Seeking Advice on AI Programming Assistants for SAS

[SusanEmelia]

I've been experimenting with AI programming assistants to enhance my SAS coding experience, but so far, I've faced some challenges.

I tried using Bart, but unfortunately, I didn't have much success. Chat GBT has been slightly better, but it still falls short of being truly useful for my needs.

I'm reaching out to inquire if anyone in the community has successfully used AI programming assistants with SAS?

[Kurt_Bremser]

From what I've seen here on the communities (there have been experiments feeding problems to ChatGPT), the best intelligence for coding successfully and efficiently is still not artificial. It's still the one between your ears. AI gets close, but usually does not get a fully working solution. Which means that AI does not improve you, it's the other way round. You have to complete what AI gives you.

[Patrick]

I've "played" a bit with chatGPT and can confirm what @Kurt_Bremser says. Sometimes you get some reasonable code that only needs a bit of tweaking but sometimes it's also totally invalid syntax even inventing new statements and procedures.

Using AI assisted programming still can be useful. It's given me in at least one occasion an idea I would never have thought of.

[tarheel13]

this has been my experience as well. usually, I get better code from thinking myself and referring to the documentation.

[ChrisHemedinger]

At SAS Explore in September 2023, SAS developers demonstrated/announced a coding assistant experience that leverages generative AI (like a copilot experience). This is under development now -- stay tuned!

Screenshot from SAS Explore demo