Listening to another pitch about how AI can empower workers at various jobs across my industry, I was striken by the comparison in the title
3d printing, just like generative models, have it’s actual niche uses, where it’s obvious downsides are irrelevant and they come handy, e.g. prototyping, replacements, small-series production
Where it comes to the top-down AI promotion trend, it feels not unlike the idea of printing the whole product - a car, or a house, from the smallest details - applying the least effective method, doomed to have a worse than average outcome due to technological limitations
And screws, the thing that we nailed down long before, and that is completely incompatible with that mode of production, is a screaming, growling, shrieking example of how helpful tech can be mispurposed in the most stupid way
I use it to generate unit tests, it’ll get the bulk of the code writing done and does a pretty good job at coverage, usually hitting 100%. All I have to do for the most part is review the tests to make sure they’re doing the right thing, and mock out some stuff that it missed.
Legit. Do you need to feed it your code base at all? How does it know what needs to be tested otherwise?
yeah, it’s the copilot plugin for intellij, basically right click and choose generate tests, it’ll read the file and … well…
Downside to that approach is that it doesn’t know what some function calls do if they’re not part of that file, so it tends to miss places that need to be mocked out.
Occasionally it writes a test that’s “wrong”, and I have to fix the test… very rarely, the “wrong” test is actually “right” based on say a method signature or decision tree, and the method itself needs changing.
You’re right, unit tests are another area where they can be helpful, as long as you’re very careful to check them over.