Debate: Is AI code completion really saving time or just adding more debugging work?

I was against AI code assistants for about a year. Thought it was just fancy autocomplete that made more mess than it fixed. Then I tried Copilot on a React project last month with a 5 day deadline. It wrote about 40% of my boilerplate and I still spent 3 hours fixing its logic errors. My coworker swears it cut his sprint time in half. For me it felt like a trade off between speed of writing and speed of fixing. What's your experience been does the time saved outweigh the bugs introduced?

3 comments

3 Comments

julia_burns91mo ago

Solidarity here, I really feel that trade-off you're describing. It's like the tool gives you speed on the easy parts but then you pay for it with weird logic errors that take forever to untangle. For me the bugs usually come from it guessing wrong on variable names or state management, so I end up spending more time debugging than I saved typing.

reese_singh871mo ago

Man, have you ever caught it making up function names that don't even exist?

patel.daniel24d ago

Respectfully, I've had the opposite experience - it nails function names more often than not.