Much of what we see written or hear podcasted about LLMs is how useful they are for programming. Coding, as they say, which may or may not be a distinction without a difference. I’ll come back to that, perhaps.

At work, as I mentioned briefly in a footnote last time there is some pressure — or not as strong as that, let’s say wishing — from some elements of management, for us to make more use of ‘AI’. It’s a payment-card company. A regulated industry. It seems vastly unlikely that there would be a place to connect our customers’ data, for example, to a US-owned (or Chinese!) probability machine.

But in the process of our work, internally; in software development, for example…

I resisted — or just ignored — the suggestion that we activate GitHub Copilot in our code editor, for a long time. And then when I decided to do so, to try it, I found I didn’t have the permissions. So I left it. Eventually, though, the permissions got sorted out, and I gave it a try.

There was a piece of code I didn’t fully understand, so I asked the chatbot built into IntelliJ to explain it. And, with a bit of back and forth, it did. It was nothing I couldn’t have found out by searching, but it was quite effective.

So I activated the auto-completion feature in my editor and let it go for a while.

Reader, yesterday I deactivated it.

It had become so annoying, so intrusive, I couldn’t stand it any more. Whenever I tried to type anything it would pop up a suggestion. Often it suggested exactly what I had been going to type anyway. Which is not the worst. We’ve had autocomplete in editors for decades, probably, where the editor will suggest the name of a class, method, etc, and it saves a lot of mistyping.

This new thing, though; this was suggesting whole blocks of code, practically whole methods. And worse, it was suggesting text. You go to type a comment, and it proposes something very close to what you were going to write. Or something quite different, but either way, it is not what I want.

They say having Claude Code or something to help you is like having a keen junior developer at your side. Fine, but if a junior developer kept trying to type what I was typing, I’d tell them to sod off and get on with their own work. Stop trying to do mine for me.

All of which leads me to another of the things about ‘AI’ that has bothered me since I first heard of people using them to help with work in this kind of way.

Maybe this is a silly concern, but: it feels like cheating. Getting someone/thing else to do your work for you? That’s not right.