Why I Still Trust This Community More Than Any AI Assistant

[acordes]

Dear community,

I’ve been working long days with SAS Viya 4 — coding, building flows, and producing reports — but I haven’t been active here for a while. Most of the time my own code base, macros, and reusable snippets get me where I need to go, and when I hit a wall I use Copilot to break through the blockage. It helps, but the hallucinations are always there, so it’s more of a debugging accelerator than a source of truth.

That’s why I keep coming back to the grounded, earned expertise of the people in this community. The quality of knowledge shared here is on a different level, and I want to say thank you for the insights and learning opportunities you’ve given me over the years.

Looking ahead, I’m curious how you see the near future of coding and development in SAS. Will SAS provide its own RAG‑based “copilot” for Viya developers? And how do you think that will change the way we write, debug, and deploy SAS code or create reports or train and score models?

[PaigeMiller]

I too don't really trust any AI assistant when I need advice SAS advice that is more complicated than regurgitating the SAS help documentation.

I am new to SAS Viya, I wanted to do a relatively simple thing but couldn't find the answer. The simple thing I wanted to do was take some upper case code and turn it into lower case code. I know how to do this in SAS 9.4, but couldn't find the right option in Viya. So I asked here, I asked Google, and I asked Copilot.

I got the correct answer here in about 15 minutes. Google didn't understand the question. On the other hand, Copilot gave me the wrong answer, Copilot said it couldn't be done, but it could provide workarounds where it would write SAS code for me to perform the task programmatically. As I asked more questions, Copilot seemed to get irritated and aggressive in insisting that it was giving me the right answer and that there was no way to do this . An unpleasant process. Finally I told Copilot that I had found the answer and it gave in and admitted that it could be done. Out of curiosity, I asked Copilot again the next day, and it still told me it couldn't be done.

[acordes]

Perhaps I can return the favor for all the help you offered to me. Please feel free to ask me anything regarding SAS Viya. I started working with Viya 8 years ago.  

[PaigeMiller]

Thanks, @acordes , I will post a question in the VIYA forum in a minute. Update: here is my question

[Quentin]

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@acordes wrote:

Looking ahead, I’m curious how you see the near future of coding and development in SAS. Will SAS provide its own RAG‑based “copilot” for Viya developers? And how do you think that will change the way we write, debug, and deploy SAS code or create reports or train and score models?

I'm not on Viya (sadly).  But yes, SAS has already released SAS Viya Copilot:  https://communities.sas.com/t5/SAS-Communities-Library/SAS-Viya-Copilot-Tips-and-Tricks/ta-p/981845

You might also be interested in Joe Matise's presentation from SAS Innovate: https://github.com/matise-joe-norc/connect-saspy  which will work with SAS 9.