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421 points briankelly | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0.308s | source
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ramesh31 ◴[] No.43575909[source]
This maps pretty well to my experience.

Other devs will say things like "AI is just a stupid glorified autocomplete, it will never be able to handle my Very Special Unique Codebase. I even spent 20 minutes one time trying out Cursor, and it just failed"

Nope, you're just not that good obviously. I am literally 10x more productive at this point. Sprint goals have become single afternoons. If you are not tuned in to what's going on here and embracing it, you are going to be completely obsolete in the next 6 months unless you are some extremely niche high level expert. It wont be a dramatic moment where anyone gets "fired for AI". Orgs will just simply not replace people through attrition when they see productivity staying the same (or even increasing) as headcount goes down.

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Denzel ◴[] No.43576102[source]
Can you talk through specifically what sprint goals you’ve completed in an afternoon? Hopefully multiple examples.

Grounding these conversations in an actual reality affords more context for people to evaluate your claims. Otherwise it’s just “trust me bro”.

And I say this as a Senior SWE who’s successfully worked with ChatGPT to code up some prototype stuff, but haven’t been able to dedicate 100+ hours to work through all the minutia of learning how to drive daily with it.

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1. carpo ◴[] No.43577042[source]
If you do want to get more into it, I'd suggest something that plugs into your IDE instead of Copy/Paste with ChatGPT. Try Aider or Roo code. I've only used Aider, and run it in the VS terminal. It's much nicer to be able to leave comments to the AI and have it make the changes to discrete parts of the app.

I'm not the OP, but on your other point about completing sprint goals fast - I'm building a video library app for myself, and wanted to add tagging of videos. I was out dropping the kids at classes and waiting for them. Had 20 minutes and said to Aider/Claude - "Give me an implementation for tagging videos." It came back with the changes it would make across multiple files: Creating a new model, a service, configuring the DI container, updating the DB context, updating the UI to add tags to videos and created a basic search form to click on tags and filter the videos. I hit build before the kids had finished and it all worked. Later, I found a small bug - but it saved me a fair bit of time. I've never been a fast coder - I stare at the screen and think way too much (function and variable names are my doom ... and the hardest problem in programming, and AI fixes this for me).

Some developers may be able to do all this in 20 minutes, but I know that I never could have. I've programmed for 25 years across many languages and frameworks, and know my limitations. A terrible memory is one of them. I would normally spend a good chunk of time on StackOverflow and the documentation sites for whatever frameworks/libraries I'm using. The AI has reduced that reliance and keeps me in the zone for longer.