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Sample size of one, but I've found AI to be quite good at automating away the parts of engineering that I really dislike. Stuff like basic scaffolding and long

Sample size of one, but I've found AI to be quite good at automating away the parts of engineering that I really dislike. Stuff like basic scaffolding and long repetitive if/elseif/else chains are things that I have zero fun doing, or looking at long debug logs from build systems makes my life considerably less irritating. It's not perfect at it, but it's also generally useful to paste a chunk of code I wrote years ago and telling me more or less what it does (because I forgot). Obviously part of this is sort of predicated on the fact that it's still pretty bad at the fun stuff right now, and if it gets better at it then maybe I'll be right now, but in its current state I feel like it's made my life better.

JohnFen 2y ago
> I've found AI to be quite good at automating away the parts of engineering that I really dislike That doesn't surprise me. Different people enjoy different aspects of development, so YMMV. > Stuff like basic scaffolding and long repetitive if/elseif/else chains are things that I have zero fun doing I've seen other devs say similar things, and I agree that stuff sucks. But I only rarely have to do that sort of thing at all, so when I do, it's not a great burden. (That said, I actually do know at least one dev who enjoys that kind of thing.) But it makes me wonder: am I an outlier here? Do others do this stuff often?
- tombert 2y ago
  It happens less as I’ve gotten into more senior roles at my jobs, but I’m constantly starting new personal protects and I find that a lot of the annoying grunt work happens in the first few days of the project, which is the part I always dread. Being able to quickly ask ChatGPT for a quick couple stanzas of code for me to get started makes things more fun. Also, I do need to look at server logs all the damn time and I never have fun doing it, especially for some of the more arcane weird stuff (getting an LTO6 drive to work on NixOS was especially irritating). A lot of the less-frequently-used services will often have logs that are really hard to parse. ChatGPT would be worth the price of admission based solely on that. For that matter, build files are pretty much universally irritating to me. Being able to quickly get some personalized Maven or Gradle information really quick has saved me considerable time and effort. There’s plenty of more bureaucratic parts of being a software engineer that it helps me with; I have gotten it to write letters of recommendation for me since those are fairly utilitarian at the end of the day, or to help me format slides in Beamer. I don’t know; again for me it’s been extraordinarily helpful and made software engineering a lot more enjoyable. If I felt like my job were actually at risk from it in the near it’s possible I would have a worse opinion of it.
  - JohnFen 2y ago
    Fair enough! > I don’t know; again for me it’s been extraordinarily helpful and made software engineering a lot more enjoyable I found it to be more of an impediment than help, in that I spent at least as much time and effort when using LLMs as assistants than not, and it makes the software engineering much less pleasant for me. Different strokes and all that. As with all tools, what is great for one person can be terrible for another.

JohnFen 2y ago

> I've found AI to be quite good at automating away the parts of engineering that I really dislike That doesn't surprise me. Different people enjoy different aspects of development, so YMMV. > Stuff like basic scaffolding and long repetitive if/elseif/else chains are things that I have zero fun doing I've seen other devs say similar things, and I agree that stuff sucks. But I only rarely have to do that sort of thing at all, so when I do, it's not a great burden. (That said, I actually do know at least one dev who enjoys that kind of thing.) But it makes me wonder: am I an outlier here? Do others do this stuff often?

tombert 2y ago
It happens less as I’ve gotten into more senior roles at my jobs, but I’m constantly starting new personal protects and I find that a lot of the annoying grunt work happens in the first few days of the project, which is the part I always dread. Being able to quickly ask ChatGPT for a quick couple stanzas of code for me to get started makes things more fun. Also, I do need to look at server logs all the damn time and I never have fun doing it, especially for some of the more arcane weird stuff (getting an LTO6 drive to work on NixOS was especially irritating). A lot of the less-frequently-used services will often have logs that are really hard to parse. ChatGPT would be worth the price of admission based solely on that. For that matter, build files are pretty much universally irritating to me. Being able to quickly get some personalized Maven or Gradle information really quick has saved me considerable time and effort. There’s plenty of more bureaucratic parts of being a software engineer that it helps me with; I have gotten it to write letters of recommendation for me since those are fairly utilitarian at the end of the day, or to help me format slides in Beamer. I don’t know; again for me it’s been extraordinarily helpful and made software engineering a lot more enjoyable. If I felt like my job were actually at risk from it in the near it’s possible I would have a worse opinion of it.
- JohnFen 2y ago
  Fair enough! > I don’t know; again for me it’s been extraordinarily helpful and made software engineering a lot more enjoyable I found it to be more of an impediment than help, in that I spent at least as much time and effort when using LLMs as assistants than not, and it makes the software engineering much less pleasant for me. Different strokes and all that. As with all tools, what is great for one person can be terrible for another.