I’m writing code because it is often faster than explaining to the ai how to do it. I’m spending this month seeing what ai can do - it ranges from saving me a lot of tedious effort to making a large mess to clean up
I’ve had better success, when using AI agents in repeated, but small and narrow doses.
It’s been kinda helpful in brainstorming interfaces (and I always have to append at the end of every statement “… in the most maintainable way possible.”)
It’s been really helpful in writing unit tests (I follow Test Driven Development), and sometimes it picks up edge cases I would have overlooked.
I wouldn’t blindly trust any of it, as all too often it’s happy to just disregard any sort of error handling (unless explicitly mentioned, after the fact). It’s basically like being paired up with an over-eager, under-qualified junior developer.
But, yeah, you’re gonna have a bad time if you prompt it to “write me a Unix operating system in web assembly”.
You will need more than a month to figure out what its good for and what not, and to learn how to effectively utilize it as a tool.
If can properly state a problem, outline the approach I want, and can break it down into testable stages, it can be an accelerator. If not, it’s often slop.
The most valuable time is up front design and planning, and learning how to express it. Next up is the ability to quickly make judgement calls, and to backtrack without getting bogged down.
So, what you’re saying is, you’re not writing code.
I’m writing code because it is often faster than explaining to the ai how to do it. I’m spending this month seeing what ai can do - it ranges from saving me a lot of tedious effort to making a large mess to clean up
I’ve had better success, when using AI agents in repeated, but small and narrow doses.
It’s been kinda helpful in brainstorming interfaces (and I always have to append at the end of every statement “… in the most maintainable way possible.”)
It’s been really helpful in writing unit tests (I follow Test Driven Development), and sometimes it picks up edge cases I would have overlooked.
I wouldn’t blindly trust any of it, as all too often it’s happy to just disregard any sort of error handling (unless explicitly mentioned, after the fact). It’s basically like being paired up with an over-eager, under-qualified junior developer.
But, yeah, you’re gonna have a bad time if you prompt it to “write me a Unix operating system in web assembly”.
You will need more than a month to figure out what its good for and what not, and to learn how to effectively utilize it as a tool.
If can properly state a problem, outline the approach I want, and can break it down into testable stages, it can be an accelerator. If not, it’s often slop.
The most valuable time is up front design and planning, and learning how to express it. Next up is the ability to quickly make judgement calls, and to backtrack without getting bogged down.
Maybe it’s work and it’s required 🤷♂️