> It was really great. Took what would have been about day's worth of work carefully figuring out from first principles how the template system was structured.. and made it into about half an hour of "get it to generate the next shim, verify that the shim does the right thing".
That also seems to highlight the disadvantage too - if you'd taken a day, you would have come away with a deeper understanding of the template system.
Fair point. In that particular circumstance I had no desire to learn the details of the system - the need of the day was to get in there, get the shims in, and get out to the other code that mattered.
If I hadn't worked for more than a decade with C++ and already been reasonably fluent in template semantics, there's a good chance I might have introduced bugs as well.
I think the issue is that these feel like incredibly safe tools because all they do is generate text, but at the same time it can lead to bad hygiene.
I personally never use AI to write prose (I'll keep my voice and my quirks thanks). And for code, I utilize the system specifically as a fancy pattern extension system. Even in well-abstracted code, about 90% of the structure of it can be inferred from the other parts. I let the AI complete that for me with tab-completions and verify that each line is what I would have otherwise typed before moving on.
I'm not comfortable engaging at a deeper level with these tools yet.
That also seems to highlight the disadvantage too - if you'd taken a day, you would have come away with a deeper understanding of the template system.