To AI or not to AI
antropia.studio
To AI or not to AI
1–10 of 90 posts
Re: To AI or not to AI
#2Not asking for feedback is the killer for me. Even most junior developers will ask for more information if they don't have enough context/confidence to complete a task.
Re: To AI or not to AI
#3I don't understand why people take bad coding practices and just let AI run with it and then expect nothing but poor quality code. Nothing about the AI revolution here changes how good software has always been written. Write tests, use a typed language, review code. If you have good patterns, good procedures, AI fits right in and fills in the blanks perfectly. Poor AI results tend to be the pot calling the kettle black.
Re: To AI or not to AI
#4I can relate to a lot of this.
Where I find AI most useful is getting it to do tasks I already know how to do, but would take time.
If you understand the problem you are trying to solve well enough to explain it to the LLM, you can get good results, you can also eyeball the outputted code and know right away if it's what you are after.
Getting it to do things you don't know how to do is where it goes off the rails IMO
Re: To AI or not to AI
#5My preferred approach in similar situations is to ask an LLM for an initial solution or code snippet, then take over manually - no endless prompt tweaking, just stop prompting and start coding. Finally (optionally), I let the LLM do a final pass to review my completed solution for bugs, optimizations, etc.
The key win is skipping the prompt refinement loop, which is (A) tedious and time-consuming, and (B) debilitating in the long run.
Re: To AI or not to AI
#6Not asking for feedback is the killer for me. Even most junior developers will ask for more information if they don't have enough context/confidence to complete a task.
I often ask Claude to scan through the code first and then come back with questions related to the task. It sometimes comes back with useful questions, but most of the time it acts like a university student looking for participation marks from a tutorial; choosing questions to signal understanding rather than be helpful.
Re: To AI or not to AI
#7Filler content.
> Our marketing director (that’d be me) said that if we don’t write something about it, we will be left behind...
Write when you have something to say. What was I supposed to learn here?
Re: To AI or not to AI
#8Not asking for feedback is the killer for me. Even most junior developers will ask for more information if they don't have enough context/confidence to complete a task.
GitHub just released spec-kit which I think attempts to get the human more involved in the spec/planning/task building process. You basically instruct the LLM to generate these docs and you tweak them to flesh it out all fix mistakes. Then you tell the LLM to work on a single task at a time, reviewing in small chunks.
Re: To AI or not to AI
#9I recently spent over an hour trying to get ChatGPT to give me some pretty simple rsync commands. It kept giving me command line parameters that didn't work on the version of rsync on my mac. With ~50% of the failures, it would go down troubleshooting rabbit holes and the rest of the time it would "realize" that it was giving incorrect version responses. I tell it to validate each parameter against my version moving forward and it clearly doesn't do that. I am sure I could have figured it out on my own in 5 mins, but I couldn't stop watching the trainwreck of this zeitgeist tech wasting my time doing a simple task.
I am not a coder (much), but I have to wonder if my experience is common in the coding world? I guess if you are writing code against the version that was the bulk of its training then you wouldn't face this specific issue. Maybe there are ways to avoid this (and others) pitfall with prompting? As it is, I do not see at all how LLMs could really save time on programming tasks without also costing more time dealing with its quirks.
Re: To AI or not to AI
#10Yes, this is how I use AI.
Indeed, self-invented abstractions are a bridge too far for AI.
You have to keep it close to the path already walked before by thousands of developers.
This makes AI more of a search engine on steroids than anything else.