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It’s a different, less enjoyable, type of work in my opinion.
If this seems interesting to me, and I have time, I will do it.
If it is uninteresting to me, or turns out to be uninteresting, or the schedule does not fit with mine, someone else can do it.
Exactly the same deal with how I use AI in general, not just in coding.
Before this "AI" I had to do the mundane tasks of boilerplate. Now I don't. That's a win for me. The grand thinking and the whole picture of the projects is still mine, and I keep trying to give it to "AI" from time to time, except each time it spits BS. Also it helps that as a freelancer my stuff gets used by my client directly in production (no manager above, that has a group leader, that has a CEO, that has client's IT department, that finally has the client as final user). That's another good feeling. Corporations with layers above layers are the soul sucking of programming joy. Freelancing allowed me to avoid that.
> That's the labor-saving promise. Where are the labor saving _measurements_? You said it yourself: > You'd think about the problem. Draw some diagrams. Understand what you're actually trying to do. So why are we relying on "promises?" > If I use AI to help, the work doesn't feel like mine. And when you're experiencing an emergency and need to fix or patch it this comes back to haunt you. > So all credit flows to the…
Only if you're doing something trivial or highly common, in which case it's boilerplate that shouldn't be copyrighted. We already had this argument when Oracle sued Google over Java. We already had the "just stochastic parrots" conversation too, and concluded it's a specious argument.
If programming is woodworking, using AI is ikea assembly except they packed most the wrong parts in the box so I have to deal with customer service to go back and forth to get the right parts and the hardware parts don’t always function as intended leaving me to find my own. It’s a different, less enjoyable, type of work in my opinion.
This is an elegant way of putting it. I like it
Aside from regular arguments and slinging insults at chatgpt, I've been enjoying being able to be way more productive on my personal projects.
I've been using agentic AI to explore ESP32 in Arduino IDE. I'm learning a ton and I'm confident I could write some simpler firmware at this point and I regularly make modifications to the code myself.
But damn if it isn't amazing to have zero clue how to rewrite low level libraries for a little known sensor and within an hour have a working rewrite of the library that works perfectly with the sensor!
I'll say though, this is all hobby stuff. If my day job was professional chatgpt wrangler I think I'd be pretty over it pretty quickly. Though I'm burnt out to hell. So maybe it's best.
For side projects no, but I use it at the level that feels like it enhances my workflow and manually write the other bits since I don’t have productivity software tracking if I’m adopting AI hard enough