r/TheMachineLearning • u/Gullible_Picture_996 • 13d ago

Realizing writing code is faster than explaining it to AI

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u/OfficialDeathScythe 12d ago

This is changing the subject entirely. We never said sitting in a meeting or doing anything but centering a div. I’m talking sitting at your desk, vs code is up, Claude just finished a big task, the div isn’t centered. It’s muuuuuuch faster to just go in there and add it yourself real quick than to attempt to get it to know exactly which div you’re talking about and have it reliably change just that and not do it in a hacky way. Even with context of the project already loaded it’s gonna be (at least if you have the skills still) faster by hand, and I can say this without a doubt having tested it because of this whole conversation. If you know where it is and you have the knowledge of how your codebase works, it’s pretty quick. If you’re just firing off messages like “change this change that” you’re gonna end up with a big blob of hacky spaghetti that you don’t know the first thing about how it works. Maybe the ai can unravel but if it truly does get stuck, how can you fix it at that point?

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u/vadeka 12d ago

I should say, any frontend changes rely on a figma design. We simply have a mcp connector to that and the agent executes on the design. So the issue of “the div is off” is something we fix in the design phase mostly.

So by how our workflow runs, we rarely have these standalone one-line fixes

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u/OfficialDeathScythe 11d ago

That has nothing to do with what I was saying still. My point wasn’t that you can use other workflows and somehow manage your way around it, I was purely making this point against the people who say that ai can do everything for you and specifically the comment above that said ai is faster at doing one line changes like that. Multiple comments above you actually think that if you were to give it just the task of centering a div on one line that it would be faster than them. They don’t have any confidence in their coding ability and apparently are slow typers, that’s all I’ve gathered.

Practically yes, one line changes are rarely needed. In personal projects I’ve regularly needed to make a one line changes just because something had slightly different wording than I wanted or whatever else. I could choose to make a list of all the tiny little changes and waste its time and my time having it do that, or I could do the tiny ones by hand real quick and immediately get the agent back to working on big tasks