I reached this conclusion pretty quickly. With all the hand holding I can write it faster - and it’s not bragging, almost anyone experienced here could do the same.

Writing the code is the fast and easy part once you know what you want to do. I use AI as a rubber duck to shorten that cycle, then write it myself.

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jprokay13 2 days ago | parent | next [-]

I am coming back to this. I’ve been using Claude pretty hard at work and for personal projects, but the longer I do it, the more disappointed I become with the quality of output for anything bigger than a script. I do love planning things out and clarifying my thoughts. It’s a turbocharged rubber duck - but it’s not a great engineer

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searene 2 days ago | parent | next [-]

Me too. I’ve been playing with various coding agents such as Cursor, Claude Code, and GitHub Copilot for some time, and I would say that their most useful feature is educating me. For example, they can teach me a library I haven’t used before, or help me debug a production issue. Then I would choose to write the code by myself after I’ve figured everything out with their help. Writing code by myself is definitely faster in most cases.

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bootsmann 2 days ago | parent [-]

> For example, they can teach me a library I haven’t used before.

How do you verify it is teaching you the correct thing if you don't have any baseline to compare it to?

	▲	searene a day ago \| parent [-]
		You are right, I don't have any baseline. I just try it and see if it works. One good thing about the software field is that I can compile and run the code for verification. It may not be optimal, but at least it's testable.

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bcrosby95 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

My thoughts on scripts are: the output is pretty bad too, but it doesn't matter as much in a script, because its just a short script, and all that really matters is that it kinda works.

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utyop22 2 days ago | parent | prev [-]

What you're describing is a glorified mirror.

Doesn't that sound ridiculous to you?

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interstice 2 days ago | parent | next [-]

That's what rubber ducking is

	▲	utyop22 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		It sounds better when you get more specific about what it is. Many people have fallen prey to this and gone a tad loopy.

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jprokay13 2 days ago | parent | prev [-]

I am still working on tweaking how I work and design with Claude to hopefully unlock a level of output that I’m happy with.

Admittedly, part of it is my own desire for code that looks a certain way, not just that which solves the problem.

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2muchcoffeeman 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I’ve been trapped in a hole of “can I get the agent to do this?” And the change would have taken me 1/10th the time.

Choosing the battles to pick is part of the skill at the moment.

I use AI for a lot of boiler plate, tedious tasks I can’t quite do a vim recording for, small targeted scripts.

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skydhash 2 days ago | parent | next [-]

How many of these boilerplate do you actually have to do? Any script or complicated command that I had to write was worthy to be recorded in some bash alias or preserved somewhere. But they mostly live in my bash history or right next to the project.

The boilerplate argument is becoming quite old.

	▲	indiosmo 2 days ago \| parent \| next [-]
		One recent example of boilerplate for me is I’ve been writing dbt models and I get it to write the schema.yml file for me based on the sql. It’s basically just a translation, but with dozens of tables, each with dozens of columns it gets tedious pretty fast. If given other files from the project as context it’s also pretty good at generating the table and column descriptions for documentation, which I would probably just not write at all if doing it by hand.
	▲	2muchcoffeeman 2 days ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		I’m doing a lot of upgrades to neglected projects at the moment and I often need to do the same config over and over to multiple projects. I guess I could write a script, or get AI to write a script, but there’s no standard between projects. So I need the same thing over and over but from slightly different starting points. I think you need to imagine all the things you could be doing with LLMs. For me the biggest thing is so many tedious things are now unlocked. Refactors that are just slightly beyond the IDE, checking your config (the number of typos it’s picked up that could take me hours because eyes can be stupid), data processing that’s similar to what you have done before but different enough to be annoying.

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shortstuffsushi 2 days ago | parent | prev [-]

A similar, non-LLM battle, is a global find and replace, but _not quite identical_ everywhere. Do I just go through the 20 files and do it myself, or try to get clever with regex? Which is ultimately faster...

	▲	baq 2 days ago \| parent \| next [-]
		I’ve just had to do just this, a one line prompt and one example was the difference between mind numbing work and a comfortable cup of coffee away from the monitor.
	▲	2muchcoffeeman 2 days ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		In this case LLM is probably the answer. I’ve done this exact thing. No messing with regex or manual work. Type a sentence and examine the result in a diff.

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catdog 2 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Writing the code in the grand scheme of things isn't the hard part in software development. The hard parts are architecture and actually building the right thing, something an LLM can't really help you with.

It's not AI, there is no intelligence. A language model as the name says deals with language. Current ones are surprisingly good at it but it's still not more than that.

	▲	cpursley 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		What? Leading edge LLMs are great at architecture, schema design and that sort of thing if you give them enough context and are not working on anything too esoteric. I’d argue they are better at this than the actual coding part.