alt Hacker NewsContent wise a nice idea, but I also like the conclusion about how AI made this possible in the first place. The author itself mentions this motivation. AI is undoubtedly perfect for utilities, small (even company internal) tools for personal use where maintainability is secondary as you can ditch the tool or rebuild it quickly.
> Two years ago, I wouldn’t have bothered with the rewrite, let alone creating the script in the first place. The friction was too high. Now, small utility scripts like this are almost free to build.
> That’s the real story. Not the script, but how AI changes the calculus of what’s worth our time.
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Came here to say exactly this.
That all the naysayers are missing the tons of small wins that are happening every single day by people using AI to write code, that weren't possible before.
I specified in a thread a few weeks ago that we manage a small elixir-rust library, and I have never coded rust in my life. Sure, it's about 20 lines of rust, mostly mapping to the underlying rust lib, but so far I've used claude to just maintain it (fix deprecations, perform upgrades, etc).
This simply wasn't possible before.
I've found that to be very true. For bigger projects, I've had rather mixed results from ai but for small utility scripts, it's perfect.
But like the author, I've found that it's usually better to have the llm output python, go or rust than use bash. So I've often had to ask it to rewrite at the beginning. Now I just directly skip bash