alt Hacker NewsHaving an AI is like having a dedicated assistant or junior programmer that sometimes has senior-level insights. I use it to do tedious tasks where I don't care about the code - like today I used it to generate a static web page that let me experiment with the spring-ai chat bot code I was writing - basic. But yesterday it was able to track down the cause of a very obscure bug having to do with a pom.xml loading two versions of the same library - in my experience I've spent a full day on that type of bug and Claud was able to figure it out from the exception in just minutes.
But when I've used AI to generate new code for features I care about and will need to maintain it's never gotten it right. I can do it myself in less code and cleaner. It reminds me of code in the 2000s that you would get from your team in India - lots of unnecessary code copy-pasted from other projects/customers (I remember getting code for an Audi project that had method names related to McDonalds)
I think though that the day is coming where I can trust the code it produces and at that point I'll just by writing specs. It's not there yet though.
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Syntax highlighting rules, initially vibe-coded 40 languages and formats in about 10 minutes. What surprised me is when it switched the design from a class to the far more elegant single line of code:
return \file_exists( $file ) ? require $file : [];
The rules files:
* https://repo.autonoma.ca/repo/treetrek/tree/HEAD/render/rule...
This is the take when you haven't really tried driving these tools with much practice
For any non professional work its there for me.
Wire up authentication system with sso. done Setup websockets, stream audio from mic, transcribe with elvenlabs. done.
Shit that would take me hours takes literally 5 mins.
I've generated 250KLoC this week, absolutely no changes in deps or any other shenanigans. I'm not even really trying to optimize my output. I work on plans/proposals with 2 or 3 agents simultaneously in Cursor while one does work, sometimes parallelized. I can't do that in less code and cleaner. I can't do it at all. Don't wait too long.
>I think though that the day is coming where I can trust the code it produces and at that point I'll just by writing specs. It's not there yet though.
Must be nice to still have that choice. At the company I work for they've just announced they're cancelling all subscriptions to JetBrains, Visual Studio, Windsurf, etc. and forcing every engineer to use Claude Code as a cost-saving measure. We've been told we should be writing prompts for Claude instead of working in IDEs now.