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If you’re writing simple code, it’s often a one-shot. With medium-complexity code, it gets the first 90% done in a snap. Easily faster than I could ever do it.
by DrewADesign 10mo ago
If you’re writing simple code, it’s often a one-shot. With medium-complexity code, it gets the first 90% done in a snap. Easily faster than I could ever do it. The problem is that 90% is never the part that sucks up a bunch of time— it’s the final 10%, and in many cases for me, it’s been more hindrance than help. If I’d just taken the driver’s wheel, making heavy use of autocomplete, I’d have done better and with less frustration. Having to debug code I didn’t write that’s an integral part of what I’m building is an annoying context switch for anything non-trivial.
- Gigachad 10mo agoYeah that’s been my experience. The generators are shockingly good. But they don’t get it all the way, and then you are left looking at a mountain of code you don’t understand. And by the time you do, you could have just built it yourself.
- bdangubic 10mo ago> you are left looking at a mountain of code you don’t understand. And by the time you do, you could have just built it yourself. SWEs that do not have (or develop) this skill (to fill-in the 10% that doesn’t work and fully understand the 90% that works and very, very quickly) will be plumbers in a few years if not earlier.
- DrewADesign 10mo agoSWEs that don’t understand the strengths and limitations of their tools allowing them to choose the right one for the job won’t be software developers much longer, but they definitely won’t be plumbers. Maybe cycling through the gig platforms or working entry-level retail. Soft, arrogant, maladroit white collar workers make hilariously pathetic trade apprentices.
- pylua 10mo agoYeah, but you can ask ai questions about it so you can understand it faster
- _pdp_ 10mo agoYou are absolutely right.
- DrewADesign 10mo agoWorks great if you’re using a very common language. I wasted more time than I care to admit trying this with a pascal code base.
- Gigachad 10mo agoYou are trying to check the code for hallucinations. The AI will just hallucinate back a plausible answer for your questions. It’s entirely detached from the process that generated the code so it doesn’t have any more insight than you do on it.
- hattmall 10mo agoSame... And the errors are often really nonsensical and nested in ways that a human or thinking brain simply would never do
- rubslopes 10mo ago> Having to debug code I didn’t write that’s an integral part of what I’m building is an annoying context switch for anything non-trivial. That's the problem I've been facing. The AI does 90% of the work, but the 10% that I have to do myself is 20x harder because I don't have as much knowledge of the codebase as I would if I had written all of it by myself, like in the old days (2 years ago).