Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by happytoexplain 3 days ago
This is my experience. It's a huge time saver for learning something that you would have had to previously Google or wade through multiple pages of documentation for, as long as you develop an intuition for when to fact-check it. It's a slightly less huge time saver for one-shotting simple functions/scripts ("write a function to download everything in a given time range from this paginated API and save it to files"), assuming you actually review what it outputs. But neither of those things are where most time is spent in software.
2 comments

> It's a huge time saver for learning something that you would have had to previously Google or wade through multiple pages of documentation for, as long as you develop an intuition for when to fact-check it.

When you're learning something, wading through documentation is a lot more valuable than zeroing in on the one thing faster. It's an investment in the future.

> assuming you actually review what it outputs

You don't need to do this if you setup TDD. Over time, you develop confidence in the tests, and those ensure your code is solid. Linters/formatters ensure coding standards.

It's a shift, but once you make it, is when agentic development clicks.

TDD is fantastic. It's also insufficient on its own. Humans must verify code line-by-line - unless you're writing disposable code, which is fine! That has its place.

More and more, this is becoming an unreconcilable ideological difference in software development.