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Nobody knows how to build with AI yet

(worksonmymachine.substack.com)
526 points Stwerner | 2 comments | | HN request time: 0.401s | source
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karel-3d ◴[] No.44616917[source]
Reading articles like this feels like being in a different reality.

I don't work like this, I don't want to work like this and maybe most importantly I don't want to work with somebody who works like this.

Also I am scared that any library that I am using through the myriad of dependencies is written like this.

On the other hand... if I look at this as some alternate universe where I don't need to directly or indirectly touch any of this... I am happy that it works for these people? I guess? Just keep it away from me

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1. weitendorf ◴[] No.44617297[source]
I've been working on AI dev tools for a bit over a year and I don't love using AI this way either. I mostly use it for boilerplate, ideas, or to ask questions about error messages. But I've had a very open mind about it ever since I saw it oneshotting what I saw as typical Google Cloud Functions tasks (glue together some APIs, light http stuff) a year ago.

I think in the last month we've entered an inflection point with terminal "agents" and new generations of LLMs trained on their previously spotty ability to actually do the thing. It's not "there" yet and results depend on so many factors like the size of your codebase, how well-represented that kinda stuff is in its training data, etc but you really can feed these things junior-sized tickets and send them off expecting a PR to hit your tray pretty quickly.

Do I want the parts of my codebase with the tricky, important secret sauce to be written that way? Of course not, but I wouldn't give them to most other engineers either. A 5-20 person army of ~interns-newgrads is something I can leverage for a lot of the other work I do. And of course I still have to review the generated code, because it's ultimately my responsibility, but I prefer that over having to think about http response codes for my CRUD APIs. It gives me more time to focus on L7 load balancing and cluster discovery and orchestration engines.

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2. bluefirebrand ◴[] No.44620227[source]
> but you really can feed these things junior-sized tickets and send them off expecting a PR to hit your tray pretty quickly

This really hasn't been my experience

Maybe I just expect more out of juniors than most people, though