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by maxrecursion 648 days ago
For me, AI is like a documentation/Googlefu accelerant. There are so many little things that I know exactly what I want to do, but can't remember the syntax or usage.

For example, writing IaC especially for AWS, I have to look up tons of stuff. Asking AI gets me answers and examples extremely fast. If I'm learning the IaC for a new service I'll look over the AWS docs, but if I just need a quick answer/refresher, AI is much faster than going and looking it up.

3 comments

This is exactly how I think of it as well.

Search is awful when you can't remember the exact term with your language/framework/technology - but highlighting code and asking AI helps out a ton.

Before, I'd search over and over fine-tuning my search until I get what I want. Tools like copilot make that fine-tuning process much shorter.

I find that for AWS IaC specifically with a high pace of releases and a ton of versions dating back more than a decade the AI answers are a great spring board but require a bit of care to avoid mixing APIs.
My experience with IaC output is that it's so broken to not only be unhelpful but actively harmful.