Generative AI coding tools and agents do not work for me

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.

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.

Regarding using AI tools for programming it is not a one-for-all choice. You can pick a grunt work task such as "Tag every such and such terraform resource with a uuid" and let it do just that. Nothing to do with quality but everything to do with a simple task and not having to bother with the tedium.

Why use AI to do something so simple? You're only increasing the possibility that it gets done wrong. Multi-cursor editing wil be faster anyway.

Why not? I regularly have a couple Claude instances running in the background chewing through simple yet time consuming tasks. It’s saved me many hours of work and given me more time to focus on the important parts.

  > a couple Claude instances running in the background chewing through simple yet time consuming tasks.

If you don't mind, I'd love to hear more about this. How exactly are they running the background? What are they doing? How do you interact with them? Do they have access to your file system?

Thank you!

I would guess that they're running multiple instances of Claude Code [0] in the background. You can give it arbitrary tasks up to a complexity ceiling that you have to figure out for yourself. It's a CLI agent, so you can just give it directives in the relevant terminal. Yes, they have access to the filesystem, but only what you give them.

[0]: https://www.anthropic.com/claude-code

Those tasks can take hours, or at least long enough where multiple tasks are running in the background? The page says $17 per month. That's unlimited usage?

If so, it does seem that AI just replaced me at my job... don't let them know. A significant portion of my projects are writing small business tools.