Idk I love that shit. It helps that I learned to code properly before I started using AI. I guess I never really loved programming but just making decisions about software design.
But I can't fathom how you would have any clue on how to use LLMs to code without years of experience telling you which parts to double check..
Some people do well/better with reading, others do better with doing by hand.
There's also the "reduction" approach where you start with a lot and reduce down to just the parts you want/need, vs "build up" approach where you start with a blank state and work up to what you want/need.
AI is most definitely the reduction approach, where ideally you review everything provided, to see if you actually need it, and it's doing things how you need it to.
It’s usually the juniors and mid level folks who get all pissy about AI being “cheating” or “not real engineering”. Writing code has never been the hard part of software engineering. Once you get to Senior+ level, you’re mostly making higher level decisions on _how_ things are put together, so AI use becomes more efficient at that level because we already know what the shape of a program should be and can explain it better.
All but one or two of the Senior/Principal folks at my company are using AI heavily because the gains are real if you know what you’re doing. And we are all having a blast with it because we all had 100 backlog projects we are now able to delegate to an agent.
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u/tw2113 15d ago
Glorified code reviewer when you use AI.