Comment by emsign
20 days ago
Sounds like an awful lot of work and nannying just to avoid writing code yourself. Coding used to be fun and enjoyable once...
20 days ago
Sounds like an awful lot of work and nannying just to avoid writing code yourself. Coding used to be fun and enjoyable once...
I'm still writing code. I'm doing it to solve a problem, there's more to writing code than than typing. Recently AI massively simplified "getting started", and all of the tips here are applicable to working well on a team.
My recent experience: I'm porting an app to Mac. It's been in my backlog for ~2 years. With Claude I had a functional prototype in under a day getting the major behavior implemented. I spent the next two weeks refactoring the original app to share as much logic as possible. The first two days was lots of fun. The refactoring was also something I wanted to flush out unit tests, still enjoyable.
The worst part was debugging really bugs introduced to my code from 5 years ago. My functions had naming issues describing the behavior wrong, confusing Claude, that I needed to re-understand to add new features.
Parts of coding are frustrating. Using AI is frustrating for different reasons.
The most frustrating part was rebasing with git to create a sensible history (which I've had to do without AI in the past), reviewing the sheer volume of changes (14k lines) and then deciding "do I want my name on this" which involved cleaning up all the linter warnings I'd self imposed on myself.
I’m finding it to be the opposite. I used to love writing everything by hand but now Claude is giving me the ability to focus more on architecture. I like just sitting down with my coffee and thinking about the next part of my project, how I’d like it to be written and Claude just fills it in for me. It makes mistakes at times but it also finds a lot of mine that I hadn’t even realized were in my code base.
Yep, I get that some people love the act of literally typing "x = 2;" but to me coding is first and foremost problem solving. I have a problem (either truly mine or someone else's), I come up with a solution in my head and slowly implement it.
Before I also had to code it and then make sure it had no issues.
Now I can skip the coding and then just have something spit out something which I can evaluate whether I believe is a good implementation of my solution or not.
Of course, you need the skill to know good from bad but for medium to senior devs, AI is incredibly useful to get rid of the mundane task of actually writing code, while focusing on problem solving with critical review of magically generated code.
A good bit of scaffolding and babysitting allows you to let the model run much faster and more efficiently. Building your tool faster. I don't code to code, I code to build something I want.
Also there is no "compiler" and "type checker" for your SPEC. If you get something wrong in some paragraph somewhere and or contradict something in your spec X paragraphs later - you have to use Mark-1 EyeBall to detect and fix this.
You have just transformed your job from developer to manual spec maintainer - a clerk who has to painstakingly check everything.