Comment by defatigable
6 days ago
Agreed. In the domains where I'm an expert, it's a nice productivity boost. In the domains where I'm not, it's transformative.
As a complete aside from the question of productivity, these coding tools have reawakened a love of programming in me. I've been coding for long enough that the nitty gritty of everyday programming just feels like a slog - decrypting compiler errors, fixing type checking issues, factoring out helper functions, whatever. With these tools, I get to think about code at a much higher level. I create designs and high level ideas and the AI does all the annoying detail work.
I'm sure there are other people for whom those tasks feel like an interesting and satisfying puzzle, but for me it's been very liberating to escape from them.
> In the domains where I'm an expert, it's a nice productivity boost. In the domains where I'm not, it's transformative.
Is it possible that the code you are writing isn't good, but you don't know it because you're not an expert?
No, I'm quite confident that I'm very strong in these languages. Certainly not world-class but I write very good code and I know well-written code when I see it.
If you'd like some evidence, I literally just flipped a feature flag to change how we use queues to orchestrate workflows. The bulk of this new feature was introduced in a 1300-line PR, touching at least four different services, written in Golang and Python. It was very much AI agent driven using the flow I described. Enabling the feature worked the first time without a hiccup.
(To forestall the inevitable quibble, I am aware that very large PRs are against best practice and it's preferable to use smaller, stacked PRs. In this case for clarity purposes and atomicity of rollbacks I judged it preferable to use a single large PR.)