The Rise of the Stochastic Parrots for Developers

Abstract

As we surf the crest of the latest AI tidal wave, we developers find ourselves savoring our portion of the technological banquet. Enthusiasm is boiling over, with shiny toys such as GitHub Copilot and ChatGPT heralding promises of skyrocketing our productivity. At CodeLounge, we have been using Copilot for a year, while also collecting data about its usage by means of Tako, an IDE telemetry collector & analyzer that we developed. In this talk, starting from this internal data, we will reflect on the impact that such tools had and might have on the structure and daily activity of a development team.

Through various programming and data analysis tasks, we will try to shed some light into the line between promise and reality, connecting the dots to incisive critiques from leading researchers who question the capabilities of Large Language Models in a more general context. Can these parrots be our perfect pirate companions, finally taking up the cudgels against the tedium of our craft, like copy-pasting from Stack Overflow? Which strategies and best practices can be adopted as developers to do work, but also as team lead to structure the development process?

An anonymous stochastic parrot may have or may have not contributed to this abstract.