[kleinsch]

AI lets you pick the parts you want to focus on and streamline the parts you don't. I get zero joy out of wrestling build tools or figuring out deploy scripts to get what I've built out onto a server. In the past side projects would stall out because the few hours per week I had would get consumed by all of the side stuff. Now I take care of that using AI and focus on the parts I want to write.

[ToucanLoucan]

Also just.. boring code. Like I'm probably more anti-AI than most, but even I'll acknowledge it's nice to just be like... "hey this array of objects I have, I need sorted by this property" and just have it work. Or how to load strings from exotic character encodings. Or dozens of other bitchy little issues that drag software dev speed down, don't help me "grow" as a developer, and/or are not interesting to solve, full stop.

I love this job but I can absolutely get people saying that AI helps them not "fight" the computer.

[vlod]

I've always believed that the dozens of 'bitchy little issues' are the means to grow as a developer.

Once you've done it, you'll hopefully never have to do it again (or at worse be derivatives). Over time you'll have a collection of 'how to do stuff'.

I think this is the path to growth. Letting a LLM do it for you is equivalent to it solving a hard leetcode problem. You're not really taxing your brain.

[djeastm]

>Letting a LLM do it for you is equivalent to it solving a hard leetcode problem. You're not really taxing your brain.

But things like "hey this array of objects I have, I need sorted by this property" are not hard leetcode problems

They're precisely the kind of tedious, but not taxing, problems that we prefer to farm out to someone else. Like asking a junior to do it.

[vlod]

My point is that it's tempting and irresistible (based on other comments in this thread) to move from basic attribute sorting, to basic CRUD, SQL queries, CSS/Tailwind, typescript error resolution then using it for Dijkstra, because why not?, it's so nice.

Then we're just puppetmasters pulling the strings (which some think this is the way the industry is going).

[thewebguyd]

> I get zero joy out of wrestling build tools or figuring out deploy scripts to get what I've built out onto a server.

And for me (and other ops folks here I'd presume), that is the fun part. Sad, from my career perspective, that it's getting farmed out to AI, but I am glad it helps you with your side projects.

[Yoric]

Yeah, that is one of my main uses for AI: getting the build stuff and scripts out of the way so that I can focus on the application code. That and brainstorming.

In both cases, it works because I can mostly detect when the output is bullshit. I'm just a little bit scared, though, that it will stop working if I rely too much on it, because I might lose the brain muscles I need to detect said bullshit.

[dionian]

Im super interested to know how juniors get a long. i have dealt with build systems for decades and half the time its just use google or stackoverflow to get past something quickly, or manually troubleshoot deps. now i automate that entirely. and for code, i know what good or not, i check its output and hve it redo anything t5hat doesnt pass my known stndards. It makes using it so much easier. the article is so on point

[bandrami]

Has anybody tried getting an LLM to pitch them an idea for software that they then implement themselves? I might actually try that now...