Comment by apothegm
1 day ago
So much this. The AI takes care of the tedious line by line what’s-the-name-of-that-stdlib-function parts (and most of the tedious test-writing parts) and lets me focus on the interesting bits like what it is I want to build and how the pieces should fit together. And debugging, which I find satisfying.
Sadly, I find it sorely lacking at dealing with build systems and that particular type of boilerplate, mostly because it seems to mix up different versions of things too much and gives you totally broken setups more often than not. I’d just as soon never deal with the he’ll that is front end build/lint/test config again.
> The AI takes care of the tedious line by line what’s-the-name-of-that-stdlib-function parts (and most of the tedious test-writing parts)
AI generated tests are a bad idea.
AI generated tests are genuinely fantastic, if you treat them like any other AI generated code and review them thoroughly.
I've been writing Python for 20+ years and I still can't use unittest.mock without looking up the details every time. ChatGPT and Claude are great at that, which means I use it more often because I don't have to deal with the frustration of figuring it out.
Just as with anything else AI, you never accept test code without reviewing it. And often it needs debugging. But it handles about 90% of it correctly and saves a lot of time and aggravation.
Well, maybe they just need X lines of so-called "tests" to satisfy some bullshit-job metrics.
Aren't stdlib functions the ones you know by heart after a while anyways?
Depends on the language. Python for instance has a massive default library, and there are entire modules I use anywhere from one a year to once a decade —- or never at all until some new project needs them.
Not everyone works in a single language and/or deep in some singular code base.
Gee do you think maybe that's why all our software sucks balls these days?
I struggle to think how one person is supposed to interact with that many languages on a daily (or even weekly) basis.
I’ve been on projects with multiple languages, but the truly active code was done in only two. The other languages were used in completed modules where we do routine maintenance and rare alterations.
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