I have a Samsung tablet in a non-flammable container waiting to be disposed of after being mostly plugged in for 3 years then suddenly swelling quite alarmingly. YMMV.
I can have Claude write stuff that does basically the right thing and actually works but, as so many people say, it's like working with a junior dev. The only way I'm going to get code I'd want to present as my own is by sitting looking over their shoulder and telling them what to do constantly, and with a junior dev and with Claude (etc) that takes longer than just writing it myself.
AI-coded/assisted work should be flagged as such so everyone knows that it needs extra scrutiny. If we decided to let a horde of junior devs loose on a codebase we'd naturally pay more attention to PRs from new intern Jimmy than revered greybeard Bob and we shouldn't let Claude hide behind Bob's username.
1 Is easy enough for trivial tasks but in a complex (typically horrible) production codebase nearly all the work is investigation and debugging. However good the initial prompt is, soon the context becomes flooded with log output and code and the LLM goes off the rails quite quickly.
Doing 2 well is the AI babysitting mentioned in the article. Of course you can stop it every minute and tell it to do something else, then watch it like a hawk to make sure it does it right, then clear context when it ignores you and makes the mistake you told it not to make. But that is often then slower than just doing the work yourself to begin with, probably leading to the findings we've all seen that LLM use is actually reducing productivity.
I think living with crappy AI code is the price we currently have to pay for getting development done quicker. Maybe in a year it'll have improved enough that we can ask it to clean up all the mess it made.
(Possibly I just have higher standards than most, other humans can be quite bad too.)
"all the work is investigation and debugging" - Yes! Exactly you can ask the AI a bunch of questions first and really dig into what the codebase currently does. Then spend the time crafting that prompt that explains how to surgically do what needs to be done. If you are watching it every min like a hawk you are doing it wrong. You need to watch it more like a VERY smart junior dev and trust but verify. I'm not saying it's easy to get good at these new skill sets. But simply throwing your hands up and saying "I'll just walk everywhere vs using a bicycle" isn't a strategy that's going to work well.
That's the only way they managed to cover such big subjects in relative depth in such a short slot! All the guests are used to waffling for a full uninterrupted hour to captive audiences about tiny segments of each topic; without that pressure the show couldn't exist.
Eh, Claude is like a magical spaniel that can read and write very quickly, with early-stage alzheimers, on amphetamines.
Yes it knows a lot and can regurgitate things and create plausible code (if I have it run builds and fix errors every time it changes a file - which of course eats tokens) but having absolutely no understanding of how time or space works leads to 90% of its great ideas being nonsensical for UI tasks. Everything is needing very careful guidance and supervision otherwise it decides to do something different instead. For back end stuff, maybe it's better.
I'm on the fence regarding overall utility but $20/month could almost be worth it for a tool that can add a ton of debug logging in seconds, some months.
There are jobs in which one may find oneself where doing them poorly is better for the world than doing them well.
I think you and your colleagues should sit back and take it easy, maybe have a few beers every lunchtime, install some video games on the company PCs, anything you can get away with. Don't get fired (because then you'll be replaced by keen new hires), just do the minimum acceptable and feel good about that karma you're accumulating as a brake on evil.
Is this a known thing? I've called myself 'immune to charisma' which seems at least related, and I've thought perhaps it's an autistic/aspie trait but have never come across any studies or articles mentioning it.
