[IshKebab]

Yeah but AI coding does speed up some simple tasks. Sometimes by a lot.

But we have to endure these tedious self-congratulatory "mwa ha well it's still not as good as my code" posts.

No shit. Nobody is saying AI can write a web browser or a compiler or even many far simpler things.

But it can do some very simple things like making basic websites. And sure it gets a lot of stuff wrong and you have to correct it, or fix it yourself. But it's still usually faster than doing everything manually.

This post feels like complaining about cruise control because it isn't level 5 autonomy. Nobody should use it because it doesn't do everything perfectly!

[bigstrat2003]

> This post feels like complaining about cruise control because it isn't level 5 autonomy.

It's nothing like that, because cruise control works reliably. There is never a situation where cruise control randomly starts going 90mph or 10mph while I have it set to 60mph. LLMs on the other hand...

This is why I disagree with people who argue (as you did) "it really does speed up simple tasks". No it doesn't, because even for simple tasks I have to check its work every time. In less than the time it takes me to do that, I could've written the code myself. So these tools slow me down, they don't speed me up.

[mdaniel]

I hear you, and actually agree, but never say "never," because it's still just a machine https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ffab&q=toyota+stuck+cruise+control...

[IshKebab]

> In less than the time it takes me to do that, I could've written the code myself.

This hasn't been my experience at all. At worst you skim the code and think "nah that's total nonsense, I'll write it myself from scratch", but that only takes a few seconds. So at worst it wastes a few seconds.

Usually though it spits out a load of stuff, which definitely requires fixing up and tweaking, but is usually way faster than doing it all.

Obviously it depends on the domain too. I wouldn't ask it to write a device driver or something UVM or whatever. But a website interface? Sure. "Spawn a process in C and capture its stdout"? Definitely. There's no way you are doing that faster by hand.