I use LLMs for coding too. They’re pretty great at generating the code I could have written myself. But that’s the important part. I completely understand the code. As long as we’re transparent and a good developer combs trough it I don’t see why not.
We might be in the wrong community here to discuss a positive attitude towards AI coding… But anyway… Do you like it? I think I’m more and more coming to the conclusion that I don’t really fancy it. It’s somewhat fulfilling to code something. But my experience with AI is I’ll spend 90 minutes arguing with it and making it have countless shots at the one problem, and then I end up reading all the code, refactoring it and rewriting snippets and it’s super tedious and I’m annoyed because I like computers for doing exactly what I tell the to do, and now I have to argue with the darn thing about the specifications or how memory allocation or maths works a certain way or if we can pull in random libraries for a simple task… So I’m a bit split on this. At first it was very exciting and fascinating. But I think for coding that kind of got old quickly. At least for me and the stuff I do. These days I’ll use it for quick tech-demos, templates, placeholders, to google the documentation, translate Chinese and the like but I’ve cut down on the actual coding mostly because it takes the fun out of it and turns it upside-down into reviewing and correcting code.
Not OP but I had great success letting it repeat stuff we already have, for example we have a certain pattern on how we place translations. So I just hardcode everything and in the end tell it, using a pre-written task I can just call up, to take all the hardcoded labels and place it im our system in the same way it has already been done. It then reads the code of a few existing components and replicates that. Or I let it extract some code into smaller components. Or move some component around, it can do that batter than the IDEs integrated move action.
Completely novel stuff is possible but I am uncertain if I am actually not slower using it to achieve that. I mostly do it step by step, really small steps that is.
I have to measure my performance at some point, it is certainly possible that I am actually slower than before. But overall I never liked typing out the solution that is in my head, so using it as writer is nice.
Sonnet 4.5 is what I use. Some colleagues like GTP-5 but it struggles real hard to do the most basic things right in my experience. Claude is just miles ahead.
To the extent I have grown more comfortable, it’s accepting that the AI is usually wrong and giving up on trying unless it’s obvious and short. I won’t “argue” with it, I just discard and do it myself. I’ll also click “review my code” and give it a chance to highlight mistakes. Again it is frequently wrong. But once it did catch an inconsistency that I know would have been frustrating when it eventually reared its head.
The thing that I’m thinking of turning off is code completion with tab. Problem is that the lag means I didn’t know if the tab key is going to do a normal thing or if by the time I hit it an AI suggestion pops up and I have to undo the unexpected modification. Also sometimes the suggestions linger and make the actual code hard to read long after I already decided to ignore the suggestion.
Yesterday was a fair amount of tab completing through excessively boilerplate crap thanks to AI, but most days it’s next to useless as I am in low boilerplate scenarios. Some frameworks and languages make you type a novel to do something very common, and AI helps with those. I tend to avoid those but I didn’t have a choice yesterday. Even then the AI made some very bad suggestions, so I have to be in the lookout at all times.
Yeah, I sometimes find the same loop with “this thing just don’t understand what I’m asking for” - I’ve had luck with breaking it down into smaller steps, and being specific about the requirements helps. I use Claude Sonnet 4.5 which is pretty decent, the OpenAI models really don’t compare and are pretty bad at best at coding.
Thanks. Yeah I didn’t try Claude. They want my phone number to sign up and I’m not providing that to people. But you’re not the only person suggesting Claude Sonnet, I’ve read that several times now. I wonder if they’re really that much better. I’ll try some more throwaway phone numbers to get in, but seems they’ve blocked most of them.
I’ve tried breaking down things as well. That’s usually a good strategy in programming. Though I guess at some point they’re small enough so I could have already typed it in myself instead of talking about doing it. And I find it often also struggles to find the right balance with the level of detail of a function and whether it’s clever to do a very specific singular thing or do it a bit more general so the function can be reused in other parts of the code. So it’ll be extra work later to revise it, once everything is supposed to come together and integrate/combine.
I’m not a particularly skilled or professional developer, so I’ll defer to those who are on determining its usefulness for professional grade projects. However, I tried it a time or two for some of my small personal projects and had to proofread and correct mistakes so I stopped fooling with it. If I’ve got to babysit it and fix its mistakes anyway, then what’s even the point? I guess for large blocks of code it might be handy to not have to type it all out, but then you’ve still got to proofread and correct that much more anyway, so my ethical concerns aside, it really didn’t help me any more than just searching Stackoverflow to remind myself how to do something.
I use LLMs for coding too. They’re pretty great at generating the code I could have written myself. But that’s the important part. I completely understand the code. As long as we’re transparent and a good developer combs trough it I don’t see why not.
We might be in the wrong community here to discuss a positive attitude towards AI coding… But anyway… Do you like it? I think I’m more and more coming to the conclusion that I don’t really fancy it. It’s somewhat fulfilling to code something. But my experience with AI is I’ll spend 90 minutes arguing with it and making it have countless shots at the one problem, and then I end up reading all the code, refactoring it and rewriting snippets and it’s super tedious and I’m annoyed because I like computers for doing exactly what I tell the to do, and now I have to argue with the darn thing about the specifications or how memory allocation or maths works a certain way or if we can pull in random libraries for a simple task… So I’m a bit split on this. At first it was very exciting and fascinating. But I think for coding that kind of got old quickly. At least for me and the stuff I do. These days I’ll use it for quick tech-demos, templates, placeholders, to google the documentation, translate Chinese and the like but I’ve cut down on the actual coding mostly because it takes the fun out of it and turns it upside-down into reviewing and correcting code.
Not OP but I had great success letting it repeat stuff we already have, for example we have a certain pattern on how we place translations. So I just hardcode everything and in the end tell it, using a pre-written task I can just call up, to take all the hardcoded labels and place it im our system in the same way it has already been done. It then reads the code of a few existing components and replicates that. Or I let it extract some code into smaller components. Or move some component around, it can do that batter than the IDEs integrated move action. Completely novel stuff is possible but I am uncertain if I am actually not slower using it to achieve that. I mostly do it step by step, really small steps that is.
I have to measure my performance at some point, it is certainly possible that I am actually slower than before. But overall I never liked typing out the solution that is in my head, so using it as writer is nice.
Sonnet 4.5 is what I use. Some colleagues like GTP-5 but it struggles real hard to do the most basic things right in my experience. Claude is just miles ahead.
To the extent I have grown more comfortable, it’s accepting that the AI is usually wrong and giving up on trying unless it’s obvious and short. I won’t “argue” with it, I just discard and do it myself. I’ll also click “review my code” and give it a chance to highlight mistakes. Again it is frequently wrong. But once it did catch an inconsistency that I know would have been frustrating when it eventually reared its head.
The thing that I’m thinking of turning off is code completion with tab. Problem is that the lag means I didn’t know if the tab key is going to do a normal thing or if by the time I hit it an AI suggestion pops up and I have to undo the unexpected modification. Also sometimes the suggestions linger and make the actual code hard to read long after I already decided to ignore the suggestion.
Yesterday was a fair amount of tab completing through excessively boilerplate crap thanks to AI, but most days it’s next to useless as I am in low boilerplate scenarios. Some frameworks and languages make you type a novel to do something very common, and AI helps with those. I tend to avoid those but I didn’t have a choice yesterday. Even then the AI made some very bad suggestions, so I have to be in the lookout at all times.
Yeah, I sometimes find the same loop with “this thing just don’t understand what I’m asking for” - I’ve had luck with breaking it down into smaller steps, and being specific about the requirements helps. I use Claude Sonnet 4.5 which is pretty decent, the OpenAI models really don’t compare and are pretty bad at best at coding.
Thanks. Yeah I didn’t try Claude. They want my phone number to sign up and I’m not providing that to people. But you’re not the only person suggesting Claude Sonnet, I’ve read that several times now. I wonder if they’re really that much better. I’ll try some more throwaway phone numbers to get in, but seems they’ve blocked most of them.
I’ve tried breaking down things as well. That’s usually a good strategy in programming. Though I guess at some point they’re small enough so I could have already typed it in myself instead of talking about doing it. And I find it often also struggles to find the right balance with the level of detail of a function and whether it’s clever to do a very specific singular thing or do it a bit more general so the function can be reused in other parts of the code. So it’ll be extra work later to revise it, once everything is supposed to come together and integrate/combine.
I have used LLMs for coding for work and it’s been really annoying. The technology just burns tokens to end up at square 0
I’m not a particularly skilled or professional developer, so I’ll defer to those who are on determining its usefulness for professional grade projects. However, I tried it a time or two for some of my small personal projects and had to proofread and correct mistakes so I stopped fooling with it. If I’ve got to babysit it and fix its mistakes anyway, then what’s even the point? I guess for large blocks of code it might be handy to not have to type it all out, but then you’ve still got to proofread and correct that much more anyway, so my ethical concerns aside, it really didn’t help me any more than just searching Stackoverflow to remind myself how to do something.