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.

The skill ceiling might be "high" but it's not like investing years of practice to become a great pianist. The most experienced AI coder in the world has about three years of practice working this way, much of which is obsoleted because the models have changed to the point where some lessons learned on GPT 3.5 don't transfer. There aren't teachers with decades of experience to learn from, either.

It’s mostly attitude that you are learning. Playfulness, persistence and a willingness to start from scratch again and again.

>persistence and a willingness to start from scratch again and again.

i.e. continually gambling and praying the model spits something out that works instead of thinking.

why is the process important? If they can continuously trial and error their way into a good output/result, then it's a fine outcome.

Why is thinking important? Think about it a bit.

is it more important for a chess engine to be able to think? Or is it able to win by brute force through searching a sufficient outcome?

If the outcome is indistinguisable from using "thinking" as the process rather than brute force, why would the process matter regarding how the outcome was achieved?

maybe if programming were a well-defined game like chess, but it's not.