Explain this too me AI. Reads back exactly what’s on the screen including comments somehow with more words but less information
Ok…
Ok, this is tricky. AI, can you do this refactoring so I don’t have to keep track of everything. No… Thats all wrong… Yeah I know it’s complicated, that’s why I wanted it refactored. No you can’t do that… fuck now I can either toss all your changes and do it myself or spend the next 3 hours rewriting it.
Yeah I struggle to find how anyone finds this garbage useful.
Not to sound like one of the ads or articles but I vice coded an iOS app in like 6 hours, it’s not so complex I don’t understand it, it’s multifeatured, I learned a LOT and got a useful thing instead of doing a tutorial with sample project. I don’t regret having that tool. I do regret the lack of any control and oversight and public ownership of this technology but that’s the timeline we’re on, let’s not pretend it’s gay space communism (sigh) but, since AI is probably driving my medical care decisions at the insurance company level, might as well get something to play with.
I bet it slows down the idiot software developers more than anything.
Everything can be broken into smaller easily defined chunks and for that AI is amazing.
Give me a function in Python that if I provide it a string of XYZ it will provide me an array of ABC.
The trick is knowing how it fits in your larger codebase. That’s where your developer skill is. It’s no different now than it was when coding was offshored to India. We replaced Ravinder with ChatGPT.
Edit - what I hate about AI is the blatant lying. I asked it for some ServiceNow code Friday and it told me to use the sys_audit_report table which doesn’t exist. I told it so and then it gave me the sys_audit table.
The future will be those who are smart enough to know when AI is lying and know how to fix it when it is. Ideally you are using AI for code you can do, you just don’t want to. At least that’s my experience. In that, it’s invaluable.
You shouldn’t think of “AI” as intelligent and ask it to do something tricky. The boring stuff that’s mostly just typing, that’s what you get the LLMs to do. “Make a DTO for this table <paste>” “Interface for this JSON <paste>”
I just have a bunch of conversations going where I can paste stuff into and it will generate basic code. Then it’s just connecting things up, but that’s the fun part anyway.
Yeah but I find code generation stuff I’ve used in the past takes a significant amount of configuration, and will often generate a bunch of code I don’t want it to, and not in the way I want it. Many times it’s more trouble than it’s worth. Having an LLM do it means I don’t have to deal with configuring anything and it’s generating code for the specific thing I want it to so I can quickly validate it did things right and make any additions I want because it’s only generating the thing I’m working on that moment. Also it’s the same tool for the various languages I’m using so that adds more convenience.
Yeah if you have your IDE setup with tools to analyze the datasource and does what you want it to do, that may work better for you. But with the number of DBs I deal with, I’d be spending more time setting up code generation than actually writing code.
I can jot down a bunch of notes and have ai turn it into a reasonable presentation or documentation or proposal
zoom has an ai agent which is pretty good about summarizing a meeting. It usually just needs minor corrections and you can send it out much faster than taking notes
for coding I mostly use ai like autocomplete. Sometimes it’s able to autocomplete entire code blocks
for something new I might have ai generate a class or something, and use it as a first draft where I then make it work
dumping email threads into it to generate user stories,
generating requirements documentation templates so that everyone has to fill out the exact details needed to make the project a success
generating quick one-off scripts
suggesting a consistent way to refactor a block of code (I’m not crazy enough to let it actually do all the refactoring)
summarize the work done for a slide deck and generate appropriate infographics
Essentially, all the stuff that I’d need to review anyway, but use of AI means that actually generating the content can be done in a consistent manner that I don’t have to think about. I don’t let it create anything, just transform things in blocks that I can quickly review for correctness and appropriateness. Kind of like getting a junior programmer to do something for me.
Explain this too me AI. Reads back exactly what’s on the screen including comments somehow with more words but less information Ok…
Ok, this is tricky. AI, can you do this refactoring so I don’t have to keep track of everything. No… Thats all wrong… Yeah I know it’s complicated, that’s why I wanted it refactored. No you can’t do that… fuck now I can either toss all your changes and do it myself or spend the next 3 hours rewriting it.
Yeah I struggle to find how anyone finds this garbage useful.
This was the case a year or two ago but now if you have an MCP server for docs and your project and goals outlined properly it’s pretty good.
Not to sound like one of the ads or articles but I vice coded an iOS app in like 6 hours, it’s not so complex I don’t understand it, it’s multifeatured, I learned a LOT and got a useful thing instead of doing a tutorial with sample project. I don’t regret having that tool. I do regret the lack of any control and oversight and public ownership of this technology but that’s the timeline we’re on, let’s not pretend it’s gay space communism (sigh) but, since AI is probably driving my medical care decisions at the insurance company level, might as well get something to play with.
If you give it the right task, it’s super helpful. But you can’t ask it to write anything with any real complexity.
Where it thrives is being given pseudo code for something simple and asking for the specific language code for it. Or translate between two languages.
That’s… about it. And even that it fucks up.
I bet it slows down the idiot software developers more than anything.
Everything can be broken into smaller easily defined chunks and for that AI is amazing.
Give me a function in Python that if I provide it a string of XYZ it will provide me an array of ABC.
The trick is knowing how it fits in your larger codebase. That’s where your developer skill is. It’s no different now than it was when coding was offshored to India. We replaced Ravinder with ChatGPT.
Edit - what I hate about AI is the blatant lying. I asked it for some ServiceNow code Friday and it told me to use the sys_audit_report table which doesn’t exist. I told it so and then it gave me the sys_audit table.
The future will be those who are smart enough to know when AI is lying and know how to fix it when it is. Ideally you are using AI for code you can do, you just don’t want to. At least that’s my experience. In that, it’s invaluable.
You shouldn’t think of “AI” as intelligent and ask it to do something tricky. The boring stuff that’s mostly just typing, that’s what you get the LLMs to do. “Make a DTO for this table <paste>” “Interface for this JSON <paste>”
I just have a bunch of conversations going where I can paste stuff into and it will generate basic code. Then it’s just connecting things up, but that’s the fun part anyway.
Most ides do the boring stuff with templates and code generation for like a decade so that’s not so helpful to me either but if it works for you.
Yeah but I find code generation stuff I’ve used in the past takes a significant amount of configuration, and will often generate a bunch of code I don’t want it to, and not in the way I want it. Many times it’s more trouble than it’s worth. Having an LLM do it means I don’t have to deal with configuring anything and it’s generating code for the specific thing I want it to so I can quickly validate it did things right and make any additions I want because it’s only generating the thing I’m working on that moment. Also it’s the same tool for the various languages I’m using so that adds more convenience.
Yeah if you have your IDE setup with tools to analyze the datasource and does what you want it to do, that may work better for you. But with the number of DBs I deal with, I’d be spending more time setting up code generation than actually writing code.
I have asked questions, had conversations for company and generated images for role playing with AI.
I’ve been happy with it, so far.
That’s kind of outside the software development discussion but glad you’re enjoying it.
As a developer
I’ve had success with:
Essentially, all the stuff that I’d need to review anyway, but use of AI means that actually generating the content can be done in a consistent manner that I don’t have to think about. I don’t let it create anything, just transform things in blocks that I can quickly review for correctness and appropriateness. Kind of like getting a junior programmer to do something for me.