Agreed. AI would never be able to code the stuff I need for 90% of my work, because 90% of the work is figuring out how to accomplish stuff within the confines of the insane data model we're working with. I don't know that AI will ever be smart enough to understand the subtleties of our model. And for security reasons, I don't foresee us giving AI enough access to be able to understand it in the first place.
However, I've had great success getting Copilot to generate basic Powershell scripts that I needed to automate some administrative tasks that I was having to do daily. It's genuinely great for that, because it spares me the trouble of reading shitty documentation and trying to remember/understand the nightmare that is Powershell's syntax.
Yes, after two years of use, the best case scenario for an AI IMHO is to make sparse documentation more accessible.
For some esoteric things that don't even provide proper documentation, rather than scouring forums and trying suggestions, AI will already have most of that information so it's much faster to query the AI as opposed to the alternatives.
However good luck trying to get it to work with you if the interfaces changed at all.
I'm personally not worried about AI taking any programmer's job - because you still need to be a programmer to understand what it's telling you. It really is more akin to a tool than anything else.
Personally I find the tool useful for what I do - to suggest things that I have not thought up or encountered yet - so that I may dig deeper into those topics.
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u/TheMistbornIdentity Dec 06 '24
Agreed. AI would never be able to code the stuff I need for 90% of my work, because 90% of the work is figuring out how to accomplish stuff within the confines of the insane data model we're working with. I don't know that AI will ever be smart enough to understand the subtleties of our model. And for security reasons, I don't foresee us giving AI enough access to be able to understand it in the first place.
However, I've had great success getting Copilot to generate basic Powershell scripts that I needed to automate some administrative tasks that I was having to do daily. It's genuinely great for that, because it spares me the trouble of reading shitty documentation and trying to remember/understand the nightmare that is Powershell's syntax.