alt Hacker NewsI don't work in coding, but I do a lot of complex tasks that can be automated to some extent. In 2019 I spent more than a month painstakingly building an autohotkey script that would interact with a design app to build a Chinese language workbook with proper formatting, and create indexes. When the script was finally running on its own it felt like magic. Nowadays I use a mix of Claude code /codex/antigravity (I have the 20 Usd sub for each) to build very specific "one use" tools that save me countless hours. I can even be very specific about how to design those scaffolds so the flow just feels intuitive for me. It's insane. It feels like a cheatcode. I think the best use for Ai in a company is to build tools for the humans, not to replace those humans
That approach works for software dev work too!
One coder at $dayjob had a “thing” where they wrapped every single block of code in a try-catch block. Thousands upon thousands of instances, enough to bloat the code volume 2x and slow down compile times.
I got an AI to write a cleanup tool that internally used a “compiler toolkit” (the Roslyn SDK) to mechanically and precisely parse the source and safely perform the substitution.
It ran for fifteen minutes, made about ten thousand edits, and halved the size the codebase with zero errors or side effects.