Re: What's your view on AI coding assistants?

[Fletch]

I'd almost want a middle option between 2 and three. I've moved from the "not impressed" camp back last year to "they're useful" (but not yet "very useful write all my code for me now clanker" though).

The free local ollama hosted (qwen 2.5 and 3, llama 3.3) that I've used so far are still lagging behind, but compared to 9-12 months ago there's noticeable improvements. "Commercial" offerings I've monkeyed with (Grok, GH copilot, Gemini Flash 2.5, Claude Sonnet) have similarly improved; I ran our interview coding problem through a couple of them and the ones I tried produced working not terrible code. Relatedly if I need to search for something depending on the context I'm going to use maybe 70/20/10 Grok/DDG/my local openweb with qwen.

For code assistants it feels like things have gone from complete slop for even trivial questions to mostly working short programs. At $work it's been decided to move to that ophidian competitor, and I find Grok pretty good for taking a detailed explanation "I'm trying to do X" and turning it into an ok/decent sample code or at the least providing me with enough search fodder to find what I really wanted.

I've also used GH Copilot (from emacs of course) to do some small utility scripts in that-other-language as learning practice and it was helpful producing slightly tweaked versions of a function which I'd already written.

So overall there's still a hype bubble for a lot of this, but if you're an experienced developer don't write things off. I think for experienced people especially moving into an unfamiliar language / domain they're at an interesting point where they can actually help you translate things into the new idiom / syntax / <handwaving />.

Edit: Not coding related, but nanobanana is pretty wild. Image stuff's come a long way from 13-fingered Will Smith consuming spaghetti through his 3 chins.

Edit 2: Coding related check out Aider which will use either an API key service (including OpenRouter) or local ollama hosted endpoints.

[adamsj]

++option 2.5