alt Hacker NewsProbably a lot of people here disagree with this feeling. But my take is that if setting up all the AI infrastructure and onboarding to my code is going to take this amount of effort, then I might as well code the damn thing myself which is what I'm getting paid to (and enjoy doing anyway)
Replies
A lot of the style stuff you can write once and reuse. I started splitting mine into overall and project specific files for this reason
Universal has stuff I always want (use uv instead of pip etc) while the other describes what tech choice for this project
Perhaps. But keep in mind that the setup work is typically mostly delegated to LLMs as well.
It really doesn't take that much effort. Like any tool, people can over-optimise on the setup rather than just use it.
Whether it's setting up AI infrastructure or configuring Emacs/vim/VSCode, the important distinction to make is if the cost has to be paid continually, or if it's a one time/intermittent cost. If I had to configure my shell/git aliases every time I booted my computer, I wouldn't use them, but seeing as how they're saved in config files, they're pretty heavily customized by this point.
Don't use AI if you don't want to, but "it takes too much effort to set up" is an excuse printf debuggers use to avoid setting up a debugger. Which is a whole other debate though.
I strongly disagree with the author not using /init. It takes a minute to run and Claude provides surprisingly good results.
The effort described in the article is maybe a couple hours of work.
I understand the "enjoy doing anyway" part and it resonates, but not using AI is simply less productive.