Comment by lowbloodsugar
3 days ago
I think it depends what you are doing. I’ve had Claude right the front end of a rust/react app and it was 10x if not x (because I just wouldn’t have attempted it). I’ve also had it write the documentation for a low level crate - work that needs to be done for the crate to be used effectively - but which I would have half-arsed because who like writing documentation?
Recently I’ve been using it to write some async rust and it just shits the bed. It regularly codes the select! drop issue or otherwise completely fails to handle waiting on multiple things. My prompts have gotten quite sweary lately. It is probably 1x or worse. However, I am going to try formulating a pattern with examples to stuff in its context and we’ll see. I view the situation as a problem to be overcome, not an insurmountable failure. There may be places where an AI just can’t get it right: I wouldn’t trust it to write the clever bit tricks I’m doing elsewhere. But even there, it writes (most of) the tests and the docs.
On the whole, I’m having far more fun with AI, and I am at least 2x as productive, on average.
Consider that you might be stuck in a local (very bad) maximum. They certainly exist, as I’ve discovered. Try some side projects, something that has lots of existing examples in the training set. If you wanted to start a Formula 1 team, you’re going to need to know how to design a car, but there’s also a shit ton of logistics - like getting the car to the track - that an AI could just handle for you. Find boring but vital work the AI can do because, in my experience, that’s 90% of the work.
Mmm, I do a lot of frontend work but I find writing the frontend code myself is faster. That seems to be mostly what everyone says it's good for. I find it useful for other stuff like writing mini scripts, figuring out arguments for command line tools, reviewing code, generating dumb boilerplate code, etc. Just not for actually writing code.
I’m better at it in the spaces where I deliver value. For me that’s the backend, and I’m building complex backends with simple frontends. Sounds like your expertise is the front end, so you’re gonna be doing stuff that’s beyond me, and beyond what the AI was trained on. I found ways to make the AI solve backend pain points (documentation, tests, boiler plate like integrations). There’s probably spaces where the AI can make your work more productive, or, like my move into the front end, do work that you didn’t do before.