alt Hacker NewsI’m not using AI to eliminate thinking but to free me from the rote mundane code writing. AI is perfectly competent at writing code once a prototype is implemented.
I do write initial proof of concept crude prototypes (not commented, hardcoded variables, etc), and AI does the productionizing of them. It has really allowed me to command a team of agents instead of keeping track of a bunch of humans of varying work ethic, skill, and ability to maintain high code quality. And often AI is very good at maintaining patterns used in the code base or even keeping them to industry best practices.
When using AI you will no longer be writing so much in programming languages—English or whatever language you talk to the LLM will be the main language.
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What even is rote, mundane code?
How much of this rote, mundane code do you honestly have in any given project?
Most of the time is spent making plans and prototype outlines for the llm to work with. Otherwise the whole thing will be a horrible mess. You need elaborately crafted prompts, so you have to have proper understanding of the underlying framework and language otherwise the whole thing will be a horrible mess. I don't even know how could people handle multiple agents, when it usually finishes quite fast. And you can't even do anything between runs, because you are in a constant oh one more minute and it finishes state. And when it finishes you have to evaluate the output. So can't even do deep thinking during "work", because the pattern is similar to social media. Constant attention, almost instant gratification. So your attention span is again and again fucked, properly fucked.
And the problem is, that these plans are obliterated in a few hours and then you have to analyze and iterate on the output to weed out the idiocies.
And handling multiple agent outputs... so continous context switches. Well, good luck with that in the long term.
If you let agents run wild and build whatever, the output is almost surely will be a horrible mess. End of story.
"AI is perfectly competent at writing code once a prototype is implemented" ... perfectly? I mean, it's certainly far from perfect - this is where I spend most of my day, in fixing the imperfections of the code generating robot.
Granted I'm not polishing up a prototype, I'm maintaining, evolving and modernizing a non-trivial 8+ year old product.