Comment by port11

While afraid that we developers will eventually be automated away — as I have bills to pay —, I only need to ask the JetBrains AI assistant for help to understand why that won't happen in my ‘career-span’.

It's not a diss on JetBrains, their assistant is good enough that I've paid for it for a few months; but ask of it anything a tad more complex and it becomes a code review for a PR that you begin to question in its entirety. I'm not familiar with CSS Grid, as I've stopped doing CSS when flex was becoming popular, but I have to say none of the models managed what I wanted. They kept proposing solutions with an arrogant confidence that this must work. When I pointed out this didn't work, they'd look at the codebase and find something else that was the problem. When I asked for help with a script for an Alpine box, it was very assertive that systemd-based solutions should work. How can you get that wrong?

I imagine the code laundering will eventually get far enough that you can copy-paste someone else's project fully baked, and then the LLM will truly shine. But for building something piece by piece, I haven't gotten good results yet. The Assistant so far has been most useful for writing unit tests, HTML, or getting a decent web search within the IDE.

I wonder if paying for Kagi wouldn't make for better search, and then I'd find some tool that writes unit tests based on your code. It really does feel like some people are being very generous about how magical these things are, because I'm not getting the magic at all.