Don't knock it until you try it!

AI helps the most with boilerplate work: Those 3 hours of boring, follow-the-design coding can now be implemented in 5-10 minutes. I then jump into the more interesting work and cleanup.

Other things are easier. For example, saying "Refactor this class to use XYZ serialization library" and having it done in 5 minutes instead of 90 minutes frees me to do the more intellectually stimulating work.

Likewise, when it comes to AI and design, what I can do is type in ideas in a stream-of-conscious way into a prompt, and then it looks at code and comes out with sane text that I can go edit.

BUT: There's interesting things you can do with AI that are harder to do by hand. I ran an experiment where I asked AI to rewrite a method to not use an ORM, which is useful if you need to optimize some DB code. Shopify is having AI write two native versions of their mobile app instead of maintaining a React Native codebase. Lean on the tool to do interesting things that otherwise are too labor intense to do by hand.

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Don't be like the guy who rejects an IDE, or the guy who only works in assembly.

I have tried it.

I didn't say LLMs are not useful. It makes some of the boring parts easy and less time consuming. But it does not add it to what makes building something rewarding, on its own.

Imagine building LEGO using a robot? Where is the fun in that?

> Imagine building LEGO using a robot? Where is the fun in that?

Depends on what you're building!

If I had more time when I made that comment, I'd clarify a bit:

We have a LOT of legos; I could easily see it being more fun to have a robot that we could prompt to find the "needle in a haystack" lego; or when building something big, to follow a pattern.

You can use it at different levels of granularity to fit your needs. I find a lot of the fun in designing the way the code interacts and class/module boundaries and responsibilities. So AI takes away the typing (code) part and makes it more fun at times. It give me more time to focus my thoughts.

I don't see it as any different as dev without it, though I don't find that especially "fun" either.

You're just staring at a screen pushing pixels all day. Whether I do that with Claude or without doesn't matter to me.

You get to focus on the design, which (to me at least) is the REAL fun. Implementation itself is a tedious annoyance that I'm happy to leave to a bot.

>focus on the design

Can you explain what you mean by this? Do you evaluate the design without reviewing the generated code?

Claude, make it good. Make no mistakes.

It (focusing on the design) is about as fun as taking part in the 4 days specification/planning marathon with a team whose super intelligent members cannot comprehend trivialities and nitpicking is needed, as they really like to code and cv-boosting coding and engineering. and are willing to go large lengths to do any overengineered over-complicated contraption that slightly resembles the solution. Exhausting. At least I can yell at the AI without negative consequences. For now.