I find the whole idea of AI coding assistants strange.

For me, the writing speed has never been the issue. The issue has been my thinking speed. I do not see how an AI coding assistant helps me think better. Offloading thinking actually makes my thinking process worse and thus slower.

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Swizec a day ago | parent | next [-]

> For me, the writing speed has never been the issue. The issue has been my thinking speed. I do not see how an AI coding assistant helps me think better

Similar to moving from individual work to coordinating a large codebase: coding agents, human or otherwise, let you think at a higher abstraction level and tackle larger problems by taking care of the small details.

	▲	amluto a day ago \| parent [-]
		If I’m coordinating a large codebase, I expect the people I’m coordinating to be capable of learning and improving over time. Coding agents cannot (currently) do this. I wonder if a very lightweight RL loop built around the user could work well enough to help the situation. As I understand it, current LLMs generally do not learn at a rate such that one single bad RL example and one (prompted?) better example could result in improvement at anywhere near human speed.

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ej88 a day ago | parent | prev [-]

I primarily find them useful in augmenting my thinking. Grokking new parts of a codebase, discussing tradeoffs back and forth, self-critiques, catching issues with my plan, etc.