Replying to Avatar MichaelJ

I tried some more serious AI-assisted programming in my day job, yesterday. I had spent two days writing up a specification and describing the API. Then I wrote Gherkin for behavior tests with some AI help on the repetitive parts.

Once I had all that, I started turning GitHub Copilot loose on the problem.

With that tool, I made as much progress in a day as I might have made in several days without AI, but the mental exhaustion really start to set in after a while. There's so much code to read.

The tests are critical, and I defined a lot of test cases, so making sure those are correct will be the most tedious part. However, even when I said "go fix the code so the tests pass," Copilot started running in circles, copying a key file, then freaking out when all the duplicate definition errors broke the build.

So, it's pretty cool, but there was no "vibing" for the most part. I find I have to stay pretty sharp to make sure the LLM understands my intent.
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ᴛʜᴇ ᴅᴇᴀᴛʜ ᴏꜰ ᴍʟᴇᴋᴜ 6mo ago

most of the time it's not that useful. it can help you comb through code to find common errors but static analysis tools that existed long before already help you catch most of those.

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Laeserin 6mo ago

If you're running Typescript and feeling lazy, you can do "npm run check" and then just copy-paste the result into the API form and it'll fix it. Faster than typing yourself, once you get beyond a few errors or a simple search-and-replace, like during a major rewrite.