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AI coding made me faster, but I can't code to music anymore

praf.me

21–30 of 262 posts

Re: AI coding made me faster, but I can't code to music anymore

#23

What kind of projects are people doing that are feeling the increased velocity?

I'm slowed down (but perhaps sped up overall due to lower rewrites/maintenance costs) on important bits because the space of possibilities/capabilities is expanded, and I'm choosing to make use of that for some load bearing pieces that need to be durable and high quality (along the metrics that I care about). It takes extra time to search that space properly rather than accept the first thing that compiles and passes…

How do you know they’re durable and high quality?

Re: AI coding made me faster, but I can't code to music anymore

#28
> writing a blurb that contains the same mental model

Good nugget. Effective prompting, aside from context curation, is about providing the LLM with an approximation of your world model and theory, not just a local task description. This includes all your unstated assumptions, interaction between system and world, open questions, edge cases, intents, best practices, and so on. Basically distill the shape of the problem from all possible perspectives, so there's an all-domain robustness to the understanding of what you want. A simple stream of thoughts in xml tags that you type out in a quasi-delirium over 2 minutes can be sufficient. I find this especially important with gpt-5, which is good at following instructions to the point of pedantry. Without it, the model can tunnel vision on a particular part of the task request.

Re: AI coding made me faster, but I can't code to music anymore

#29

What kind of projects are people doing that are feeling the increased velocity?

Pretty much what somebody else said: AI takes over simple tasks, the "fluff" around the business logic, error handling, stuff like that, so I can focus on doing the harder stuff at the core.

Re: AI coding made me faster, but I can't code to music anymore

#30
The tradeoff of higher velocity for less enjoyment may feel less welcome when it becomes the new baseline and the expectation of employers / customers. The excitement of getting a day's work done in an hour* (for example) is likely to fade once the expectation is to produce 8 of such old-days output per day.

I suspect it doesn't matter how we feel about it mind you. If it's going to happen it will, whether we enjoy the gains first or not.

* setting aside whether this is currently possible, or whether we're actually trading away more quality that we realise.

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