AI Coding: Better, Faster, Cheaper. Just Pick Two, Please
January 29, 2024
This essay is the work of a dumb dinobaby. No smart software required.
Visual Studio Magazine is not on my must-read list. Nevertheless, one of my research team told me that I needed to read “New GitHub Copilot Research Finds “Downward Pressure on Code Quality.” I had no idea what “downward pressure” means. I read the article trying to figure out what the plain English meaning of this tortured phrase meant. Was it the downward pressure on the metatarsals when a person is running to a job interview? Was it the deadly downward pressure exerted on the OceanGate submersible? Was it the force illustrated in the YouTube “Hydraulic Press Channel”?
A partner at a venture firms wants his open source recipients to produce more code better, faster, and cheaper. (He does not explain that one must pick two.) Thanks MSFT Copilot Bing thing. Good enough. But the green? Wow.
Wrong.
The writeup is a content marketing piece for a research report. That’s okay. I think a human may have written most of the article. Despite the frippery in the article, I spotted several factoids. If these are indeed verifiable, excitement in the world of machine generated open source software will ensue. Why does this matter? Well, in the words of the SmartNews content engine, “Read on.”
Here are the items of interest to me:
- Bad code is being created and added to the GitHub repositories.
- Code is recycled, despite smart efforts to reduce the copy-paste approach to programming.
- AI is preparing a field in which lousy, flawed, and possible worse software will flourish.
Stephen E Arnold, January 29, 2024
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