. Like I can ask “where is this component actually inserted into the web page” and it can sometimes point to a file and function. It doesn’t always work of course, but when it does it can save a lot of time.
I don’t ever let AI write code for me though
Can’t you use global search for that? I mean I do that too but using global search functionallity is way faster and guaranteed.
You can also use grep command to search occurrences inside files based in a string/regex
Of course, but this assumes I know roughly what the text will look like that I’m searching for. If I already know what it will look like, I’ll use global search of course, but if all I know is that “at some point this element is put into the document” then I have no idea how that might actually happen. AI is just pretty good (ie succeeds sometimes) at generalising my words into a rough idea and searching for that.
Yes because I can’t program.
I ask it to construct small blocks like if or for loop statements with a very verbose prompt so that all variables are properly named and the code block is small enough I can debug myself.
Basically is like building lego where the AI prints every piece.
- It’s much more time consuming than if I knew the language myself but it’s actually a fun way to learn and it’s faster than wading through forums for n amount of time.
- I don’t get paid to do it, so I don’t see it as problematic, my biggest gripe is I used to cite the stack overflow, etc, user where I got the snippet of code before and now I can’t give credit to the original author.
- It’s useful since it has allowed me to automate a lot of tedious tasks that would otherwise be more time consuming, making the activation energy necessary to create the automation much lower.
- I use mistral exclusively, the GPT 4, 4o and 5 are quite useless in comparison. The latest mistral and codestral tower above them in my anecdotal experience, at least the way I use it.
- It works well with local models so I don’t have to feed the beast.
- I’m an illiterate idiot when it comes to python so it has resulted in someone being able to do something they otherwise couldn’t.
- I’m not a programmer, AI hasn’t made me a programmer, If I were a programmer, the code completion is so slow I’d probably not use it, I’m unaware of other uses other than debugging, but even for its own code, debugging is hit or miss, miss, miss because of limited context, it really can’t debug well.
- It’s definitely not worth how many trillions are being poured into it. Especially when one uses it more and becomes painfully aware of the limitations, it becomes quite obvious that the applications lie in increasing industrial and scientific productivity rather than creating a mass market tool.
- Agentic AIs are pure cancer and a security catastrophe waiting to happen. The ease with which one can use prompt injection to exfiltrate basically any kind of data the agent has access to is probably keeping many a cyber security experts awake at night. I envision, ironically, black hat being invaded by “prompt engineers” specialized in creating injection prompts.
Thank you for coming to my ted talk.
I use AI as a rubber duck, to compliment the rubber ducks on my desk when they don’t give enough feedback. So it’s use is mostly conceptual, I find that models that provide “thinking” output perhaps more useful than whatever its actual answer is because it asks questions about edge cases I might not have considered.
As for code generation, I hate it. It outputs garbage, forgets things, hallucinates, and whatever thing it writes I’ll have to rewrite anyway to actually make it compile.
As I’m fairly isolated at work I think it makes a good pair programmer partner, so to speak. Offering suggestions that I can take into consideration and research heavily if I think it’s a good one.
I use Copilot with mostly Claude Sonnet 4.5. Don’t use the autocomplete because it’s useless and annoying. I mostly chat with it, give it specific instructions for how to implement small changes, carefully review its code, make it fix anything I don’t like, then have it write test scripts with curl calling APIs and other methods to exercise the system in a staging environment and output data so I can manually verify it and make sure all of its changes are working as expected in case I overlooked something in the automated tests.
As far as environmental impact, training is where most of the impact occurs, and inference, RAG, querying vector databases, etc. is fairly minimal AFAIK.
My colleague uses it to generate rambling code, often pointlessly rewriting existing logic to solve all kinds of hallucinated problems, which he doesn’t understand a bit, then dumps it on me and acts offended when asked to explain any of it.
No, I don’t. I often have to fix the work of my colleague and my boss, who do use it. I often have to gently point out to my boss that just because the chatbot outputs results for things, doesn’t mean those results are accurate or helpful.
No.
I tried to use AI to help me code, it only gave me trash.
My answer (OP): I use AI for short and small questions, like things I already know but I forgot, like “how to sort an array”, or about Linux commands, which I can test just in time or read the man page to make sure it works as intended.
I consider my privacy and environment, so I use a local AI (16b) for most of my questions, but for more complex things that I really need any possible help I use Deep Seek Coder v3.1 (671b) in the cloud via ollama.
I don’t use autocomplete code because it annoys me and don’t let me think about the code, I like to ask when I think I need it.
This is basically how I roll as well.
I did have cursor build an example fastapi project (which didn’t work at first) just to sort of give me a jump start on learning the framework.
I messed around with that, got it to work, learnes enough about how it works that I was then comfortable starting from scratch in a different project.
I kind of treat the local AI as a knowledge base. Short questions with examples. Mostly that just then lets me know what sort of stuff to look for in the real documentation, which is what actually solves my issues.
Cant these questions be answered more easily with an online search?
Maybe 5 years ago. Not anymore.
Ask for oneline problems, that’s mostly syntax. Ask for concepts/systems on new knowledge areas To summarise logoutput/debug unknown errortype To add docs and comments, mostly if im in some old code with nothing of the sort. If it absolutely boilerplate, it usually can give fine output.
