Coding Without AI

Context

So, everyone is talking about how powerful, or easy to use and how fast it is to write code with AI. I must say, at first glance when I tried, yes, it was mind blowing, however, this was 2 (or 3, I don’t exactly remember) years ago, when GitHub Copilot¹ was still in its early beta. I treated it as a kinda more powerful intellisense tool than what’s currently available.

When Copilot was finally released, I stopped using it since I needed to pay for it, and since I’m a very egoist money savy person, I didn’t buy it.

Anyways, a year passed, and got a job, we were offered a copilot subscription, and I was like, “Oh, sure why not, it may be useful.”, and oh boy I was wrong…

Why using AI for coding was actually the worst mistake of my life

First of all, copilot feels very boxed, only really usable in VSCode and JetBrains IDEs, at the time, I was using NeoVim as my IDE. I know some third-party plugins that work great (because the first-party plugin actually sucks, and I spent too much time trying to make this piece of crap work than searching for alternatives.), still, I managed to work using copilot, and, that was the worst time of my life, constantly fighting with it because it kept suggesting me dumb changes, accidentally pressing enter to complete a nonsense suggestion, then deleting it, then copilot re-suggested the same change over and over again. That was a hell of a pain.

I think I spent more time cleaning up the stupid code this mf left behind than actually using my brain and coding.

The vicious trap of AI

And yes, sadly, I continued using it, because “It can’t be worse than that, right… Right?”.

It is possible…

Microshit released their new “feature” the chat box, which makes you able to talk with the LLM behind copilot, instead of writing comments telling what to do, now you write text telling it what to do.

And this “feature” was actually the worst thing that ever happened. Because now, I was just feeding copilot with stupid instructions that I wasn’t able to understand myself, all that to produce incorrect and misleading results just to spend more time debugging the shit it’s given to me.

And that’s where the trap is, I wasn’t using my brain anymore, it sounds scary but it’s a fact, it’s like when these newspapers articles talk about how teenagers can’t communicate with eachother, think for themselves etc… because they’ve been fed up with too much garbage infos some applications like to suggest (e.g TikTok).

And I was like “No way that’d happen to me, I don’t even use this thing.”
Well, the same thing happened to me. I was stuck in this loophole

Getting out of this

So, you will ask me, how did I ever get out of this? How am I writing this at the moment?

Well, I simply uninstalled the extension. That was hard at the beginning, very hard, it was like relearning to code from scratch actually. Especially using my own knowledge, I was even kind of surprised by myself that I can actually do what I think I couldn’t.

That was actually enjoyable, I’ve managed to re-enjoy coding, debugging, spending 3 hours on a stupid error.

Being myself kinda missed me.

Conclusion

I know some people are AI evangelists where their minds can’t be changed no matter what. But I’m not trying to change anyone’s mind, I’m just sharing my experience, what I’ve personally discovered and was subject to.

You still want to use AI? Go ahead, I won’t force you to stop, but I will not accept a PR from you.

I was never an AI fan at the beginning, I was just struck by the hype wave and followed it.

Still, I am now sick of it, yeah, it’s useful, sometimes, in some situations, but coding is never a good situation. The only thing I find AI reasonable for is for injecting alt properties dynamically to describe an image for disabled people.

I kinda miss the github were I could find good projects led by actual people. Now in the explore tab, it’s just Wow, a better AI than yesterday.

FFS, where did our free will went?