| I have lot of software engineering experience and I’m working on something for which I decided to use Rails where I had zero prior experience in either Ruby or Rails. I’ve been using Claude for help. Here’s what my personal experience: it’s been great at helping me understand things and converting stuff, which is both helping with learning about Rails as well as making progress would have been hard otherwise. It did much better at explaining than Rails documentation which I found lacking. For example, I gave it large Go structs and it generated Rails generate commands to generate schema and XML serialization code. There was a little back and forth regarding foreign key relationships but “we” were able to figure it out. I was even able to ask it for opinion on some table design, asked it to play the role of an experienced DBA, and it did great. In short, it’s great if you know what you want to do at granular level, especially for new stuff. But, if I didn’t know what I know, I don’t think it would have worked. Think of it like a calculator, can calculate what I tell it to calculate faster than me, but that’s it. But that in itself is huge. |
I use it for the boring work like generating comments, basic algorithms, API endpoints, and naming stuff. Even with the need to double-check the output, it still takes a load off my brain.