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Comment by Aurornis | Hacker News Reader

> You're assuming that finding the places where AI needs help isn't already a larger task than just writing it yourself.

Not assuming anything, I'm well versed in how to do this.

Anyone who defers to having AI write massive blocks of code they don't understand is going to run into this.

You have to understand what you want and guide the AI to write it.

The AI types faster than me. I can have the idea and understand and then tell the LLM to rearrange the code or do the boring work faster than I can type it.

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If you are trying to sell it, you are doing a poor job and effectively siding with OP while desperately trying to write the opposite.

Juniors are mostly better than what you write as behavior, I certainly never had to correct as much after any junior as OP writes. If you have 'boring code' in your codebase, maybe it signals not that great architecture (and I presume we don't speak about some codegens which existed since 90s at least).

Also, any senior worth their salt wants to intimately understand their code, the only way you can anyhow guarantee correctness. Man, I could go on and on and pick your statements one by one but that would take long.

The number of devs I've worked with who can't touch-type and don't use or know their way around a proper IDE is depressingly large.

Same with debuggers. I run into people with 10 years of experience who are still trying to printf debug complex problems that would be easy with 5 minutes in a debugger.

I think we're seeing something similar with AI: There are devs who spend a couple days trying to get AI to magically write all of their code for them and then swear it off forever, thinking they're the only people who see the reality of AI and everyone else is wrong.

At the same time - there are devs that spend two days setting up a debugger for a simple problem that would be easy with five minutes and printf. AI is a tool and it's a useful tool - it's not always the best tool for the job and the real skill is in knowing when you use it and when not to.

It's a sort of context of life that the easy problems are solved - those where an extreme answer is always correct are things we no longer even consider problems... most of the options that remain have their advantages and disadvantages so the true answer is somewhere in the middle.

Right, but then the AI doesn't have a positive ROI. In all fairness, it never has a positive ROI but now its much more negative, to the point the accountants will put an end to the experiment after year end reveals how negative it really is.

This isn't about touch typing or IDE tricks. I'm an IDE power user and - reasoning aside - I used to run circles around my peers when it comes to raw code editing efficiency. This is increasingly an obsolete workflow. LLMs can execute codebase-wide refactors in seconds. You can use them as a (foot-)shotgun, or as a surgical tool.

So many are masters of AI marketing, it's thinkable one of them has mastered AI.

You've come full circle and are essentially just describing what the OP was saying in their initial post lol.

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