[LogicFailsMe]

In my side hustle time, I use coding agents to explore what if projects I would otherwise never get to build.

At my day job, I use AI to fix config, container, and installation issues so I can spend my time coding instead of struggling to fix mostly other people's mistakes. And really, in this age of python wheels, containers, virtual environments, and fragmented APIs, the cognitive load of doing this by hand would shut me down for the day.

1.5 years in and I haven't burnt out. If anything, I'm ramping up. I'm no longer afraid of adding a web UI, or insane numbers of unit tests, or deploying other people's software.

What I'm not doing is using it to build products, but instead just doing so to augment the supporting stack. All of this is subject to change as the AI landscape evolves.

[embedding-shape]

That's exactly what the article highlight might actually put your "competitors" (if you see others like that) in front of you, as focus and "what you actually did" becomes more important. Might be that while you shipped and experimented with 50 different APIs, your "competitor"/peer just did 3, but they were more carefully considered so the payoff ended up bigger/better, in whatever way that could be.

That's how I understood the article at least.

[vouaobrasil]

> At my day job, I use AI to fix config, container, and installation issues so I can spend my time coding instead of struggling to fix mostly other people's mistakes. And really, in this age of python wheels, containers, virtual environments, and fragmented APIs, the cognitive load of doing this by hand would shut me down for the day.

I think it was a mistake to add this much complexity to the world of software in the first place, so I'd view AI as a bandaid to a problem rather than addressing the underyling issue. But on the whole, the cost of all this extra complexity, data centers to run AI to fix layers of crud and buildup don't seem to provide much of a net benefit to society (except to those who are at the top and need to see growth to pad their retirement portfolios).

[LogicFailsMe]

Oh no disagreement that it was a mistake, but as Ambassador Kosh once stated "The avalanche has started, it is too late for the pebbles to vote."

I would suggest not concluding the end of this movie from the first 5 minutes of the story. But then, I really fought against complexity over my career and lost hard. One can either check out as a fossil of the good old days or adapt to the new reality. 6 months ago, AI was about to replace all the engineers and then reality slapped the C-suite hard on that subject as just one recent plot twist.

[vouaobrasil]

It's not 5 minutes into this story, I think. It's been going on for a long time, but really started to become a "conscious entity" with computers - and I do think computers were a mistake.

[tayo42]

Your job would be so much harder without those supposedly complex tools. Most of those listed help solve issues with multiple environments. What simple solution is there to that.

[voicedYoda]

My biggest struggle is UI. I can make functional, but my design skills couldn't sell water to someone in death valley

[saghm]

Same, honestly. I've dabbled in trying to come up with some UI stuff with LLMs, but I'm still not at the point where I'm totally comfortable. At my day job, luckily I have people much more talented than me at design who can provide feedback and guidance. For my personal side projects, I've had some modest success inducing the agent to provide the feedback from a suitable "persona", for lack of a better term (e.g. "Is there any existing standard on how to make this component accessible?", "How intuitive would you expect a non-technical user to find interaction with this?").

[robomartin]

I read somewhere that Claude is better at UI than Codex. I haven't tested it yet. I am currently using Codex for a couple of native application projects with Avalonia. The UI isn't really good at all and I can fix it by hand far better than it does with prompts. For example, a table to view database data ended up with huge spaces between rows and columns and it can't seem to grasp how to format a table nicely. So I fixed it by hand, no big deal.

[misiti3780]

Pick a website you like, and tell claude to use it for inspiration. I do this all the time and the results are pretty impressive and different than what you get out of the box prompting.

[NateEag]

> Pick a website you like, and tell claude to use it for inspiration.

I believe you misspelled "rip it off."

I guess I shouldn't be surprised that people are using the tools built by ripping off the collective creative works of humanity to rip off individual things, too.

[tomrod]

Steve Jobs said something about good and great artists.

[georgemcbay]

> Steve Jobs said something about good and great artists.

Picasso said that, Jobs quoted it (and to his credit, gave attribution... which I doubt is happening with all of these claude-cloned designs).

[tomrod]

Brilliant irony!

[__MatrixMan__]

When other people emulate your behavior because they appreciate the results you got, we used to call that leadership. Something has gone awry that we now call it a ripoff.

[NateEag]

Emulating your _behavior_ is completely different from imitating your _output_.

[misiti3780]

im not ripping it off, or at least, i wouldnt consider that. a perfect example is artsy. i like the clean style of the website, and the colors, so if im building a prototype instead of getting the standard shadcn look i get something a bit different. im not building a competing product to artsy, i built a piece of software i run locally to aggregate my taxes everything year.

[danshipt]

AI as an expensive bandaid

[acedTrex]

Ya this is exactly how I use it, the LLM does everything i don't want to do. Which is basically everything except the exact code im writing. Its very freeing to not have to worry or touch a jira ticket ever again. The LLM just does it for me.