3 Problems with AI-Generated Code

Key Takeaways

a while back some big Tech leaders made some bold claims about AI Jensen hang the CEO of Nvidia actually said that kids wouldn't even need to learn to code anymore because according to him everyone in the world is now a programmer it is our job to create Computing technology such that nobody has to program everybody in the world is now a programmer this is the miracle this is the miracle of artificial intelligence yeah he said everyone in the world is now a program and then there is emad mushak CEO of stability AI who said that in just 5 years there wouldn't be any human programmers left sounds wild right but here's the reality AI isn't exactly living up to that hype instead of taking over programming it's causing a whole new set of issues studies are showing that AI generated code is often buggy insecure and honestly not very reliable in this video we're going to dive into to why this AI hype bubble might be popping we'll check out some numbers talk about why certain AI companies might be overvalued and see why some investors are starting to lose that initial excitement if you actually had to talk about the thing he selling today you go well it's a calculator of sorts well it doesn't always work but when it does it's sort of good so what happened how did we go from AI is going to replace programmers to AI is making things more complicated let's look at the research let's start with a recent study by up level that looks at the reality of AI in coding they studied over 800 developers using AI coding tools like GitHub co-pilot and the results not exactly what you would expect first they found that developers using AI saw a 41% increase in bugs yeah while AI might help you write code faster it's also adding a lot more errors meaning more time spent fixing those errors so in instead of spitting things up AI can actually slow you down in the end and even though you would think that AI tools would help developers complete tasks faster the study didn't show any real improvements in task completion or issue resolution basically ai's Promises of efficiency don't quite hold up also developers using these tools didn't feel any less stressed or burned out their workload and stress levels stayed pretty much the same even though AI was supposed to take over some of those rep competitive tasks so yeah it sounds great in theory but in practice not so much next up let's talk about a study from get clear they analyzed millions of lines of code to see how AI tools actually affect developer productivity if you thought AI was making things more efficient think again one big takeaway was that AI generated code has a 39% higher churn rate meaning a lot of it gets Rewritten or removed shortly after it's created so nearly 40% of that AI generated code ends up being redone which is basically waste of time and that's not all this study found about 11% more duplicated code when developers used AI tools instead of generating efficient reusable code AI tends to spit out new code unnecessarily which just clutters your code base now duplicated code isn't just ugly it can also introduce bugs in multiple places and make your software harder to debug and scale so yeah AI might help you pump out code faster but it also creates a ton of instability more churn more duplicated code it all adds up to less Reliable Software and more effort spent maintaining a clean code base in the end it's more work not less not exactly the game changer we were promised right oh it it thinks that BofA is a real protocol and it's like I don't know how to do that hey I wanted to tell you about something that's been improving my YouTube experience a ton and that's YouTube premium have you ever been watching a video and at the best part and ad pops up well YouTube premium gets rid of that you can watch all your favorite content without a single ad I've been using YouTube premium for the past few years and it's the best experience especially when I'm in bed I love listening to 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commission you will not only get an amazing atree experience but you will also support my channel so if you want 2 months of YouTube premium for free subscribe using the link in the description now let's talk about security because when you're writing code it's not just about getting it done it's about getting it right and this is where AI coding assistants start to fall short a study from Stanford found that the developers using an AI assistant wrote significantly less secure code than those working without one what's worse is that developers who had access to an AI assistant were actually more likely to believe their code was Secure even when it wasn't this suggests that AI tools might be giving developers a false sense of confidence AI generated code often looks right which makes developers trust it too easily and this false sense of security is a big deal in fields like healthcare Finance or infrastructure places where security really can't be compromised now don't get me wrong I'm not saying AI is useless or we should stop using it as a developer I can tell you that AI has definitely boosted my productivity I use it all the time for repetitive tasks it's great for generating boilerplate code like the stuff that nobody wants to write from scratch it's great for translating code from one language to another or quickly throwing together a prototype so yes AI is a powerful tool but it's just that a to the future of coding is an AI replacing developers it's developers working with AI anyone telling you otherwise probably has never built real enterprise software in their life or they're trying to sell you something look coding isn't even the hardest part of being a software engineer we spend a ton of time in meetings Gathering requirements setting up environments and digging through old code bases to understand what's really going on coding is only one piece of the puzzle so think of AI like spell checker for writers it makes us more productive but it's not replacing us anytime soon if ever and this brings us to a big takeaway education AI might help with some coding but you still need to understand what's going on behind the scenes you can just trust it blindly companies have learned this the hard way AI can give you code that looks great at first but if you don't fully understand it you're opening the door to bugs instability and security risks on top of that just copy pasting AI generated code can lead to technical death code that's so messy and complex that no one can work with without breaking something that's why in my courses I focus on teaching you to write clean maintainable code that solves real problems I don't just show you what to write I explain why we are doing it this way knowing the reasoning behind your code is key to becoming a great developer someone who can create software that is functional scalable and sustainable in the long run so AI is awesome and it can definitely spit things up but don't use it blindly don't skip learning the fundamentals best practices or the reasoning behind your code just because AI can generate it for you because here's the truth if you don't understand what your code is doing you're not making yourself more valuable you're actually putting yourself at risk of being left behind you won't lose your job to AI you will lose it to the developer who has solid programming skills and knows how to use AI to be even better AI is here to help not to replace us so invest in yourself learn the fundamentals understand the details and then use AI to level up if you found this video helpful please like And subscribe for more coding advice