Comment by tedious-coder

But what do you make of the parent’s second paragraph? This is the way I feel as well - I would rather not spend my time asking AI to do something right that I could just do myself.

I bit the bullet last week and tried to force myself to use a solution built end to end by AI. By the time I’d finished asking it to make changes (about 25 in total), I would’ve had a much nicer time doing it myself.

The thing in question was admittedly partially specified. It was a yaml-based testing tool for running some scenarios involving load tests before and after injecting some faults in the application. I gave it the yaml schema up front, and it did a sensible job as a first pass. But then I was in the position of reading what it wrote, seeing some implicit requirements I’d not specified, and asking for those.

Had I written it myself from the start, those implicit requirements would’ve been more natural to think about in the progression of iterating on the tool. But in this workflow, I just couldn’t get in a flow state - the process felt very unnatural, not unlike how it would’ve been to ask a junior to do it and taking 25 rounds of code review. And that has always been a miserable task, difficult to force oneself to stay engaged with. By the end I was much happier making manual tweaks and wish I’d have written it myself from the start.