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Nobody knows how to build with AI yet

(worksonmymachine.substack.com)
526 points Stwerner | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0s | source
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fizx ◴[] No.44616685[source]
The "time dialation" is real. I mostly manage these days, yet my fun projects progress faster than they ever have, because I can prompt in the 2 minutes between meetings, and come back to significant progress.
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jvanderbot ◴[] No.44616741[source]
Yes, it's not faster to develop with AI if you watch it work. It's faster to develop with AI if you parallelize. Typing was never the bottleneck, but is is a now-parallelizeable part of the pipeline.
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criley2 ◴[] No.44616810[source]
It can still be faster to develop with AI watching it work. It can legitimately introduce an entire simple fullstack change across multiple projects in my monorepo including graphql queries/mutations, typeorm repository, a service layer, and a reactnative frontend using apollo client, etc. It can do that in about 10 minutes in my local. I can't. If I turned it into a speed run event and practiced, maybe I could get it done in 10 minutes but honestly, it's a machine and I'm John Henry. Since it's using my IDE, it's using my meticulously setup and maintained local and I'm able to quickly stop it and fix any mistake it makes. Level 2 driving assist.

I have enjoyed the github copilot agent style development where someone elses computer is running everything, and I can make a request and just come back half an hour later and check on it. But this level 5 driver gets the wrong destination basically every time, and then it's another 10, 20 or even 30 minutes for it to make a minor adjustment. It doesnt understand my `yarn` scripts, it runs my tests wrong, it can't do codegen, it doesn't format or lint files, etc. I asked copilot yesterday to lint and format a PR and it took 25 minutes of agentic work lol.

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1. wrs ◴[] No.44616938[source]
For me, one of the new superpowers is the ability to interactively do multiple drafts following different design principles and see which works better.

I just started an embedded project where two different people had implemented subsystems independently, and I asked Claude to merge the code into a single project and convert the existing synchronous code into asynchronous state machines called from a single main loop. It wrote three drafts with me giving it different stylistic principles to follow. I don't know if I would have had the patience to do that myself!