I created my first AI-assisted pull request

A good mental model for what we do in the IT industry ever since it came into existence is automating things that feel repetitive and uncreative. Drudgery is a thing where for whatever reason technology falls short and you have to do tedious manual work.

AI tools remove drudgery at an unprecedented rate. My favorite new way of creating new projects is 1) create empty directory. 2) point codex at it and give it some example git repos (on disk or by url) and tell it use that repo as a template, copy some features/skills from that repo over there, and then build me an X.

That completely wipes out the drudgery of setting up a new project, fiddling with whatever to get it just right and doing a bunch of work to get some basic mvp in place. You kind of hit the ground running 5 minutes into this. Same with debugging. "CI failed, check what happened and fix it". Or "Follow the release skill and cut a new release". I have a skill dialed in to do a lot of checks around that; it also follows CI to ensure things go ahead as planned. All stuff I used to do manually.

Addressing the self-deprecation:

> I felt like I was flinging slop over the wall

> my impostor syndrome got worse

> thanks for dealing with my slop, Alec

> I have never felt like a bigger fraud in this field

I'm the most senior software developer in my company and I sit in the middle of the room with my screens open to everyone, and I use 10x the average tokens. I've felt like an imposter when I was barely measuring up against the intellectual giants in my first jobs. It's a feeling, and it has nothing to do with you, your work, or your automation tools.

Secrecy leads to bad patterns of practice. AI doesn't make good programmers bad, or bad programmers good.

Addressing the lack of fun:

> I’m privileged that I get to have fun at all in my line of work

> this has sucked out all of the fun

Split your coding in two: The part that gets done quick, and the part where you personally care about every line of code.

This was always a problem with commercial programming for me: Employer only cares that it gets done, I care that it's good. The tension is necessary.

There are aspects to your style of craftsmanship that the AI hasn't encoded yet.

I choose to embed those in templates and agent skills, but you can also just keep writing that code yourself.

Addressing productivity:

> I would not have the mental capacity or skill to create a pull request like that without AI tooling

> Now that using AI is a normal expectation at work and how I’m evaluated in performance reviews, I suspect that this fraud feeling will only grow

I think that's why using it is so unavoidable: It does increase productivity and lowers cognitive strain, at the cost of yolo.

I don't know if "fraud feeling" is referring to your impostor syndrome, and you want to get rid of this: deal with the feeling, it's just part of your growth as a person. Or if you're using fraud as a loaded term to devalue AI use in programming for ideological reasons: Can't help here, I don't have a problem with it.

Addressing craftsmanship:

> no matter how big the impact, I feel empty

> I still contributed something of value

> I perhaps tied my identity too much to my career

> I’m not the greatest engineer, but I’ve always worked hard

> I care about the craftsmanship of my code

Your interest in the details of your craft will disappear eventually.

Keep it up as long as you care, it's fun.

When you're ready to see yourself as something else, it will naturally fade.

I've been an aspiring team lead without a team for a long time. Now I have a team of robots (and incidentally a team of people), and it feels natural. I still code in my spare time, but not for productivity, only when I have to or when I want to have fun.

For me, I've slowly switched to wanting things to exist rather than wanting to make them. That helps swallowing that I don't code as much any more. (I mean, I still recreatively code 2-3 hours per day, but it's far from the 8-16 hours that have been the norm in my life.)

If it helps: It is probably good for your physical well-being that you don't have to sit hunched over as much.

It's the difference between lovingly crafting heirloom tomatoes in small batches vs producing a consistent multi-ton quantity of tomatoes at an industrial scale.

There are uses for both, but job/compensation wise the heirloom grower isn't in the majority.

> Split your coding in two: The part that gets done quick, and the part where you personally care about every line of code. > This was always a problem with commercial programming for me: Employer only cares that it gets done, I care that it's good. The tension is necessary.

Use AI-assisted coding to MVP or vertical slice or however you want to call it. Prove that it works and is doable. Now you have baseline to start editing from, rewrite every single line, even the ones with just a single { if that's how you roll.

Or read it and ship it as is. Maybe adjust the agent's instructions and the project linters/formatters to match your specific style better.

No, I understand the point, it means that people drawing the analogies don't understand the original intent was production, not consumption.