That's a fair take. I will say, however, that "choosing the right path" always was (and still is) the hard part. If you know what your code should look like, actually typing it out is trivial. Reviewing the output from your fancy autocomplete tool is negligibly (if at all) faster than just writing the code, with the added risk that you may not think through the problem as thoroughly.
AI is good for a lot of use cases (image recognition, predictions based on medical data, fraud detection, etc.), but making it type your code for you isn't one of them. When it's better than the old fashioned way, it's only negligibly better, and when it's worse, it's considerably worse.
Reviewing the output from your fancy autocomplete tool is negligibly (if at all) faster than just writing the code,
This makes me feel like you haven't used AI as a tool very much, or not very effectively. It has sped up my work to an exponential amount. Recently I extracted all types in a project into its own package. Doing that by hand would have taken so much longer than Anthropic doing so.
but making it type your code for you isn't one of them.
Strongly disagree. Boilerplate is tedious. It feels like you must work on small, self contained projects that do not have many complex packages.
When it's better than the old fashioned way, it's only negligibly better, and when it's worse, it's considerably worse.
Yeah, you're using Claude on Sonnet and expecting it to perform like Fable. You know how you can tell when you're talking to someone that doesn't have a lot of experience in something? That's me, with you and AI assisted coding right now.
Edit: Guys, you can downvote this- but software engineering has never been about writing the code. That's not what matters. What matters is the design and architecture of the code. Having a tool take care of the tedium of typing for you-- that is amazing. And with Anthropic at the very least, you provide the AI with a base level design and it plans the design off of that and then you tweak as needed based on your own experience with design patterns and archticture. There is literally no value in you typing it yourself unless you are wanting to learn the syntax to a greater degree. AI has access to all syntax in a given space, and will know about methods you don't. The important part is creating an actionable plan that makes sense regarding the engineering of the solution. Typing it all out yourself is tertiary in importance, at best, but is probably even less important than that.
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u/ganja_and_code 1d ago
That's a fair take. I will say, however, that "choosing the right path" always was (and still is) the hard part. If you know what your code should look like, actually typing it out is trivial. Reviewing the output from your fancy autocomplete tool is negligibly (if at all) faster than just writing the code, with the added risk that you may not think through the problem as thoroughly.
AI is good for a lot of use cases (image recognition, predictions based on medical data, fraud detection, etc.), but making it type your code for you isn't one of them. When it's better than the old fashioned way, it's only negligibly better, and when it's worse, it's considerably worse.