I used AI often when it became powerful enough to write code, but this excitement quickly wore off after lots of time wasted reviewing the code and fixing bugs and removing garbage. Nowadays I may ask AI some random questions if I don't quickly find my answer searching the web or let it solve a small very contained problem.
Are you still using AI for coding? Does it really save you time?
I’ve had similar thoughts but haven’t used it for actual work so I’m curious. I feel like it could do small proof of concepts perhaps but as the project gets larger it’s going to have trouble being internally consistent and the manual tweaks required will take too long to fix.
Yeah, for small proof of concepts, it works sometimes. I did it to scaffold a quick app to fetch all YouTube comments for a given search query. The code looked awful but it worked almost out of the box!
Yes and yes.
The key is, don't interact with the AI like you are both coders. The AI is a coder. You are now a manager, product owner, and tester.
You design in your head and plan how it works function by function and object by object.
Once you see how the pieces fit have the AI code it one function and one object at a time. You can even have it write tests for the functions it just wrote. Have it write comments galore since you probably weren't commenting enough. (You just wrote it, it makes perfect sense to you.)
Now you test piece by piece and put it together yourself.
