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Generative AI coding tools and agents do not work for me

(blog.miguelgrinberg.com)
399 points nomdep | 2 comments | 17 Jun 25 00:33 UTC | HN request time: 0.409s | source
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waprin ◴[17 Jun 25 01:48 UTC] No.44295040[source]▶
To some degree, traditional coding and AI coding are not the same thing, so it's not surprising that some people are better at one than the other. The author is basically saying that he's much better at coding than AI coding.

But it's important to realize that AI coding is itself a skill that you can develop. It's not just , pick the best tool and let it go. Managing prompts and managing context has a much higher skill ceiling than many people realize. You might prefer manual coding, but you might just be bad at AI coding and you might prefer it if you improved at it.

With that said, I'm still very skeptical of letting the AI drive the majority of the software work, despite meeting people who swear it works. I personally am currently preferring "let the AI do most of the grunt work but get good at managing it and shepherding the high level software design".

It's a tiny bit like drawing vs photography and if you look through that lens it's obvious that many drawers might not like photography.

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notnullorvoid ◴[17 Jun 25 04:25 UTC] No.44295759[source]▶
Is it a skill worth learning though? How much does the output quality improve? How transferable is it across models and tools of today, and of the future?

From what I see of AI programming tools today, I highly doubt the skills developed are going to transfer to tools we'll see even a year from now.

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1. vidarh ◴[17 Jun 25 07:08 UTC] No.44296435[source]▶
Given I see people insisting these tools don't work for them at all, and some of my results recently include spitting out a 1k line API client with about 5 brief paragraphs of prompts, and designing a website (the lot, including CSS, HTML, copy, database access) and populating the directory on it with entries, I'd think the output quality improves a very great deal.

From what I see of the tools, I think the skills developed largely consists of skills you need to develop as you get more senior anyway, namely writing detail-oriented specs and understanding how to chunk tasks. Those skills aren't going to stop having value.

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2. notnullorvoid ◴[17 Jun 25 14:29 UTC] No.44299690[source]▶
If I had a green field project that was low novelty I would happily use AI to get a prototype out the door quickly. I basically never work on those kinds of projects though, and I've seen AI tools royal screw up enough times given clear direction on both novel and trivial tasks in existing code bases.

Detailed specs are certainly a transferable skill, what isn't is the tedious hand holding and defensive prompting. In my entire career I've worked with a lot of people, only one required as much hand holding as AI. That person was using AI to do all their work.