[shubb]

Maybe this is a me problem, but if I could figure out a way to use AI to significantly accelerate or replace developers or my own work, I would do it.

I have experimented a bunch with llm, copilot, etc. The current offering is useful in a limited scope. People google a bit less, and they are a bit better than existing IDE snippeting tools. I see potential but what is on the market doesn't give me a 10% improvement.

If you ask an LLM to write you a story it will write you a story. If it want a very specific story you have to write a very detailed prompt. Code generation is also like this. A seasoned developer can write code as fast as they can write a detailed prompt, and a newbie may be able to work faster in unfamiliar technologies but is susceptible to following bad suggestions (e.g. llm will tell you to write your own email validation instead of using the teams preferred library).

The vibe I get is like low code technologies. Initially they look promising and you wonder if you need skilled people anymore but any non trivial problem and you're just coding on diagram form realising text is better.

What are you / that using? I'd really like to try it if it is publicly available.

What I see anecdotally is, now debt costs money a lot of buisness cases for tech investment just don't make sense. Borrowing to buy future growth made a lot of sense when interest rates were negative. Now we have a lot of pressure to deliver profits today.

[infecto]

I use Copilot within the IDE extensively and only for the autocomplete. It is not always correct but it honestly is correct enough of the time that it is like having a second brain complete what I was thinking. If I want to write a unit test for the function I can do it at lightspeed compared to the past.

I will use a flavor of a chat interface (Mistral Chat, ChatGPT, Gemini) when I am trying to figure out something I don't have domain expertise on. For example I have a lot of trouble digesting AWS docs, I often get permissioning wrong or a configuration that is not well outlined to me. I use a chat interface to walk through the problem and more times than not get to a solution a lot quicker than if I had tried to step through all the docs.

I am still doing most of the thinking, I don't find LLMs to be that amazing for engineering solutions. I think it will happen in the future though as they become perhaps more opinionated, especially on software engineering.

[mewpmewp2]

> developer can write code as fast as they can write a detailed prompt

That is misleading. Usually what happens for me is I write a line of code, then I wait few seconds and copilot will write the next 5-10 lines. I have in my head what I expect it to write, so I can immediately tell if it is good. It is much less mentally draining as well, it is easy for me to code 12h a day and with higher productivity rates than before. I have done so many side and interesting hobby projects because of that productivity boost.

But overall it hasn't made me code less, it has made me spend more time coding because it is much faster to get the same value.

Same might be for the companies. Projects that weren't worth to do before will now be, because they are cheaper and faster to do.