MY annoyance is when AI is used instead of better machines.
I just logged onto github and saw a "My open pull requests button".
Instead of taking me to a page which quickly queried a database, it opened a conversation with copilot which then slowly thought about how to work out my open pull requests.
I closed the window before it had an answer.
Why are we replacing actual engineering with expensive guesswork?
In this case the featre isn't unnecessary and would serve a useful purpose if it were just a query. I wouldn't object to AI writing that feature to get it out quickly. I'm not anti-AI entirely.
However, someone has taken a useful feature and has made it worse to shoe-horn in copilot interaction.
Clicking this button also had a side-effect of an email from Github telling me about all the things I could ask copilot about.
The silver lining is that email linked to copilot settings, where I could turn it off entirely.
AI is incredibly powerful, especially for code-generation. But It's terrible ( at current speeds ) for being the main interface into an application.
Human-Computer interaction benefits hugely from two things:
- Speed
- Predictability
This is why some people prefer a commandline, and why some people can produce what looks like magic with excel. These applications are predictable and fast.
A chat-bot delivers neither. There's no opportunity to build up muscle-memory with a lack of predictability, and the slowness of copilot makes interaction just feel bad.
I just logged onto github and saw a "My open pull requests button".
Instead of taking me to a page which quickly queried a database, it opened a conversation with copilot which then slowly thought about how to work out my open pull requests.
I closed the window before it had an answer.
Why are we replacing actual engineering with expensive guesswork?