alt Hacker NewsAI lets you pick the parts you want to focus on and streamline the parts you don't. I get zero joy out of wrestling build tools or figuring out deploy scripts to get what I've built out onto a server. In the past side projects would stall out because the few hours per week I had would get consumed by all of the side stuff. Now I take care of that using AI and focus on the parts I want to write.
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Has anybody tried getting an LLM to pitch them an idea for software that they then implement themselves? I might actually try that now...
Yeah, that is one of my main uses for AI: getting the build stuff and scripts out of the way so that I can focus on the application code. That and brainstorming.
In both cases, it works because I can mostly detect when the output is bullshit. I'm just a little bit scared, though, that it will stop working if I rely too much on it, because I might lose the brain muscles I need to detect said bullshit.
Also just.. boring code. Like I'm probably more anti-AI than most, but even I'll acknowledge it's nice to just be like... "hey this array of objects I have, I need sorted by this property" and just have it work. Or how to load strings from exotic character encodings. Or dozens of other bitchy little issues that drag software dev speed down, don't help me "grow" as a developer, and/or are not interesting to solve, full stop.
I love this job but I can absolutely get people saying that AI helps them not "fight" the computer.
> I get zero joy out of wrestling build tools or figuring out deploy scripts to get what I've built out onto a server.
And for me (and other ops folks here I'd presume), that is the fun part. Sad, from my career perspective, that it's getting farmed out to AI, but I am glad it helps you with your side projects.