AI Stole the Joy of Programming

I personally find writing tests to be soul-crushing, boring, work. I never really learned it properly, and when I have a well-documented function, CGPT typically does a decent job making a rough draft. I often have to work on the test function, fix some things, but the final product is way better than the PoS I would have put together: my guess is it has saved me hundreds of hours. I have developed a decent understanding of fixtures, mocking, sharing fixtures across modules, etc, all with the help of ChatGPT. It "understands" my project and how it is organized, and makes suggestions based on this understanding. Yes, it sometimes gets stuck in local minima and I have to kick it out, which can be frustrating. But even that is a learning process, as I often go to SO or other people's code bases to find good examples, and feed them to ChatGPT to get it unstuck.

It's like the ultimate rubber duck paired programming partner. I tell it what I'm working on, and that's intrinsically helpful. But the rubber duck has really good feedback, because it has read the entire internet.

It's made writing tests for my code fun, for the first time ever.

The people I know personally who refuse to use CGPT are typically very good software developers, somewhat arrogant and have a chip on their shoulders, and honestly I think in 20 years we'll look back at them like people who thought the internet was a passing phase in the mid 1990s. I also think many of them don't understand how LLMs work, and how powerful they can be when prompted correctly

Use Composer notebooks to keep a growing markdown document of context you want future versions to remember.

My Cursor today is much better than my Cursor on day 1.

There are thousands of weather apps in the App Store, but none display rain data exactly the way I’d like to see it. That’s why I’ve long considered writing my own home screen widget to show it exactly as I want.

I hadn’t developed iPhone apps in a few years, so I had no experience with SwiftUI, the Swift Graph framework, or creating widgets. Just two years ago, building an app with a widget from scratch would have taken me a week — to read tutorials, navigate the necessary documentation, get started and solve my beginner bugs. Because of that time investment, I always hesitated to even begin.

Now, I’ve created exactly what I wanted in a single afternoon after work, with the help of AI. To be honest, GitHub Copilot isn’t very helpful for this, though it does speed up repetitive typing. However, using ChatGPT to scaffold the graph code—with me tweaking the parameters—made the process much faster. Since they added search functionality, there’s minimal "hallucination" of APIs, allowing for quick iterations and bringing back that “joy of programming” feeling.