You make a good point about using it for documentation and learning. That’s a pretty good use case. I just wouldn’t want young developers to use it for code completion any more than I’d want college sophomores to use it for writing essays. Professors don’t have you write essays because they like reading essays. Sometimes, doing a task manually is the point of the assignment.
I’ve found they’re great as a learning tool where decent docs are available. Or as an interactive docs you can ask follow up questions to.
We mostly use c# and it’s amazing at digging into the MS docs to pull out useful things from the bcl or common patterns.
Our new juniors got up to speed so fast by asking it to explain stuff in the existing codebases. Which in turn takes pressure off more senior staff.
I got productive in vuejs in a large codebase in a couple days that way.
Using to generate actual code is insanely shit haha It is very similar to just copy pasting code and hacking it in without understanding it.
You make a good point about using it for documentation and learning. That’s a pretty good use case. I just wouldn’t want young developers to use it for code completion any more than I’d want college sophomores to use it for writing essays. Professors don’t have you write essays because they like reading essays. Sometimes, doing a task manually is the point of the assignment.
What setup are you using for junior devs to be able to query your codebase?
I was talking more generally about LLMs here