>I feel like I am taking crazy pills that other devs don't feel this way.
Don't take this the wrong way, but maybe you are.
For example, this weekend I was working on something where I needed to decode a Rails v3 session cookie in Python. I know, roughly, nothing about Rails. In less than 5 minutes ChatGPT gave me some code that took me around 10 minutes to get working.
Without ChatGPT I could have easily spent a couple hours putzing around with tracking down old Rails documentation, possibly involving reading old Rails code and grepping around to find where sessions were generated, hunting for helper libraries, some deadends while I tried to intuit a solution ("Ok, this looks like it's base64 encoded, but base64 decoding kind of works but produces an error. It looks like there's some garbage at the end. Oh, that's a signature, I wonder how it's signed...")
Instead, I asked for an overview of Rails session cookies, a fairly simple question about decoding a Rails session cookie, guided it to Rails v3 when I realized it was producing the wrong code (it was encrypting the cookie, but my cookies were not encrypted). It gave me 75 lines of code that took me ~15 minutes to get working.
This is a "spare time" project that I've wanted to do for over 5 years. Quite simply, if I had to spend hours fiddling around with it, I probably wouldn't have done it; it's not at the top of my todo list (hence, spare time project).
I don't understand how people don't see that AI can give them "superpowers" by leveraging a developers least productive time into providing their highest value.
> I don't understand how people don't see that AI can give them "superpowers" by leveraging a developers least productive time into providing their highest value.
I'm unwilling to write code^1 that's not correct, or at least as correct as I'm able to make it. The single most frustrating thing in my daily life is dealing with the PoC other devs cast into the world that has more bugs than features, because they can't tell it's awful. I've seen code I've written at my least productive, and it's awful and I'm often ashamed of it. It's the same quality as AI code. If AI code allows me to generate more code that I'm ashamed of, when I'm otherwise too tired myself to write code, how is that actually a good thing?
I get standards for exclusively personal toy projects, and stuff you want others to be able to use are different. But it doesn't add value to the world if you ship code someone else needs to fix.
^1 I guess I should say commit/ship instead, I write plenty of trash before fixing it.
Have you tried asking LLMs to clean up your code, making it more obvious, adding test harnesses, adding type hints or argument documentation, then reviewing it and finding out what you can learn from what it is suggesting?
Last year I took a piece of code from Ansible that was extremely difficult to understand. It took me the better part of a day to do a simple bug fix in it. So I reimplemented it, using several passes of having it implement it, reviewing it, asking LLMs to make it simpler, more obvious code. For your review: https://github.com/linsomniac/symbolicmode/blob/main/src/sym...
I think you're making my point for me. Isn't it "taking crazy pills" if you use it incorrectly, and then stand on that experience as proof that other devs are insane? :-)
I agree with your assessment in the situation you describe: greenfielding a project with tools you are unfamiliar with. For me LLMs have worked best when my progress is hindered primarily by a lack of knowledge or familiarity. If I'm working on a project where I'm comfortable with my tools and APIs, they can still be useful from time to time but I wouldn't call it a "superpower", more like a regular productivity tool (less impactful than an IDE, I would say). Of course this comment could be outdated in a few months, but that's what it feels like to me in the here and now.
IMHO, still feels like a superpower in the editor when I type "def validate_session(sess" and it says "Are you wanting to type: `ion_data: dict[str, str]`?" Especially as the type annotations get more convoluted.
Don't take this the wrong way, but maybe you are.
For example, this weekend I was working on something where I needed to decode a Rails v3 session cookie in Python. I know, roughly, nothing about Rails. In less than 5 minutes ChatGPT gave me some code that took me around 10 minutes to get working.
Without ChatGPT I could have easily spent a couple hours putzing around with tracking down old Rails documentation, possibly involving reading old Rails code and grepping around to find where sessions were generated, hunting for helper libraries, some deadends while I tried to intuit a solution ("Ok, this looks like it's base64 encoded, but base64 decoding kind of works but produces an error. It looks like there's some garbage at the end. Oh, that's a signature, I wonder how it's signed...")
Instead, I asked for an overview of Rails session cookies, a fairly simple question about decoding a Rails session cookie, guided it to Rails v3 when I realized it was producing the wrong code (it was encrypting the cookie, but my cookies were not encrypted). It gave me 75 lines of code that took me ~15 minutes to get working.
This is a "spare time" project that I've wanted to do for over 5 years. Quite simply, if I had to spend hours fiddling around with it, I probably wouldn't have done it; it's not at the top of my todo list (hence, spare time project).
I don't understand how people don't see that AI can give them "superpowers" by leveraging a developers least productive time into providing their highest value.