Comment by simonw
15 hours ago
I had that experience back in January! I used it for a joke in a talk recently... did anyone really need a half-finished buggy slow implementation of a JavaScript interpreter in Python? They did not. https://github.com/simonw/micro-javascript
It's taken me the best part of this year to readjust and find a pace and level of ambition that fits.
It was challenging for me as well, but my pace and level is now that I use it for these cases at the moment:
New language, infrastructure, general level of understanding of something I barely have an idea of.
Rubber duck debugging, if i dont know the correct solution
Checking my code for issues and bugs.
But not for:
- writing my code - agentic coding (help me)
The inference has reduced drastically. It’s basically just chatting. I don’t let it write anything, but sometimes I purposely use the browser window instead of them sitting in my codebase, because I know it gets things subtly wrong and migth focus on the wrong things.
The same way people used to say don’t copypaste code at least write it out I think it’s still true. It helps to buidl the mental model and to find the right abstractions.