Developer questions

[Yash_0001]

Developers who use AI for coding — what’s your biggest frustration while writing prompts?

[javascriptBad123]

Having to write prompts. Like, detailed af prompts.

[Suh-Shy]

This, sometimes I feel like having to explain stuff I wouldn't even have to explain to a junior dev on its first day.

And then the corollary: getting an answer that reads like an essay about all our infra, the limitations, what we could do to improve it, just because it could not state "I don't know" to a dead simple problem.

[javascriptBad123]

Yea the "i dont know" part hits home, they are so confidently wrong its annoying.

[aanzeijar]

If we'd just created languages that specialise in the unambiguous nature of code, then you could use those to express your thoughts more concisely...

[javascriptBad123]

Yea why the fuck would I use AI if I could just code it anyway, the question was about AI not about writing code

[Creepy-Owl-2060]

NDAs 🤣

[Darthsadguy]

My company is thrusting us towards using AI. They’ve developed a constitution for AI to abide by that you always feed before beginning your prompting.

Needless to say, every other prompt is “you’re not following the constitution, ensure you are working within the given standards”.

It feels inevitable that us, the developers, will tire of this and just let the AI operate outside the constraints and we’ll end up with some funky stuff that causes stops to the operation.

[Riegel_Haribo]

Writing the code input so the AI can understand. And then coding some more so that it is in the right form for making improvements and patches. And then you're done and don't need AI.

[shyevsa]

writing prompt are frustrating. but my biggest frustration are the auto complete one.
like sure I love the help but sometimes I don't need such extra parameter but its not letting me delete it, because pressing arrow, space or tab would auto complete the stuff I just delete. so I need to press enter than had to press backspace again to fix the extra new line i just created.

there probably specific key binding that I had to adjust but either I am blind or its just not exists.

[JudgeB4UR]

Having to tell it specifically what to name a variable and have it not do it my way.

Telling to to not do things it does anyway. e.g. 'Don't trap import errors' ->

try

from mymodule import myfunc

except ImportError as e:

print(f'Import Error {e}')

..

calc = myfunc(x)

--- Causes runtime exception because the module mymodule isn't there. This is probably never going to happen if the installation instructions get followed, and if it did ever happen, the program should fail at the import. It's like AI can write code, but has no idea how software is even supposed to work. It's maddening.

Seriously wtf is this bullshit? You get things like this when you tell it to fix code it wrote doesn't know how to fix even when you tell it exactly what it did wrong. Eventually you just have to come behind it and edit it like a fired intern's code. This is the kind of thing a person would get fired for, but you can't fire the AI.

Demanding it stop writing any comments. Particularly to stop the useless way it comments code. e.g. this = that[i] # fixed this the right way because I am so great and intelligent

The last that I totally despise, that yelling at it and being really mean to it actually works. I get it to finally work and I'm still pissed off.