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by Philip-J-Fry
483 days ago
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I'm pretty confident in my ability to write any code in my main language. But AI is still very useful in just filling out boiler plate, or noticing a pattern and filling out the rest of some repetitive code. Or say, I need to write wrapper around a common command-line utility. It's pretty good at generating the code for that. What I mostly enjoy using it for is just writing bash scripts for me. I hate writing bash but Claude is excellent at writing the scripts I need. AI isn't writing software features or anything close to that for me at the moment. But what it is great at is just being a really excellent intellisense. Knowing what you're likely to want to do in the next ~5 lines and just filling it out in one button press. Things like intellisense and automatic refactoring tools were big productivity improvements when they became ubiquitous. AI will be the same for most people, an intellisense on steroids. Also, writing tests. Writing tests can be quite mundane and boring. But I can just type out what I want tested, give it some files as context and it can be pretty good at generating some tests. Does AI get it right every time? No way. But, as a developer, I'd rather spend 10 minutes trying to coax an AI into generating me 90% useable code for some boring task than spend 20 minutes typing it out myself. Often, I probably could write the code faster than I could prompt an AI, but being lazy and telling something else to do the work feels pretty good and relaxing. |
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That's what I tend to find with English writing as well. It's not great. But sometimes you just need decent generic prose for an introduction or an explanation of something. If you know enough to adjust as needed, it can save time for something that readers are probably just skimming anyway. As I've written previously, about a year ago I was working on cleaning up a bunch of reference architectures and I used Google's Bard in that case to give me a rough draft of background intros for some of them which I modified as needed. Nothing miraculous but saved me a bit of time.