• Lovable Sidekick
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    14 hours ago

    I’m a retired software dev, but anactive developer I know talks about how much time he saves daily by using Claude for grunt work.

    • sobchak@programming.dev
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      7 hours ago

      I’ve tried (and still try) to find good workflows using AI, but I don’t think I’ve found anything that saves time. To get the same quality using AI, I have to go back and forth with it a lot, and review all the bloated bullshit it generates. If you don’t care about quality or the thing even working correctly (e.g. prototypes/POCs), it’s really fast.

      • Lovable Sidekick
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        4 hours ago

        Or if you do care about quality and learn how to use it right.

        • Dumhuvud@programming.dev
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          54 minutes ago

          You aren’t prompting right, bruh. You need to be very good at writing markdown to leverage Ayy-Eye properly.

          You aren’t using the latest and the greatest model, bruh. Have you tried Claude Fairy Tale 6.9.420?

    • toofpic
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      12 hours ago

      Most of the younger generation devs at my company are using ai coding - mostly for said gruntwork (like writing small functions, api methods, writing what data they want to see instead of complex sql requests), but some are more enthusiastic and use heavier agentic setups. The best validation is that we still have old-school human pull request reviews (enforced by a scary Chief R&D) and if your colleague would see something unreadable or weird, your stuff wouldn’t pass.
      I’m a Product Manager and I have several pet products now - all pretty viable (depending on the time I invested in each of course). A stocks website, a money splitting android app (now passing google play review), a weather app. All working, and I have really low coding skills myself

      • iocase@lemmy.zip
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        8 hours ago

        AI corporate slop is when you mass generate a bunch of stuff, don’t read it, and then export the mental burden to a different coworker. You make them looks less productive and you look extremely productive, when really you’re stealing the productivity of colleagues.

        You just reminded me of that.

        • toofpic
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          42 minutes ago

          Again, in a corporate setting I see that the “generated stuff” is being read before being approved. And in my private setting I’m working on my projects for myself, I’m not “stealing the productivity”, I obtained productivity. All my life I was coming up with ideas, planning, and managing, but having something on my own wasn’t possible - I can’t hire a dev team. Now I am my team, I’m empowered.

      • baines@lemmy.cafe
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        9 hours ago

        what actual product do any of those sites produce

        sounds like toys

        • toofpic
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          35 minutes ago

          “Sounds”? You are an expert in measuring value by vague comments?
          Okay:

          • The expense splitting app I made for myself, my friends, and maybe other people (no ide if it will be picked up), after I was managing a giant spreadsheet of our new year’s trip costs. Now my app calculates everything, of any complexity, and it is used.
          • The stock trading site has everything that I need from a stock trading site (to look for opportunities to buy), but I needed 3 or 4 before
          • The weather app I made not because there’s not enough weather apps, but because each and every app wants your data for 1000s of their partners, so I made my own thing that shows weather.
            If it’s not real life value, then I don’t know
    • hperrin@lemmy.ca
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      13 hours ago

      Tell him this: If you’re writing that much boilerplate (grunt work), you’re probably doing something wrong. If AI can write your normal work, you really should be learning, so not using AI at all.

      • Lovable Sidekick
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        12 hours ago

        Actually I’m not going to tell a dev with decades of experience that an internet rando thinks he’s doing his job wrong lol.

        • hperrin@lemmy.ca
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          12 hours ago

          K. It’s astounding to me that after decades in the business, he’s still writing code that can be written by basically an intern.

          When I try to get AI to write my code, it stumbles all over itself just failing to understand the simplest of my libraries. (Literally it made multiple mistakes using the fucking tokenizer library I wrote that is so simple, an intern would have no problem with it.)

          • toofpic
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            34 minutes ago

            Yeah, so if you are a senior dev, the easy work just disappears? Like if you are an experienced carpenter, you will never have to drive nails again, because that’s too easy!

          • Lovable Sidekick
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            11 hours ago

            he’s still writing code that can be written by basically an intern He usually does full-stack projects by himself, so he has to do everything. And he’s using AI to do what interns could do. I’ve dabbled a little using VSCode AI myself to refactor and upgrade a couple hobby projects, and it didn’t “stumble all over itself” at all. In fact it conversed with me like an intern or colleague would, and made many proposals I agreed with. There are ways to craft your prompts that make AI work better. Maybe that’s your problem I dunno.

            • hperrin@lemmy.ca
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              7 hours ago

              Even if it does write code that works, it usually (about 50% of the time in my experience) has bugs, and sometimes those bugs can be really difficult to spot. For me, it has never saved me any time. I’m either fixing something it doesn’t know how to do correctly, or going over its code with a fine tooth comb because when it says, “this is production ready code, with no bugs,” it’s usually wrong. That takes a lot of time. It’s easier for me to just write the code correctly myself.

              Admittedly, I haven’t used that new model that Anthropic revoked access to the public to recently. Maybe that one is good enough for government work.

              • toofpic
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                25 minutes ago

                Fable was “just ask and get it done” quality level, but really I don’t get THAT much bugs - about the same amount that I see irl developers do: get a new feature, find 5 problems, get them fixed, find one more, done. As a recommendation - try to alleviate the biggest problems that ai models have:

                • overconfidence - skipping wrong stuff “because they have a note saved that it works” or losing the point where they stopped after a session broke, then making things up. Test Driven Development solves the majority of problems like that - when Claude writes tests first, then it’s not able to bullshit me that the job is done when “everything is red”
                • even with large contexts, they run out and stuff gets lost. So if you’re not doing something really compact, make your ai document everything, document the feature they are working on now, make it then offload it to permanent doc when that piece is finished. When the ai will fuck up next time, you can tell it to “go read some docs” and most of the times it will work
              • Lovable Sidekick
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                4 hours ago

                When I first tried it I felt lost, but after watching a couple videos about writing good prompts I had no trouble getting it to produce perfectly good code that did what I wanted. Your mileage may vary.