I tried AI-everything (apart from code review of course). But it’s just too hard. Letting the AI do bigger things results in subtle, hard to find, but devastating design fails and errors. It’s fractal. No matter what layer I look at, it’s always sort-of working but also bugged in subtle and sometimes hard-to-fix ways.
So I don’t do that. Instead I use the AI as an assistant while I still do most of the actual work. I downgraded my account too because I never reached the limits for a while.
Ding ding ding. It’s fucking GREAT for eliminating the menial bullshit like scaffolding, data cleanup, sifting through overly verbose documentation… Anything that requires abstract thought still needs to be done by a human.
I’m in a similar situation. My workplace has been heavily pushing implanting AI tools into our daily workload, but I’ve struggled to find a more meaningful use beyond a technical search engine: eg. How can I calculate x in the most resource efficient way?
My IDE told me that there is a new version of some library which fixes security bugs. I asked the AI what will break if I update. It actually found out that the new version requires a license key which has to be updated yearly even for the free use case. So I had it refactor the single use of that library to use another library instead. I then polished the refactored code myself a bit.
When I am done with something, I ask the AI what it thinks about the changes. It then tells me where I violated the style guide and sometimes it finds silly bugs I somehow missed. In rare cases it also finds serious stuff. the code definitely never got worse by having the AI look over it. Btw, looking at it doesn’t mean changing it. I had to tell it to save in its memory files that it should only change anything when explicitly asked to.
When I am not sure why something is like it is, I ask the AI. It then comes up with one or more potential explanations and often I then remember what was actually the reasoning if it’s my own code or the code becomes somewhat understandable when it’s written by someone else.
When some behavior looks like it should be impossible, I ask the AI how it’s possible, and it usually tells me the actual reason or gets close enough to make it much easier for me to find it.
When I’m unsure how to implement something, I discuss some options with the AI. It’s reasoning isn’t always sound. But sometimes the internal dialog is just not enough and chatting with AI works surprisingly well for me.
Just treat it like an extremely knowledgeable college with a serious psychedelics addiction. Can’t let it do stuff unattended. But when it isn’t hallucinating, it is pretty capable. Also, it doesn’t care how much you ask it.
In general, every easy to explain task with easy to verify results and low damage on failure can be done by AI. But it is often faster to just do something yourself than explain it to the AI and polish the result.
I tried AI-everything (apart from code review of course). But it’s just too hard. Letting the AI do bigger things results in subtle, hard to find, but devastating design fails and errors. It’s fractal. No matter what layer I look at, it’s always sort-of working but also bugged in subtle and sometimes hard-to-fix ways.
So I don’t do that. Instead I use the AI as an assistant while I still do most of the actual work. I downgraded my account too because I never reached the limits for a while.
Ding ding ding. It’s fucking GREAT for eliminating the menial bullshit like scaffolding, data cleanup, sifting through overly verbose documentation… Anything that requires abstract thought still needs to be done by a human.
I’m in a similar situation. My workplace has been heavily pushing implanting AI tools into our daily workload, but I’ve struggled to find a more meaningful use beyond a technical search engine: eg. How can I calculate x in the most resource efficient way?
My IDE told me that there is a new version of some library which fixes security bugs. I asked the AI what will break if I update. It actually found out that the new version requires a license key which has to be updated yearly even for the free use case. So I had it refactor the single use of that library to use another library instead. I then polished the refactored code myself a bit.
When I am done with something, I ask the AI what it thinks about the changes. It then tells me where I violated the style guide and sometimes it finds silly bugs I somehow missed. In rare cases it also finds serious stuff. the code definitely never got worse by having the AI look over it. Btw, looking at it doesn’t mean changing it. I had to tell it to save in its memory files that it should only change anything when explicitly asked to.
When I am not sure why something is like it is, I ask the AI. It then comes up with one or more potential explanations and often I then remember what was actually the reasoning if it’s my own code or the code becomes somewhat understandable when it’s written by someone else.
When some behavior looks like it should be impossible, I ask the AI how it’s possible, and it usually tells me the actual reason or gets close enough to make it much easier for me to find it.
When I’m unsure how to implement something, I discuss some options with the AI. It’s reasoning isn’t always sound. But sometimes the internal dialog is just not enough and chatting with AI works surprisingly well for me.
Just treat it like an extremely knowledgeable college with a serious psychedelics addiction. Can’t let it do stuff unattended. But when it isn’t hallucinating, it is pretty capable. Also, it doesn’t care how much you ask it. In general, every easy to explain task with easy to verify results and low damage on failure can be done by AI. But it is often faster to just do something yourself than explain it to the AI and polish the result.