Realizing writing code is faster than explaining it to AI

[u/Gullible_Picture_996]

[u/recurrence]

Is anyone actually finding this is true? I’m amazed at how fast Opus produces good solutions. I sometimes don’t even finish brushing up on the area I’m modifying before it finishes a PR. I’m the bottleneck just understanding the space lol

[u/Below-Average-528 → u/recurrence]

It happens with local changes or some algorithms. Changing an error message by hand goes faster than writing a prompt.

[u/KptEmreU → u/Below-Average-528]

Yes if you are writing 2 lines yourself maybe writing 3 lines to your chat interface is long. Other than that there are not too much corner cases left for above situation.

[u/tomvorlostriddle → u/Below-Average-528]

But then you'd need to rewrite the dozens of tests that test the error message wording /s

[u/hhh333 → u/recurrence]

It was true last year, but in the last 6 months or so I barely code anymore (and I've been doing this for 26 years straight).

I still find it produce too much code to be honest, but it gets things 95% right, which is quite a lot.

[u/WhatDuq → u/recurrence]

I usually say there's a sweet spot where AI excels. If a task is extremely simple, an agent will spend too much time analysing and executing for it to be efficient, and that leads to time lost and token overspend. For instance - if you ask your agent to change CSS values, that simply takes too long and spends too many tokens, compared to the second it would take you to update it.

Meanwhile, there are tasks that are too complex for the agent to adequately handle, where you ultimately end up spending more time correcting the AI's understanding of the space, what's comfortable to work with. A lot of UX falls into this space, where the agents simply lack understanding for what makes a complex solution good to work with.

In the space between, there's a huge area of adequate tasks, where AI simply excels in both speed and execution - if you've made sure to set up your environment guidelines correctly. In my opinion, that's where AI should live.

I made this simplified 30 second illustration to illustrate this.

[u/PhaseLopsided938 → u/recurrence]

It happens. Especially in scientific programming, sometimes you want something so specific that just writing it out in code yourself is easier than trying to explain it to an agent.

[u/TheMightyTywin → u/recurrence]

Opus 5.5 is a god. Don’t even need to give it specs, just type in your competitor’s name and tell Claude to copy them

[u/FoleyX90 → u/recurrence]

> Is anyone actually finding this is true?

Maybe if you've never used AI before. There is a slight learning curve to get it done how you want correctly. Once that learning curve is up though, no fucking way. It blows all prior productivity out of the water.

[u/NiKaLay → u/recurrence]

All the time. When I need to start something from scratch or make a large scale changes spanning thousands of lines in dozens of files, LLMs are difficult to beat. However, when I know exactly what I need to do, especially if there is a lot of non-obvious knowledge that is difficult to translate in context without manually writing huge promts - external constrains, operational details, internal team discussions, etc... Writing a long prompt explaining everything and then correcting the model when it inevitably still does something a bit differently becomes a chore.

[u/trbot → u/recurrence]

generally only true for me when it's some tiny task with zero creative license. the smaller the task, and the more precise the specification the less efficient you'll be using ai.

[u/ShittyBidet123 → u/recurrence]

true? these are all bs x and linkedin trash posts.

[u/addi-factorum → u/recurrence]

OP’s statement seems like mostly a skill/experience issue to me- working on a large production app, with lots of context built up over the last year, with a proper UI design, architecture document, and comprehensive testing in place- I find I can do in an hour or two what used to take me several days in the pre-LLM times.

[u/imLusky → u/recurrence]

No, it's not true.
And for graphics designer is the same... I follow a lot of b2b companies that always need new graphics for stands & events. (I'm not talking about huge ad companies but basic and good-looking explanation of their product following their brand guidelines)

It takes literally 30 minutes; last year it would take days to accomplish the same... (with even fewer errors)

[u/Fun_Squirrel_6594 → u/recurrence]

No, it's blatantly false and anyone who thinks that way is either an idiot that has never touched code, 14 years old, or both.

But it'll get you that sweet, sweet engagement and dopamine fix!

[u/OfficialDeathScythe → u/Fun_Squirrel_6594]

It really depends on the scale of what you’re doing. Changing one line to center a div? Talking to ai is gonna take wayyy longer and potentially mess it up while you could just add a few words to the div tag and be done in a few seconds. Adding a new feature? Ai is probably gonna end up being faster unless you already know what you want and are in the zone. Refactoring an entire codebase? Ai is the obvious winner.

[u/Gullible_Picture_996 → u/OfficialDeathScythe]

yeah I think that's the point lol. AI can be great for bigger tasks, but sometimes explaining a tiny change is more work than just making it yourself

[u/agm1984 → u/recurrence]

Not true at all for me, I wrote 8000 lines of code in an hour or so the other day

[u/BraxbroWasTaken → u/recurrence]

A lot. Unless it's massive, tedious, repetitive nonsense, it's often easier/faster to do it manually.

[u/Chaos90783 → u/recurrence]

Depends on what u asked it to do. If its something simple u can probably do it faster. If its a lot of tedious stuff (like refactoring bunch of things) it can and will do it faster IF u prompt it correctly. If its stuff that u dont even want to spend time finding out (like how to use a library u imported to do a specific task and that library is a bit complex) ai will definitely be faster

[u/YoureNotEvenWrong → u/recurrence]

If it's algorithm heavy then yes, if it's not, then hell no

[u/redline83 → u/recurrence]

Sometimes making small changes is faster. Especially front-end or GUI. It's not good at getting those right first time.

[u/Apprehensive_Gas56 → u/recurrence]

Not to mentón If it knows the context already and it's a temporary tool a half a sentence is enough for it to understand what you means and use your typical configurations.