This resonates with me, a lot. Few months ago I wrote about my initial thoughts here: https://www.cleverthinkingsoftware.com/programmers-will-be-r...
Things have changed quite a bit since, but I'm glad they changed for the better. Or so it seems.
AI coding made me faster, but I can't code to music anymore
51–60 of 262 posts
Re: AI coding made me faster, but I can't code to music anymore
#52In my experience, listening to music engages the creative part of your brain and severely limits what you can do, but this is not readily apparent. If I listen to music, I can spend an hour CODING YEAH! and be all smug and satisfied, until I turn the music off and discover that everything I've coded is unnecessary and there is an easier way to achieve the same goal. I just didn't see it, because the creative part of…
I describe it slightly differently. Similar to what the author described, I'll first plan and solve the problem in my head, lay out a broad action plan, and then put on music to implement it.
But, for me the music serves something akin to clocks in microcontrollers (and even CPUs), it provides a flow that my brain syncs to. I'm not even paying attention to the music itself, but it stops me from getting distracted and focus on the task at hand.
Re: AI coding made me faster, but I can't code to music anymore
#53What kind of projects are people doing that are feeling the increased velocity?
There's a local website that sells actual physical Blu-rays. Their webshite is a horror show of Javascript.
I had Claude Code build me a Playwright+python -based scraper that goes through their movie section and stores the data locally to an sqlite database + a web UI for me to watchlist specific movies + add price ranges to be alerted when it changes.
Took me maybe a total of 30 minutes of "active" time (4-5 hours real-time, I was doing other shit at the same time) to get it to a point where I can actually use it.
Basically small utilities for limited release (personal, team, company-internal) is what AI coding excels at.
Like grabbing results from a survey tool, adding them to a google sheet, summarising the data to another tab with formulas. Maybe calling an LLM for sentiment analysis on the free text fields.
Half a day max from zero to Good Enough. I didn't even have to open the API docs.
Is it perfect? Of course not. But the previous state was one person spending half a day for _each_ survey doing that manually. Now the automation runs in a minute or so, depending on whether Google Sheets API is having a day or not =)
Re: AI coding made me faster, but I can't code to music anymore
#54What kind of projects are people doing that are feeling the increased velocity?
Every kind of project is faster with AI, because it writes the code faster. Then you have to QA it for ages to discover the bugs it wrote, but the initial perception of speed never leaves you. I think I'm overall slower with AI, but I could be faster if I had it write simple functions that I could review one by one, and have the AI compose them the way I wanted. Unfortunately, I'm too lazy to be faster.
It's like working with a junior coder or an offshore consultant that always says yes.
Of course you need to check their work, but also the better your initial project plan and specifications are, the better the result.
For stuff with deterministic outputs it's easy to verify without reading every single line of code.
Re: AI coding made me faster, but I can't code to music anymore
#55Absolutely—I feel like I can ship at a crazy velocity now, like I have a team of interns at my disposal to code up my every silly demand. It reminds me this scene: `Cut my eggs` `Your eggs are cut sir!' `Cut my milk' `I can't sir, it's liquid' `Imbecile! Freeze it, then cut it!'
> Absolutely—I feel like I can ship at a crazy velocity now, like I have a team of interns at my disposal to code up my every silly demand. I also wonder what type of simple CRUD apps people build that have such a performance gain? They must be building well understood projects or be incredible slow developers for LLMs to have such an impact, as I cant relate to this at all.
I wonder whether we'll be able to look back on this period in 10 years time and save definitively whether the wide spectrum of responses to LLMs was perception or real feature of our differing jobs.
Re: AI coding made me faster, but I can't code to music anymore
#56The 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 t…
Short-term, automated tech debt creation will yield gains.
Long term the craftsperson writing excellent code will win. It is now easier than ever to write excellent code, for those that are able to choose their pace.
Re: AI coding made me faster, but I can't code to music anymore
#57What 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.
Exactly!
90% of what the average (or median) coder does isn't in any way novel or innovative. It's just API Glue in one form or another.
The AI knows the patterns and can replicate the same endpoints and simple queries easily.
Now you have more time to focus on the 10% that isn't just rehashing the same CRUD pattern.
Re: AI coding made me faster, but I can't code to music anymore
#58What kind of projects are people doing that are feeling the increased velocity?
Whenever I need some sort of quick data pipeline to modify some sort of file into another format, or do some batch transformation, or transform some sort of interface description into another syntax, or things like that, that would normally require me to craft a grep, awk, tr, etc pipeline, I can normally simply paste a sample of the data and with a human language description get what I need. If it’s not working well…
AI is a force multiplier for experienced people.
The ones who know what they want to do, how it should be done, but can't really be arsed to read the man pages or API docs of all the tools required.
These people can craft a prompt (prompt engineering :P) for the LLM that gets good results pretty much directly.
LLMs are garbage in garbage out. Sometimes the statistical average is enough, sometimes you need to give it more details to use the available tools correctly.
Like the fact that `fd` has the `-exec` and `--exec-batch` parameters, there's no need to use xargs or pipes with it.
Re: AI coding made me faster, but I can't code to music anymore
#59Earlier quoted context omitted.
Every kind of project is faster with AI, because it writes the code faster. Then you have to QA it for ages to discover the bugs it wrote, but the initial perception of speed never leaves you. I think I'm overall slower with AI, but I could be faster if I had it write simple functions that I could review one by one, and have the AI compose them the way I wanted. Unfortunately, I'm too lazy to be faster.
It's like working with a junior coder or an offshore consultant that always says yes. Of course you need to check their work, but also the better your initial project plan and specifications are, the better the result. For stuff with deterministic outputs it's easy to verify without reading every single line of code.
Yeah, I mostly tend to work on web apps, where it's pretty hard to test all the interactions, so I'm hit by the bugs more often.
Re: AI coding made me faster, but I can't code to music anymore
#60If the price is music, then it’s too expensive.
This is why I reject every Teams call
I use Zoom rather than Teams, but have no problems playing background music with Spotify. Just have to make sure that “share computer audio” is not enabled when sharing your screen. Also, when I was using the mic of my bluetooth headphones, any music played would be mono and lower quality due to bluetooth bandwidth. Since moving to using a dedicated mic on my desk, the bluetooth headphones are output only and back to good quality stereo (MacOSX and Bose QC35).