Flag on the Play AI Let Me Down

My latest coding involves an attempt to memorize nautical signal flags. I’ve played with this idea in the past but never had the time to really dig into it. I’ve had images of the flags for years. I’d even started created a class to hold the data.

Image _flag;
String _mnemonic;
String _shortName;
String _morseCode;

Yes, at some point I want to learn Morse Code as well. Always plan for additions. Semaphore is in my thinking as well.

Once again, Copilot, the AI in Visual Studio, has jumped in to help. Or to try to help. It was pretty helpful with some tedious coding. Specifically, with a couple of lines entered it figured out how I wanted to add images and what not to the individual flag objects I wanted to create. Hitting tab and return was pretty easy compared to typing whole lines in.

A = new Flag(Flag_Host.Resource1.alpha, "Alpha", "A", ".-");

I had already added the image files to the project of course. Copilot was not always so helpful though. I created a couple of additional forms for the project and wanted to pass the array for flags objects to the new forms. Copilot struggled to code that properly and there were several false starts.  I used to do that sort of thing regularly but it’s been a few years. I guess my memory isn’t what it used to be. I finally figured it out. Honestly, this should have been easy for Copilot and for me.

I have heard from a number of teachers about how Copilot is showing up in their classes. One teacher uses MonoGame and tells me that Copilot is so unreliable with MonoGame that his students turn it off. My suspicion is that there is not enough good MonoGame code loose on the internet to properly train Copilot.

That leads to a major concern I have about using AI for coding. It’s usability and reliability depends on the quality and quantity of the code used to train it. Programmers love to reinvent the wheel so there is a lot of code available for doing common things in coding. I would expect AI to handle most common data structures pretty well. Some things that are not as common may not have as much code to study. I wonder how well AI will handle new programming languages?

I also wonder how well AI will handle new and unique problems. Will the AI be dependent on very detailed prompts from user developers? I think that is likely. I also think that some person is going to have to do a lot of verification of said code. We are still going to need people who can read and write code.

In a related note, several times while writing this post, I have dipped into raw HTML because I didn’t like how the program I use, Windows Live Writer, was formatting the text.