Brit workers waste nearly six hours a week 'botsitting'
4 months ago by HaraldvonBlauzahn to c/technology
Have you tried DeepWiki?
It basically lets an agent loose on your codebase, and it documents the intricacies of your legacy code, and in my experience, it has been very accurate.
I don't even vibe code, I just ask questions about my legacy codebase and I code manually.
Static code analysis existed before the "AI" era.
Of course, but this is auto documentation without necessarily relying on the programmer properly documenting their code, or even writing self-documenting code (both of which everyone should be doing anyway)
@lemmy.world
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@lemmy.world
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I have only one data point:
I am an embedded software developer. Recently, I had to attach and debug a stepper motor with a serial interface to an embedded control system. A bog standard task - basically, you need to initialize the motor, send it a home / referencing command, tell it to which position it has to go, and wait until it is there. Luckily for science, I had to do practically the same seven years ago with a lab system at a research institute. And in the current job, the senior engineer responsible for the motor interface is a heavy proponent of AI tools and uses these whenever he can.
Oh, and there are a few more pesky little differences:
In both cases, the result had to be reliable, ad it was part of expensive and heavy machinery with high cost of failures.
The outcome? The task took less than four weeks in the first job, and over six months in the second job. In the first case, the result was very reliable. In the second, it is still not fully reliable.
You can point out that the second was a legacy system, which is more difficult to evolve. But that's the point - AI does not "understand" legacy systems at all, and worse its use brings down and inhibits communication and knowledge transfer.
At best, you can conclude that AI is no substitute at all for a lack of knowledge and working institutional processes.
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