alt Hacker News> And when I ask them about it, they answer something like "oh but programming is the boring part, now I can focus on the problem solving" or something like that, even though that's precisely what they delegate to the AI.
This I think I can explain, because I'm one of these people.
I'm not a programmer professionally for the most part, but have been programming for decades.
AI coding allows me to build tools that solve real world problems for me much faster.
At the same time, I can still take pride and find intellectual challenges in producing a high quality design and in implementing interesting ideas that improve things in the real world.
As an example, I've been working on an app to rapidly create Anki flashcards from Kindle clippings.
I simply wouldn't have done this over the limited holiday time if not for AI tools, and I do feel that the high level decisions of how this should work were intellectual interesting.
That said, I do feel for the people who really enjoyed the act of coding line by line. That's just not me.
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>> AI coding allows me to build tools that solve real world problems for me much faster.
If you can't / won't / don't read and write the code yourself, can I ask how you know that the code written for you is working correctly?
> AI coding allows me to build tools that solve real world problems for me much faster.
But it can't actually generate working code.
I gave it a go over the Christmas holidays, using Copilot to try to write a simple program, and after four very frustrating hours I had six lines of code that didn't work.
The problem was very very simple - write a bit of code to listen for MIDI messages and convert sysex data to control changes, and it simply couldn't even get started.
> coding line by line
This phrase betrays a profoundly different view of coding to that of most people I know who actively enjoy doing it. Even when it comes to the typing it's debatable whether I do that "line by line", but typing out the code is a very small part of the process. The majority of my programming work, even on small personal projects, is coming up with ideas and solving problems rather than writing lines of code. In my case, I prefer to do most of it away from the keyboard.
If AI were a thing that could reliably pluck the abstract ideas from my head and turn them into the corresponding lines of code, i.e. automate the "line by line" part, I would use it enthusiastically. It is not.