>I don’t really understand the, “more, better, faster,” cachet to be honest. Writing the code hasn’t been the bottle neck to developing software for a long time. It’s usually the thinking that takes most of the time and if that goes away well… I dunno, that’s weird. I will understand it even less.

This is what I've always found confusing as well about this push for AI. The act of typing isn't the hard part - its understanding what's going on, and why you're doing it. Using AI to generate code is only faster if you try and skip that step - which leads to an inevitable disaster

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koolba 3 hours ago | parent [-]

> The act of typing isn't the hard part - its understanding what's going on, and why you're doing it. Using AI to generate code is only faster if you try and skip that step - which leads to an inevitable disaster

It’s more than just typing though. A simple example remembering the exact incantation of CSS classes to style something that you can easily describe in plain English.

Yes, you could look them up or maybe even memorize them. But there’s no way you can make wholesale changes to a layout faster than a machine.

It lowers the cost for experimentation. A whole series of “what if this was…” can be answered with an implementation in minutes. Not a whole afternoon on one idea that you feel a sunk cost to keep.

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EagnaIonat 31 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

> It lowers the cost for experimentation. A whole series of “what if this was…”

Anecdotal, but I've noticed while this is true it also adds the danger of knowing when to stop.

Early on I would take forever trying to get something exactly to whats in my head. Which meant I would spend too much time in one sitting then if I had previously built it by hand.

Now I try to time box with the mindset "good enough".

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CivBase 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> But there’s no way you can make wholesale changes to a layout faster than a machine.

You lost me here. I can make changes very quickly once I understand both the problem and the solution I want to go with. Modifying text is quite easy. I spend very little time doing it as a developer.

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sublinear 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

This is not correct. CSS is the style rules for all rendering situations of that HTML, not just your single requirement that it "looks about right" in your narrow set of test cases.

Nobody writing production CSS for a serious web page can avoid rewriting it. Nobody is memorizing anything. It's deeply intertwined with the requirements as they change. You will eventually be forced to review every line of it carefully as each new test is added or when the HTML is changed. No AI is doing that level of testing or has the training data to provide those answers.

It sounds like you're better off not using a web page at all if this bothers you. This isn't a deficiency of CSS. It's the main feature. It's designed to provide tools that can cover all cases.

If you only have one rendering case, you want an image. If you want to skip the code, you can just not write code. Create a mockup of images and hand it off to your web devs.

	▲	ufish235 2 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		So AI is good for CSS? That’s fine, I always hated CSS.
	▲	slopinthebag an hour ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Eh, I've written so much CSS and I hate it so much I use AI to write it now not because it's faster or better at doing so, just so I don't need to do it.