My biggest problem with AI is that currently it is a very shitty tool that outputs nonsense 9 out of 10 times while big tech pretends it is totally awesome, which like you say, makes it being forced on you even more frustrating.
Is it here to stay? Yes I believe so. But it needs a lot of work in a lot of area’s to be truly useful.
I feel like you must be prompting it poorly or using ChatGPT / Copilot?
I’d say in my day to day, AI tooling successfully tackles 90% of my software engineering jobs and with proper context and promoting the output is pretty stellar.
Assuming you’re maintaining a big codebase and not just producing boilerplate, do you find LLMs to be more help than language servers/IDE code snippets?
Definitely more helpful. But I would preface that with proper context building.
It isn’t enough (generally) to just tell it to do the thing. It is far better to to tell it to do a thing, and how, and provide rules, and provide examples, and provide the company’s best practices.
And I realize it takes a bit to get there, but I’m at a point that with enough context provisions, I can generate 10+ files of code for a net new feature that is 99%+ how I would do it in sub 5 minutes.
Do I tell Product that I still need another week? Absolutely.
My biggest problem with AI is that currently it is a very shitty tool that outputs nonsense 9 out of 10 times while big tech pretends it is totally awesome, which like you say, makes it being forced on you even more frustrating.
Is it here to stay? Yes I believe so. But it needs a lot of work in a lot of area’s to be truly useful.
Skill issue
Lack of skill issue
I feel like you must be prompting it poorly or using ChatGPT / Copilot?
I’d say in my day to day, AI tooling successfully tackles 90% of my software engineering jobs and with proper context and promoting the output is pretty stellar.
I hope I never have to use “your” code.
It goes through two levels of review, we do not accept slop.
Assuming you’re maintaining a big codebase and not just producing boilerplate, do you find LLMs to be more help than language servers/IDE code snippets?
Definitely more helpful. But I would preface that with proper context building.
It isn’t enough (generally) to just tell it to do the thing. It is far better to to tell it to do a thing, and how, and provide rules, and provide examples, and provide the company’s best practices.
And I realize it takes a bit to get there, but I’m at a point that with enough context provisions, I can generate 10+ files of code for a net new feature that is 99%+ how I would do it in sub 5 minutes.
Do I tell Product that I still need another week? Absolutely.
Context is king.