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It’s a tool with limited functionality. I think over time you vaguely learn the shape of its limits and work with what it can do, and it becomes genuinely usefu

It’s a tool with limited functionality. I think over time you vaguely learn the shape of its limits and work with what it can do, and it becomes genuinely useful. Doing basic stuff with a very limited scope that’s likely well documented all over the internet, great. Boilerplate, tedious yet simple things, works awesome as enhanced autocomplete. More complex stuff, give it a shot, maybe you’ll get lucky, otherwise if it starts fucking up I’ve had the most success just taking a step back and doing it myself, maybe chatting with it as a live docs substitute, or a realtime stack overflow/discord programming channel which are also sometimes of dubious quality but frequently useful. The misery really lies in getting stuck in that cycle of it just messing up over and over as you try to get it to make this thing work that is clearly beyond its scope and it’s just turning everything into a greater and greater mess of hallucinated bullshit.

petesergeant 2y ago
> It’s a tool with limited functionality. I think over time you vaguely learn the shape of its limits and work with what it can do, and it becomes genuinely useful. Yeah, I think this is exactly right. I use it for adding new files to an existing codebase, but without giving it access to that codebase, by passing in the definitions I want it to work with. It gets stuff wrong a lot, and I need to keep anything I'm asking for _well_ within a scope that I can be eagle-eyed about. But if I want to do something pretty simple that would be slightly annoying to write by hand, and can be done in a single file, it makes a pleasant alternative to typing out the code by hand. I don't think I would be able to do this as a junior developer, I think this is only working because I can tell when it's full of shit, and I lasted about 90m of being willing to let IDE-integration happen, because it's too easy to be lazy and not scrutinize every little change, and that way lies total madness. This makes me beyond skeptical of non-developers writing anything significant with it: they'd be much, much better off learning Bubble or similar.

petesergeant 2y ago

> It’s a tool with limited functionality. I think over time you vaguely learn the shape of its limits and work with what it can do, and it becomes genuinely useful. Yeah, I think this is exactly right. I use it for adding new files to an existing codebase, but without giving it access to that codebase, by passing in the definitions I want it to work with. It gets stuff wrong a lot, and I need to keep anything I'm asking for _well_ within a scope that I can be eagle-eyed about. But if I want to do something pretty simple that would be slightly annoying to write by hand, and can be done in a single file, it makes a pleasant alternative to typing out the code by hand. I don't think I would be able to do this as a junior developer, I think this is only working because I can tell when it's full of shit, and I lasted about 90m of being willing to let IDE-integration happen, because it's too easy to be lazy and not scrutinize every little change, and that way lies total madness. This makes me beyond skeptical of non-developers writing anything significant with it: they'd be much, much better off learning Bubble or similar.