[thealienthing]

I think one of the great strengths of AI (smol developer in mind) is to greatly speed up the development process by reducing busy work. How many times do you need to write a CRUD app from scratch? Sure templates exist but having a buddy that can do a lot of the tedious work up front while also implementing the basic structure with your design in mind can save you hours of work. Far more powerful than some template that can leave you with a bunch of extra crap and irrelevant libraries.

More broadly speaking, AI applications like chatGPT can save you a ton of time looking up a bunch of tools just to accomplish an incredibly boring task. This can help to keep you focused on the far more interesting and challenging aspects of work. Often, the solutions yielded from these interactions end up revealing to me a built in bash tool or python lib that I had no idea even existed. To me it’s like stackoverflow on steroids if you know how to use it

Also, AI chat bots can be extremely effective learning resources. A few weeks ago, I wanted to implement a digital low pass audio filter and didn’t know more than a few basic concepts. I asked chatGPT to explain the concepts with code examples. What followed was several late nights of just asking it follow up questions and very detailed discussions on the various aspects of filters. I got a primer on digital signal processing, bilinear transforms and filter design. I fed it snippets from free text university textbooks asking it to walk me through concepts and explain the things that would have been completely over my head. This was extremely useful since many books will assume you have a strong background in topics that can takes weeks to get a grip of assuming you even have a teacher.

All in all, I see AI as a tool as disruptive and empowering as the Gutenberg printing press, radio or internet was for humans. I highly recommend trying some of this stuff out and seeing how you can use it to enhance your workflow and learning process.

[ciconia]

> How many times do you need to write a CRUD app from scratch?

Personally, I really don't mind doing this. And each time I get a little better at it. I much prefer this to having an AI agent write code for me that I then have to audit and verify it does what it's supposed to do. I highly doubt this will reduce work.

[bioxept]

I actually agree with the doubt of it reducing work in general. In my experience it depends a lot on the person who is using an AI agent.

I have seen it multiple times that people were using ChatGPT or GitHub Copilot to, without thinking about it, paste some code into their application and then mindlessly removing and adding code based on the AIs responses until it finally worked. In the end the devs didn’t know why it worked and the implementation was rather bad.

Of course it lets you generate boilerplate code and I use Copilot for this purpose all the time. But you have to pay extra attention and recognize it when the AI is NOT generating boilerplate code.

[gonzan]

Reading code that you know what is supposed to do and testing it works correctly is a lot faster than writing all the said code. Reading is much faster than writing.

I also don’t mind writing this sort of code and I’m actually quite fast at writing it but AI is just on another level. Simple stuff like this it gets right almost every time and even does well on slightly more complicated stuff.

[ciconia]

> Reading is much faster than writing.

Not in my experience, especially not reading code someone else wrote.

[thealienthing]

If that’s your preferred MO, then I can’t argue with that. But based off your response, it seems like you haven’t tried it yet. I would recommend at least giving it a try.