alt Hacker NewsThere really is a skill to using it effectively. I've tried coaching some of the devs on my team. Some get it, some don't.
Our company has been tracking token usage and models used vs output (tickets, story points, PRs, deploys, etc...). A dev got chewed out, even after I warned him, because he spent over $2k in a single month almost exclusively on Opus while his actual productivity in terms of what he delivered was abysmal.
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What are the biggest pitfalls devs on your team fall into?
rookie numbers. in one of the top companies, i know someone who tokenmaxed so hard they ended up spending $50000
So you are going to blame this one that dev?
Define productivity, and while at it, quality, maintainability , modularity and so forth.
It's funny, the thing that makes effective prompt also makes effective documentation/communication.
It's bizzare to see people that made clown issues (not enough detail etc.) suddenly start writing detailed prompts just because it is AI that will do the task and not the human on the other side.
there's a manifold to what "effective" means. The problem is once you get into the vibe flow, it's really difficult to eject yourself into the other realms of vscode or IDE or whatever it is you normal do because the vibing provides no anchor to what you're doing.
Even if these models are smart enough to reorient themselves, they get entirely stuck in a desert and now you're asking someone to just pull up stakes and digg them out even thought they only watched them get there and the UI provides so much speed that no human can comprehend how they got there in the first place.
It's like asking a pilot to take over in an emergency situation when they're not tasked with any of the every day requirements of the job. The orgs are relying on borrowed time of experienced professionals, and that's going to erode away and what replaces it is mostly people who understand how to navigate context but not use any of the _classic_ tools.
It's a real conundrum and won't be easily surfaced but for a decade.
I get it but it goes against the grain for me. Isn't it ironic that we have to waste our precious and expensive human brain cycles to think about how to use AI cheaply so that it is not more expensive than us?
In other words I want to spend 100% of my mental capacity in the problem domain for the things AI cannot do for me, like steering, grounding, verification and not for things AI could do.