It works great, but I can’t imagine skipping the refinement process.
Yes. I almost always end with "Do not generate any code unless it can help in our discussions as this is the design stage" I would say, 95% of my code for https://github.com/gitsense/chat in the last 6 months were AI generated, and I would say 80% were one shots.
It is important to note that I can easily get into the 30+ messages of back and forth before any code is generated. For complex tasks, I will literally spend an hour or two (that can span days) chatting and thinking about a problem with the LLM and I do expect the LLM to one shot them.
Having said all of that, I do believe AI will have a very negative affect on developers where the challenge is skill and not time. AI is implementing things that I can do if given enough time. I am literraly implementing things in months that would have taken me a year or more.
My AI search is nontrivial but it only took two months to write. I should also note the 5% that I needed to implement was the difference between throw away code and a usuable search engine.
Not sure I believe this. If you suddenly automate away 95% of any task, how could it be the case you retain 100% of your prior abilities?
>However my debugging and problem solving skills should increase
By "my", I assume you mean "my LLM"?
>I do think my writing proficiency will decrease though.
This alone is cause for concern. The ability for a human being to communicate without assistance is extremely important in an age where AI is outputting a significant fraction of all new content.
I need to review like crazy now, so it is not like I am handing off my understanding of the problem. If anything, I learn new things from time to time, as the LLM will generate code in ways that I haven't thought of before.
The AI genie is out of the bottle now and I do believe in a year or two, companies are going to start asking for conversations along with the LLM generated code, which is how I guess you can determine if people are losing their skill. When my code is fully published, I will include conversations for every feature/bug fix that is introduced.
> The ability for a human being to communicate without assistance is extremely important
I agree with this, but once again, it isn't like I don't have to review everything. When LLMs get much better, I think my writing skills may decline, but as it currently stands, I do find myself having to revised what the LLM writes to make it sound more natural.
Everything is speculation at this point, but I am sure I will lose some skills but I also think will gain new ones by being exposed to something that I haven't thought of before.
I wrote my chat app because I needed a more comfortable way to read and write *long* messages. For the foreseeable future, I don't see my writing proficiency to decrease in any significant manner. I can see myself being slower to write in the future though, as I find myself being very comfortable speaking to the LLM in a manner that I would not to a human. LLMs are extremely good at inferring context, so I do a lot lazy typing now to speed things up, which may turn into a bad habit.
Compare that to the approach you're using (which is what I'm also doing), and you're able have have AI stay much closer to what you're looking for, be less prone to damaging hallucinations, and also guide it to a foundation that's stable. The downside is that it's a lot more work. You might multiply your productivity by some single digit.
To me, that 2nd approach is much more reasonable than trying to 100x your productivity but actually end up getting less done because you end up stuck in a rabbit hole you don't know you're in and you'll never refine your way out of it.