Everyone's comparing o1 and claude, but neither really work well enough to justify paying for them in my experience for coding. What I really want is a mode where they ask clarifying questions , ideally many of them, before spitting out an answer. This would greatly improve utility of producing something with more value than an auto-complete.
Just today I got Claude to convert a company’s PDF protocol specification into an actual working python implementation of that protocol. It would have been uncreative drudge work for a human, but I would have absolutely paid a week of junior dev time for it. Instead I wrote it alongside AI and it took me barely more than an hour. The best part is, I’ve never written any (substantial) python code before.
That being said, I definitely believe it's only useful for isolated problems. Even with Copilot, I feel like the AIs just lack a bigger context of the projects.
Another thing that helped me was designing an initial prompt that really works for me. I think most people just expect to throw in their issue and get a tailored solution, but that's just not how it works in my experience.