[codegeek]

Wrong analogy in my opinion. A hand saw vs power saw is like an old Pentium Laptop vs M2 Macbook. The latter is just faster and better. But both do not tell you how to do something. In case of the both the hand and power saw, you need to know exactly where to drill/cut without any hint. When coding with AI, you are getting actual code snippets and hints.

[umvi]

I disagree. In my analogy, cutting wood == writing code. You can't write code any faster on an M2 Macbook just because the CPU is faster. If you are more productive on an M2, it's only because you have more intelligent software (re: AI) helping you write code faster. But given vi or emacs in both setups, they are basically the same from a software dev standpoint aside from faster build time as your software gets huge.

> When coding with AI, you are getting actual code snippets and hints.

I still know the cut that needs to be made. Say I need a function that returns true if an array contains a value. Without AI, I would write it by hand, which might require me to RTFM. But with AI, I can simply prompt "// return whether the provided array contains a given value" and the AI will fill in the function. I could have accomplished my goal either way. But with AI, I was done and moved on without context switching to google or stackoverflow.

I could have sawed the 4x4 in half by hand. But instead I buzzed it with a buzz saw and moved on to the next part of my project 5 minutes ago.