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by Isolated_Routes 63 days ago
I think building something really well with AI takes a lot of work. You can certainly ask it to do things and it will comply, and produce something pretty good. But you don't know what you don't know, especially when it speaks to you authoritatively. So checking its work from many different angles and making sure it's precise can be a challenge. Will be interesting to see how all of this iterates over time.
4 comments
deepfriedbits 63 days ago
I agree 100%. At the same time, I feel like this piece, and our comments on it are snapshots in time because of the rate of advancement in the industry. These coding models are already significantly better than they were even nine months ago.

I can't help but read complaints about the capabilities of AI – and I'm certainly not accusing you of complaining about AI, just a general thought – and think "Yet" to myself every time.

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Isolated_Routes 63 days ago
Exactly! I completely agree. I think figuring out how to use this new tool well develop into a bit of an art form, which we will race to keep up with.
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ValentineC 63 days ago
> But you don't know what you don't know, especially when it speaks to you authoritatively. So checking its work from many different angles and making sure it's precise can be a challenge.

I've spent far more time pitting one AI context against another (reviewing each other's work) than I have using AI to build stuff these days.

The benefit is that since it mostly happens asynchronously, I'm free to do other stuff.

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mleo 63 days ago
If I don’t know what I don’t know, how am I going to build something any better than a coding agent? An approach on a couple of projects has been to prototype with the agent, learn, write a design and then start over. I then know the areas to look into more detail.
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Isolated_Routes 62 days ago
That's really the catch, and I think we're just figuring out how to approach this. I think your iteration approach is correct. I do a lot of asking AI to tell me about blind spots, to double check it's work in specific ways. I've asked it to let me know what it might have hallucinated, where it cut corners, and a bunch of other things along these lines. It will be interesting to see how things evolve in this area, and if AI gets good to the point that we have to do this less.
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nunez 63 days ago
Yep. It's quite good at getting you to 80% of the solution. The other 20% depends on the problem!
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