Comment by ookblah
6 days ago
AI critics always have to make strawmen arguments about how there has to be a human in the loop to "fix" things when that's never been the argument AI proponents ever make (at least those who deal with it day to day). This will only get better with time. AI can frequently one-shot throwaway scripts that I need get things done. For actual features I typically start and have it go thru the initial slog and then finish it off. You must be reviewing the entire time, but it takes a huge cognitive load off. You can rubber-duck debug with it.
I do agree if you have no idea what you are doing or are still learning it could be a detriment, but like anything it's just a tool. I feel for junior devs and the future. Lazy coders get lazier, those who utilize them to the fullest extent get even better, just like with any tech.
The one thing about concocting throwaway scripts yourself is the increased familiarity with the tooling you use. And you're not actually throwing away those scripts. I have random scripts laying around my file system (and my shell history) to check how I did a task in the past.
> increased familiarity with the tooling you use
In general I agree, but sometimes you want something that you haven't done in years but vaguely remember.
~20 years ago I worked with ffmpeg and vlc extensively in an IPTV project. It took me months to RTFM, implement stuff, test and so on. Documentation was king, and really the only thing I could use. Old-school. But after that project I moved on.
In 2018 I worked on a ML - CV project. I knew vlc / ffmpeg could do everything that I needed, but I had forgotten most of everything by then. So I googled/so/random-blogs, plus a bit of RTFM where things didn't match. But it still took a few days to cobble together the thing I needed.
Now I just ask, and the perfect one-liner pops-up, I run it, check that it does what I need it to, and go on my merry way. Verification is much faster than context changing, searching, reading, understanding, testing it out, using a work-around for the features that ffmpeg supports but not that python wrapper, and so on.
I used to do that too. I find I don't really need to save anything less than 100 lines these days because I can just ask again when I need it.